At least the barely sublimated aggression is played for laughs in the sitcoms. When it comes to the dramas, the female triumphs are that much more potent, and the resulting arrested machismo of the men is that much more ... not potent. On ABC's "Women's Murder Club," Angie Harmon is police Lt. Lindsay Boxer -- recently promoted over her older male colleague -- who solves murders with the support of her best female confidants, a reporter, a medical examiner and a D.A. (brunet, blond, African-American, natch). They're such a successful clique that they even have a wannabe (Asian!) member, who begs to become a part of their club, which she sees as "women teaming up to level the playing field in a man's world."
The only area in which these women show any weakness is their love lives, but it's made clear that that has a lot to do with male discomfort with their power. As Lindsay says about her failed marriage, "Before he left, I kept promising that I would change. That I would put him over the job and that I would be at home more. Eventually he just stopped believing me, and he was right." But even without the husband, she shows no interest in changing. When it's pointed out that Lindsay hasn't had sex in two years, she says defensively, "I'm picky. And busy." Medical examiner Claire (Paula Newsome) has a more successful relationship. When she goes home to cuddle with her husband, we understand him to be a man comfortable with his wife's power as soon as she sits in his lap ... in his wheelchair.
Set on an opposite coast and a professional world apart, ABC's "Cashmere Mafia" strikes amazingly similar notes to "Women's Murder Club." "Mafia" is Darren Starr's attempt to plunder the "Sex and the City" audience, before the mid-season debut of NBC's "Lipstick Jungle," based on a book by the original Carrie, Candace Bushnell.
"Mafia" begins with a shot of New York amazons (brunet, blond, red-headed, Asian!) striding down a Gotham street. "This is a story about four friends who were taught from childhood that through hard work and smart choices they could have it all," the efficient voice-over tells us. Zoe (Frances O'Connor) is a Wall Street macher with a great family and stay-at-home-dad husband so devoted that he turns down a play-group mom's offer for strings-free sex. Juliet (Miranda Otto) is a hotel chain executive; Caitlin (Bonnie Somerville) is a marketing executive for a cosmetics company who, according to the intro, "says she lives for work because work never tells her that he's just not that into her." But her imperviousness to men may not be simply attitudinal; she's also a budding lesbian. After her first kiss with a woman, the pilot's soundtrack plays "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman." That's right, boys. Want to know what makes this beautiful woman feel like a woman? A woman! Suck it!
Like the Murder Club ladies, these women are utterly self-sufficient professionally, except insomuch as they rely on each other for detailed four-way-phone-call advice. Listen to Zoe make like Gordon-ette Gekko, telling a young colleague: "Profit doesn't care if you have kids or cats or a penis or a vagina; profit only cares if you have the hot hand, and through hard work and a little bit of luck, mine's been hot more often than not." Even in romantic weakness, they are steely. When Juliet learns that her husband has been cheating, she barely flinches; what's more, she quickly begins to pity him. "Look at what a man gives up to be with one of us," she tells her girlfriends. "We make more money. We rise higher. We take up more space. We are as far from the idea of a wife he grew up with as it's possible to be and still wear his ring and go by his last name."
It's excellently diabolical, this logic: Even at their macho cheating caddish hurtful worst, men are the weak ones. He's only cheating because he's so enfeebled by his junior role in the marriage.
On "Big Shots," "Cashmere Mafia's" corollary about a bunch of classically red-blooded businessmen, the four friends sit around a swimming pool taking a schvitz like the girls on "Sisters" used to do. "Look at us," says Brody, played by Christopher Titus, as a man so devoted to his wife that he spends the whole episode micromanaging the catering for her birthday party, "We're supposed to be these alpha males, right? But now James' wife is sleeping around on him and Karl can't control his crazy mistress and I'm so whipped that I can't tell my wife that the delivery company can't seem to find her shipment of Napoleans." Duncan (Dylan McDermott) replies flatly, "Men, we're the new women," just before Brody gets a phone call that he answers, "Oh, what fresh hell ... What do you mean the pastry filling won't clear customs?"
"Big Shots" is one of the two -- two! -- new dramas so befuddled by gender arrangements that in their pilots, they have their muscular male leads -- McDermott on "Big Shots" and William Baldwin on ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money" -- engaging in sex with transvestites. What better symbol could there be of the emasculation of television's men and the chicks-with-dicks attitude toward its women? As "Dirty Sexy Money" lead Peter Krause taunts Baldwin's character: "Is she more of a man than you are?"
Yes. She is more of a man than he is. All of television's women are, apparently. You know you're in trouble when Julianna Margulies' tough lawyer character on Fox's "Canterbury's Law," which premieres midseason, walks in on her male junior colleague in the pisser, and when he asks her to leave, she merely turns on the water to hurry things along.
Rather than seeing their opportunities for interaction with women expand, these men have instead curled into fetal positions like Gracen on "Carpoolers." Is it simply impossible for the televised heroes of yesteryear to go gracefully into their new world order?
It's understandable and honest to express some befuddlement with shifting expectations. But these are characters whose discomfort makes them unattractive, or silly-looking. They are whipped, flummoxed and helpless without the power to make the calls -- in the bedroom or the boardroom. They can't just be normal nice guys who are no longer entirely in control, who do childcare or play a subordinate role at work but who do so in a way that is still sexy, still powerful, instead of in a way that is marked as submissive, beaten down or pansy-assed. Nope, they must be buffoons, caricatures, dopes or just angry, neutered bastards.
It's discomfiting for women, too, to see television's idea of what a feminized man is, since it is a reflection of what television considers feminine to begin with. If these men are "the new women," then what does that say about what they take women for? Do they think we have hissy fits when we discover how much our husbands have in their bank accounts? That we flip out when a man comes on to us? That when we get passed over for promotions we walk out of relationships in defeat? If these are supposed to be girly-men, then the notion of what girly looks like is simply ghastly, an insult not only to the men, but to the women whose habits they are supposedly aping.
Little wonder that many of these programs include plotlines in which women and men turn in on their own gender to fulfill their social, professional and sexual needs. Many of us who rather enjoy the upturn in women's professional, political, sexual and social fortunes might think that it could only help our relationships with the men we love and respect, and with whom we come ever closer to being considered equal. But if television is any measure, and this summer it appears to be measuring something palpable in our collective consciousness, then it seems that as our field gets closer to level, men and women are simply not playing well together.
For more Salon TV Week coverage, click here.
About the writer
Rebecca Traister is a staff writer for Salon Life.
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