Like, where are the guests? After three days on the air — three long days spent in the “co-hosting” company of Snoop Dogg, a man whose conversational skills and extemporaneous wit would be put to shame by a volleyball with a smiley-face painted on it — Jimmy has spent an inordinate amount of time visiting with security guards, deeply disturbed “paranormal experts,” relatives and Tammy Faye Bakker. You can’t blame him for not appearing to be fascinated or even quite engaged — but then again, it is his job, isn’t it?

One of the few innovations of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” — the fact that audience members and guests were allowed to drink alcohol on the set, a presumed attempt to add “fun” to the proceedings, or perhaps a calculated attempt to impair audience judgment — was nixed after one audience member vomited backstage on the night of the debut. Three days later, it remained a topic of conversation.

Another innovation seems to be that “Jimmy Kimmel Live” is a talk show in which nobody has anything much to say. There is no monologue, hardly a mention of politics or current events and nobody even seems to be promoting anything. Booking highlights have so far included George Clooney, the Rock and Al Michaels, the voice of “Monday Night Football.”

Aside from Tammy Faye and the crazy ghostbuster lady, girls have stayed away in droves. Maybe they fear they will be inadvertently stepping onto the set of “The Man Show II.” (Though how anyone could confuse the bloated, rococo set of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” with the “Romper Room”-on-Viagra vibe of “The Man Show” is beyond me.) Perhaps they are afraid of being asked to don bikinis and jump on trampolines. But even this seems strange, as Kimmel’s mensch persona — he is cuddly, friendly, slightly self-effacing — was a benign antidote to Adam Carolla’s motor-mouthed obnoxiousness on “The Man Show,” and generally helped keep it from descending into total offensiveness.

Maybe celebrity publicists, not known for their willingness to take chances, want to see how things go for Kimmel before allowing their charges to spend a few unsupervised minutes in his presence. (Then again, we are not talking about an obscure little show on basic cable.) Whatever the reason, the utter absence of estrogen inspired Kimmel to present Tammy Faye with a sash and a bouquet on Tuesday night for agreeing to come on.

After canceling Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” last year and briefly flirting with the idea of building a show around Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show,” ABC has decided that the best way to gain late-night market share in the 18-34 demographic is to keep things dumb, slow and harmless. Whether it will work is anybody’s guess. But as long as we’re guessing, I will venture to say that A) it’s time to retire the whole 18-34 idea and start thinking in terms of “good” and “not so good,” and B) if networks and advertisers are going to cling to the idea that audiences born within a particular 16-year period universally favor adolescent mediocrity to the exclusion of anything and everything else, then they should have at least let Kimmel bring the “Juggies” with him and kept the vodka handy.

As things stand now, Kimmel is a not-so-great conversationalist struggling to squeeze fun from a stone (or a stoned Snoop; show No. 3 included clips of show No. 2, in which the rapper’s eyes had narrowed to the width of coin slots). A second-night gimmick intended to mock NBC’s patently absurd “Blizzard Monday,” in which its entire prime-time lineup was subjected to heavy precipitation, fell flat. Fake snow falling on a boring show somehow just highlights the “boring show” part.

Tuesday night’s show ended on a particularly sad note, when Kimmel was reduced to announcing that the next night’s lineup would consist of some musical guests and — whoever else happened to turn up. Somebody please help him.

Sports

U.S. Open Golf (noon, 5 p.m., 8 p.m., ESPN; 3 p.m., NBC)

Baseball:
College World Series (3 p.m., ESPN2)
Reds at White Sox (7 p.m., Fox Family)

Talk

Rosie O’Donnell (syndicated) Tom Brokaw, Meredith Edwards
David Letterman (CBS) Blink 182
Jay Leno (NBC) Martin Short, Missy Elliott with Nelly Furtado
Politically Incorrect (ABC) Joe Rogan, Mark Cuban
Conan O’Brien (NBC) Craig Bierko, Steve Earle
Craig Kilborn (CBS) Jimmy Kimmel

All times Eastern unless noted.

In another era, Parker would have been a Hollywood comedy goddess, like Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck or Carole Lombard, playing characters who were smart, wily, ambitious, sexual beings. But where Hollywood has failed Parker, TV has come to the rescue. In HBO’s super-glossy adult comedy “Sex and the City,” which has just begun its second season, Parker is at her gawky, sexy, sly best as a 30-ish sex columnist observing the mating rituals of New York singles. Based on Candace Bushnell’s droll New York Observer columns, “Sex and the City,” like its screwball comedy forerunners of the 1930s and ’40s, appreciates the humor in the complicated socioeconomic dance of marriage-seeking. Parker’s Carrie and her three best friends work the problem of finding a mate as if they’re plotting a complicated bank heist — which, many unhappily single people in major metropolitan cities will probably tell you, is easier to accomplish than finding a non-psychotic person to date.

OK, I admit it — at first I was put off by “Sex” for reasons succinctly articulated this season by Carrie’s friend, feminist lawyer Miranda (Cynthia Nixon): “How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?” But gradually, the show won me over. Producer Darren Star (“Melrose Place”) and regular writer Michael Patrick King juice up Bushnell’s pseudo-anthropological premise with dazzling guilty-pleasure voyeurism.

“I love a big dick. I love it inside of me. I love looking at it. I love everything about it,” exclaims Carrie’s 40-ish, well-worn, publicist pal Samantha (Kim Cattrall). But to appreciate the comic force of that speech, you have to realize that the sexually voracious, not-to-be-denied Sam is out of her mind with frustration because the otherwise perfect guy she’s dating is, as she somberly puts it, roughly the size of a gherkin. Let’s face it, you’re not going to hear dialogue like that on “Providence.” “Sex” is horny and witty, goofy and wise. Imagine Edith Wharton and Jacqueline Susann meeting for drinks at Moomba and you have some idea of its smart girl allure. “Sex” is literary sociology with a graduate degree in smut, and, boy, is it fun.

“Sex” revolves around the romantic misadventures of Carrie, Miranda, Sam and their refined, relatively naive art-dealer friend, Charlotte (Kristin Davis). The show’s structure is pretty straightforward — narrator Carrie taps away at her Powerbook, composing columns about such puzzlers as, “Are there certain things one should never say in an intimate relationship?” and “Are relationships the religion of the ’90s?” These dilemmas are then depicted in story lines involving the quartet and its acquaintances. Throughout the ensuing chaos, the girls still have many opportunities to gather ’round the bar or the coffee shop booth and debate Topic No. 1, the difficulty of finding marriageable men in New York who aren’t asses. Watching “Sex” is like eavesdropping on a conversation in the ladies’ room, and not a unisex bathroom, either — “Sex” knows the value of boundaries. Which is why “Sex” may be horny, but it’s never crude.

What sets “Sex” apart from the similarly relationship-obsessed “Ally McBeal” is that Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte are true-blue friends — they’re supportive, not envious of one another’s career or romantic successes. The second season opener of “Sex” had a denouement that sweetly illustrated the nurturing quality of female friendship at its best. Carrie has broken up with the commitment-phobic man of her dreams, known only as Mr. Big (played by Chris Noth with a degree of rogueish charm that, I believe, is illegal in several states). She runs into Big unexpectedly while she’s out on a rebound date, and it throws her off balance. She eventually sends her date home, goes to a pay phone and makes a call: “It’s me. I know things are weird between us right now but I really need to talk. Can you meet me at our place?” Carrie goes to the coffee shop and, after an anxious moment, spots — no, not Mr. Big. Miranda. Despite her earlier high-minded outburst about her friends’ conversational preoccupation with men, Miranda has answered Carrie’s call, because that’s what girlfriends are for.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least acknowledge that “Sex” doesn’t exactly portray men in a heroic light. The show is a parade of “toxic bachelors,” “serial modelizers” and assorted other small-membered, ball-scratching, bad-breath-spewing, selfish, conceited, unfaithful, untruthful males who fail to measure up as husband material.

However, I know that some guys feel left out, bullied and dissed by girl-talk shows like “Sex and the City.” So I must inform those guys that there are two new cable shows, FX’s “The X Show” and Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” that are allegedly designed to ease the pain of the average maligned, unappreciated, badgered, Dockered, “Titanic”-ed male. The nightly “X Show,” which features four hosts, advice segments and interviews with Playboy Playmates and sports stars, is basically a male version of “The View,” except without the sage presence of a Barbara Walters as elder statesperson. Hugh Downs, call your agent. As for “The Man Show,” fellas, listen to me: Nothing the women on “Sex and the City” say about your gender could possibly be more humiliating than what “The Man Show” says about your gender.

Hosted by Adam “Loveline” Carolla and Jimmy “Win Ben Stein’s Money” Kimmel, “The Man Show” (which premieres Wednesday) is a snarky schmuckfest dedicated to (as the hosts declare in the opener) “building a dam to hold back the tidal wave of feminism that is flooding the country. A dam to stop the river of estrogen that’s drowning us in political correctness. A dam to urinate off of when we’re really drunk!” (Hey, didn’t Comedy Central already build that dam and call it “Politically Incorrect”?) This weekly “joyous celebration of chauvinism” promises a testosterone-friendly lineup of things guys supposedly like to watch on TV, which in the first show includes women in bikinis, women jumping on a trampoline, explosions, supermodels and “one of the purest forms of entertainment” — monkeys, wearing costumes, doing people things.

Coincidentally (or not!), TNT has just launched a weekly sitcom called “The Chimp Channel,” starring actual primates doing spoofs of TV shows like “Treewatch” and “NYPD Zoo.” I don’t know where those guys on “The Man Show” get the idea that watching monkeys is strictly a male thing — I enjoy a good performing monkey act as much as the next person (Oh, that Marcel from “Friends” was pure gold!), but I am disappointed to report that “The Chimp Channel” just doesn’t cut it. The dialogue is unimaginative and sophomoric and the parodies aren’t so much funny as they are creepy. Putting a chimp in a blond wig and a “Baywatch” swimsuit with big fake Pamela Anderson boobs sure seems like animal abuse to me. Oh, jeez — I hope I didn’t just give “The Man Show” any ideas.