At least the guys on "The Secrets of Starting Over" have met women. Geeky schlubs Sheldon and Leonard (Jim Parsons and Johnny Galecki) on CBS' "Big Bang Theory" are socially hobbled physicists whose only sexual activity involves donating to a high-IQ sperm bank, so that woman can get pregnant by them without actually having to touch them! The guys meet a cute neighbor and by the end of the half-hour have had their pants removed by her brawny ex. "It wasn't my first pantsing, and it won't be my last," says a defeated Sheldon.
Going pantsless is one of the weirdly repeated themes of the new season, turning up again in ABC's bone-chillingly bad comedy "Carpoolers."
The idea behind "Carpoolers," voiced several times during its pilot, is that daily trips to and from work are the only escape for these four miserable men, who have nothing in common except a barely disguised antipathy for the women in their lives. Aubrey's wife has him by the balls: He waits on her, cooks and cares for the kids while she watches television and takes his money. Laird (Jerry O'Connell), the carpool's founder, has been dumped by his wife, who cheated and left him with nothing but an ass-print on the sliding glass door. Gracen (Fred Goss) is married to Leila (Faith Ford), a woman he seems to care for, but whose real estate "hobby" has recently become lucrative. The pilot revolves around the carpool's suspicion that Leila is making more money than her husband. The decline of masculinity is further embodied by Gracen and Leila's subliterate adult son Marmaduke, who inexplicably prances around the house without trousers and miraculously lands a job at which he, too, will be making more money than his father.
The fury and confusion about shifting gender roles as expressed on "Carpoolers" is scary in its nakedness. At one point, Laird suggests to Gracen that he talk to his wife about how she's spending his money. "My money? Ha ha, no," says Gracen. "All the money I make is our money; it always has been. The money she's making now is her money." Aubrey chimes in, "Well at least you have your money. My wife gets my checks; I don't even know how much I make!" To which Laird says, "My wife and I have it all worked out out. She gets everything. Her lawyer saw to that."
Ha ha ha ha!
Later Laird stokes Gracen's fear by explaining that "men go off to war; women shop; if we don't provide for our women, do they really need us?" Part of the horror of this show is how it -- and not the specter of the high-earning wife -- is actually stripping its heroes of anything resembling self-respect or masculine dignity. Gracen squirms around about Leila's income like a spineless nelly; he curls in a fetal position when he hears how much she has in her account; he can only have sex with her after he realizes it's all been a misunderstanding -- of course she's not wealthier than he is!
"Carpoolers" does more to impugn the American male than any high-earning spouse could ever do. But if this sitcom is any measure -- and god willing it is not -- the American female is fucked. There is no mode of femininity that satisfies these guys: The wife who is too successful makes her husband feel unmanly; the wife who doesn't work makes her husband bake; the wife who leaves is a bitch who takes the furniture.
Even on far better shows, like Fox's Kelsey Grammer-Patricia Heaton vehicle "Back to You," the malevolence toward professional women is ill-disguised. Grammer plays Chuck Darling, a Los Angeles newscaster demoted to his old station in Pittsburgh after he's caught on camera railing about a ditzy colleague. "I didn't freeze my ass off in Minnesota and fucking Pittsburgh to end up working with some dipshit who only has her job because she's fucking the general manager!" Chuck shouts before he realizes he's on air and calmly reports, "It was bring your daughter to work day today!" -- a funny transition that highlights the disjuncture between enforced political correctness and his actual animosity toward his young female co-worker.
Back in Pittsburgh, Chuck is reunited with his former co-anchor, Kelly Carr (Heaton), with whom he had a brief sexual relationship before his career took off. During Chuck's decade-long absence, Kelly has raised a child on her own, whom newsroom gossips speculate she conceived with the help of a sperm donor -- a child whom Heaton protects with such fierceness that Chuck is moved to comment, "Your daughter could benefit from a strong masculine figure in her life, but I can see she already has one."
Grammer is not a loser in the mold of Gator or Gracen, but he has been professionally humiliated and forced to slink back to a woman whom he thought he'd surpassed, only to realize that she'd been just fine without him. The theme of female self-sufficiency is echoed in Fox's "The Return of Jezebel James," slated to run midseason, in which Parker Posey's single, ambitious book editor character is informed she cannot get pregnant, and so turns to her sister for help in the uterus department, no baby-daddy in sight.
These shows smell only faintly of a lighthearted desire to punish or dominate their high-achieving female leads, perhaps make them lonely, a little desperate, a touch shrill, infertile. But the punishment mechanism positively reeks on ABC's "Samantha Who?" a sitcom ripped off from "Thirteen Going on Thirty," in which psychiatrist Sam (Christina Applegate) wakes up from a coma with amnesia, and must be taught in a thousand belittling ways that pre-accident she was a mean, ambitious, cheating, slutty harridan who was so hated by her boyfriend's friends that they called to congratulate him when she got hit by a car. As an amnesiac, Sam is much nicer, especially when she confesses to her man that she feels "so needy [and] unarmed." A collective fantasy: If only we could knock out those ball-busting brats and bring them back with no memories and much more amenable dispositions!
Next page: "Is she more of a man than you are?"