• “Pajama Party,” a talk show where the host, guests and
  on-stage audience, all grown women, are wearing pajamas and
  giggling about boys ‘n’ stuff;

• “We Sweat,” which is not a deodorant commercial, but a
  show about women’s sports;

• “Oprah Goes Online,” in which Winfrey and her minion,
  Gayle King, learn all about that Internet thingie in 12 easy
  lessons;

• “Pure Oxygen,” a live, midday clone of ABC’s href="/ent/tv/mill/1998/08/17mill.html">“The View,”
  featuring celebrity interviews, astrology forecasts, newsy tidbits,
  relationship, health, fashion and money advice, a daily “water
  cooler” topic and a DJ named Monica who takes us into
  commercials with a snippet of music and the reminder to “take a
  breath;”

• “Trackers,” a late afternoon teenage girl version of “Pure
  Oxygen;”

• “Inhale,” a morning yoga show;
• “Exhale,” a prime-time talk show where a very serious
  Candice Bergen interviews guests like Naomi Judd and Grace
  Slick on a pillow-strewn, flower-laden estrogen-chic
  living-room set;

• and a brand-new version of the hoary game show “I’ve Got
  a Secret,” which has nothing to with women, per se, but fills up
  airtime, so what the heck.

Across the bottom of the screen, in the space where ESPN runs
scores and CNBC runs stock quotes, Oxygen runs the e-tail
addresses of its sponsors.

And after all this Oxygenating, I have come to a perplexing
conclusion: I am not woman enough for this women’s cable
network. I mean, I’m not much of a shopper, I never read my
horoscope and I was miraculously able to find the Internet
without Oprah’s help. I haven’t been to a pajama party since
ninth grade. I would rather watch a hockey fight — in fact, I
would rather be in a hockey fight — than watch anything
called “We Sweat.” I think Naomi Judd is a babbling idiot.

Watching Oxygen, there were times when I actually did have to
“take a breath” — from the sheer, overwhelming, insulting
girliness of it all. I reached my breaking point
somewhere between the “Pajama Party” segment where the
bride-to-be had a bronze mold of her butt made as a gift for her
fiance and the documentary about the woman who draws the
comic strip “Cathy.” So much for my notoriously high tolerance
for brain-sucking vapidity.

Oxygen, which is synergistically united with Oxygen.com (a
collection of women-aimed Web sites), is very well funded –
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and AOL are among its major
investors. But, so far, funding hasn’t resulted in clout; Oxygen is
still fighting for space on cable systems, reaching only 7 million
to 10 million homes (it’s unavailable in New York City and
parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco), in contrast to its
venerable women’s cable rival Lifetime, which reaches 75
million homes. And it hasn’t resulted in compelling
programming, either. Oxygen is relying mainly on in-house talk
and infotainment shows augmented by “interactive” segments
where the TV hosts take email questions from viewers in real
time. You can get the same exciting visual effect by setting up
an armchair in the middle of your office and watching your
co-workers type.

Oxygen is a depressing jumble of retro stereotypes and empty
“You go, girl!” solidarity. And it’s absolutely obsessed with
body image. On Feb. 10 and 11, for example, I took down the
following program notes: The animated block “X-Chromosome”
(actually the most original and impressive of Oxygen’s
programming) showed “Fat Girl,” a cartoon about a sassy,
large-and-in-charge woman who clashes with her mean,
stick-figure female boss, and “Bitchy Bits,” in which a woman
grumbled and bitched her way through a bathing suit shopping
expedition. Bergen had a show about teenage girls and
self-esteem, which included much talk of eating disorders and
the entertainment industry’s notion of beauty. There was the
aforementioned “Cathy” documentary (more bathing suit
shopping!), and the “Pajama Party” segment where host Katie
Puckrick poked fun at dieting-obsessed women who are afraid
to eat. And “Pure Oxygen” had a plus-size lingerie fashion
show. Yes, many women have food and weight issues. But
Oxygen’s schizo attitude (“It’s cool to be fat!”; “I hate myself in
a bathing suit!”) is doing nobody any favors; it just reinforces
viewers’ love-hate affairs with their bodies.

Caryn Mandabach, who executive produced “The Cosby
Show” and href="/may97/roseanne970519.html">“Roseanne”
and is one of Oxygen’s founding partners (with
Laybourne, Winfrey and TV execs Marcy Carsey and
Tom Werner), has been quoted as saying that “men watch
TV with one hand down their pants and the other on the
control,” but that “women watch TV with a Krispy Kreme
in one hand and a martini in the other and they don’t need
a remote control.” Let’s take a breath and ponder
that image, shall we? What makes the Oxygen
viewer on her chenille sofa pounding down martinis and
donuts any more highly “evolved” (to use a favorite
Oxygen buzzword) than the guy in the La-Z-Boy
watching Comedy Central’s “The Man Show” in a happy
Bud-and-Doritos stupor?

There’s no difference, of course; Oxygen and jokily
chauvinistic shows like “The Man Show” and FX’s “The
X Show” are niche programming at its most nakedly
opportunistic. And Laybourne is unquestionably a
niche-programming genius, having invented
Nickelodeon, the arbiter of all that is cool, hot, funny,
gross, smart, dumb and, above all, desirable in the
pre-teen world. On Nickelodeon, with rare exception,
girls and women are portrayed as smarter than, more
resourceful than and generally superior to boys and men.
And that “girls rule, boys drool” brand of schoolyard
feminism makes its nyah-nyah presence felt all over
Oxygen and Oxygen.com. (Actually, the young-skewing
“Trackers” and “X-Chromosome” might have made the
core of a more viable cable network than Oxygen — a
network for young, post-Nickelodeon women.)

For example, the “People” page of Oxygen.com, which
contains press bios of Laybourne and her partners, looks
like the high school yearbook blurb you’d write in a
daydream about being queen of the world. The bio for
“Gerry” tells us that we can “trust her” because “She
gets it,” and quotes Laybourne’s vision for
Oxygen: “The center of women’s lives isn’t expensive cars
and designer clothes. The center of their life is managing
all their roles.” Mandabach’s bio flatters her thusly:
“Famously wacky. Vivacious. Intense. Fast. Long
committed to yoga. A great dresser.” As for Werner, we
are assured that “he loves women and knows they’re
smarter than men.”

That vanity-plate page crystallized something I’d begun to
suspect watching Oxygen’s clueless programming. For all
its “we celebrate you” crap, Oxygen is a monument to
conformity. Laybourne pays lip service to the many roles
women play, but Oxygen is really only interested in one
of those roles: shopper. Oxygen commiserates, in sisterly
clichis, with a phantom woman-consumer, telling her
over and over that she’s in charge yet stretched thin,
strong yet in need of a place to collapse, appreciated yet
taken for granted. The network is like a pep rally in
reverse, exhorting women to give three cheers if they’re
miserable. And what do women do when they’re
miserable? Shop!

In its own way, Oxygen is as separatist as “The Man
Show.” Can’t we all just get along? But more damning
than that, it’s superfluous. “Who is the most underserved
audience?” Laybourne asked rhetorically in a recent New
York Times profile. “Women, of course.” In what
universe? Lately, it seems as if TV is serving no one
but women, morning (“The View,” “Later
Today”), noon (Oprah, the soaps, Rosie O’Donnell) and
night (“Providence,” “Judging Amy,” “Ally McBeal,”
“Once and Again” and the rest of the flock of chick
shows).

In all my hours of Oxygen viewing, I saw almost nothing
that surprised or engaged me — no domestic insight as
harsh and true as what’s offered every week on
“Everybody Loves Raymond” or “The Sopranos” (one
woman posted on HBO’s “Sopranos” bulletin board that,
“It’s the only show my husband and I sit down and watch
together”), no contemplation of female power as
complicated and daring as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,”
no girl-talk show as witty and audacious as “Sex and the
City.” I did see plenty of earnest Oprah-style
confessionalism, though, and designer spirituality, and
teeny-tiny morsels of news you can use — this is women’s
culture as advertiser-friendly and passi as “I Am Woman”
(which, tellingly, was used as the theme song in Oxygen’s
TV commercial).

And everywhere, everywhere on Oxygen, I heard the
same divisive, battle-of-the-sexes bull they use on “The
Man Show,” except without the humor. On Oxygen,
clichis about men are repeated as if they’re undisputed
gender fact: Men don’t listen, men don’t talk, men fear
intimacy, men are slobs, yada yada yada. If this is
Oxygen’s idea of evolution, give me ESPN.

Here’s the delicious irony: Sidney Blumenthal, premier theorist of right-wing conspiracy, may leave as his greatest legacy the public reminder that he himself is part of a claustrophobic media-government sewing circle whose interconnections put the Scaife network to shame — an inbred nightmare community where every pseudopod of the elite-opinion amoeba dines, drinks, goes to bed and marries with another. Early discussion has centered on whether Hitchens’ act violated the journalistic tradition of not naming anonymous sources, notwithstanding the fact that Blumenthal’s lawyer grandly welcomed anyone with this sort of information to come forward, which — if Hitchens is telling the truth — was a sleazy attempt to take advantage of colleagues’ honor by making them complicit in a lie through their silence. But it only proves the cluelessness of this Washington power circle if they think the public is going to give them a standing ovation for defending the sanctity of comfy cabalistic gossip sessions at the Washington Occidental. By violating journalism’s most sacred principle — the rule of lunch — Hitchens may ultimately hurt the bottom line of Jean-Louis Palladin establishments, but if he encourages Washington journalists to befriend and marry people who don’t have Cabinet officials on speed-dial, the readers and the human gene pool of tomorrow will thank him.

The women who would be Debbie

When Debbie Matenopoulos, the much-spoofed voice of the younger generation on Barbara Walters’ “The View,” suddenly vaporized (or, as an ABC publicist put it, left voluntarily to “pursue other opportunities”) last month, the producers of the daytime chat show decided to hold a televised job fair — a live Gen-Xpo in which four young would-be Walterettes auditioned for two days each for the post of youth spokesmodel.

On-air groveling is hardly new on talk shows — “Tonight Show” guests must still take care not to trip on Jay Leno’s kneeprints — but bringing a string of candidates to essentially interview for the job live is much rarer. And it’s a typically sharp move for the most of-the-moment chatfest of daytime TV. “The View,” an engrossing, funny round table of “women of different generations, backgrounds and views,” has been called a lot of things (among them a female Rat Pack), but this parade of résumé-toting twentysupplicants shows that “The View” is above all the first talk show for the age of fetishizing work.

The traditional morning chat show was conceived as a surrogate living room, sans Legos on the carpet, for kid-shackled suburban women. “The View,” launched in 1997, knows how its viewer has changed: She may be telecommuting or working part time, on maternity leave or stuck with a sick child (all situations, by the way, reflected in the commercials: cold and stomach remedies to “get kids better faster”; adult medicines to get you back to work pronto). She gets all the home she cares for in her own damn house. She wants a surrogate office.

And there’s the genius of “The View.” Here, the coffee table is replaced by a dinner table, as in an employee break room, and the hosts around it look like the family that we give the most QT now: our co-workers. “The View” panel is the kind of race- and age-integrated group we find only on the job, all familiar white-collar types: the leonine chief executive (Walters), on vacation every other day; the wisecracking second banana (comedian Joy Behar); the earnest office mom (journalist Meredith Vieira); the warm and self-promoting diva (attorney Star Jones); and, of course, the ghost (Matenopoulos) — the young achiever who quietly vanished one day and who no one talks about anymore. Rather than give us fake intimacy, “The View” gives us fake fake intimacy, a simulation of workplace didja see the Post this morning jawboning over institutional java, as Vieira tosses out hot-button headline questions (Does Chelsea deserve privacy? Is oral sex really sex?) for the same off-the-cuff analysis you find so endearing in Patty from Accounting (It’s always the children who suffer!).

With admirable honesty, “The View’s” hosts never let us forget that they’re doing a job, one that’s a damn sight more enviable than ours. It’s fitting, really, at a time when sitcom audiences avidly follow the upper-class follies of lawyers, doctors and fashion editors, that Babs and company acknowledge readily and often the gulf between them and the viewer. (On a recent show, Star Jones pulled the signal busier-than-thou ’90s careerist move, whipping out a cell phone in mid-interview with Judge Judy Sheindlin to take a call from Mom.) They have drivers, they have law degrees, they dine with Prince Edward, they negotiate interviews with Monica Lewinsky. You don’t. Deal with it.

Seeking a piece of this action came four ingenues — a Nordstrom saleswoman, a newspaper reporter, a TV anchor and a former cast member from MTV’s “The Real World” — who exchanged patter in the opening round table, co-hosted light advice segments and, above all, in this haven of commercial tie-ins, shilled with gusto, helping Victoria’s Secret models and self-help authors move units, and even, in one case, donning a hairpiece and holding up “Price Is Right”-style price tags to help Jones push her new line of href="http://abc.go.com/theview/cohosts/jones/wig_collection_index.html">wigs.

Well, isn’t the grunt-level humiliation of young aspirants — the willingness to grit your teeth and run the boss’s errands — the driving engine of our economy? Isn’t the job interview’s excruciating dance between sycophancy and belligerence the most important skill in boom or bust? Certainly, anyway, it’s top-notch TV, proof that some canny producer should be pitching Fox a reality program of taped job interviews. Forget animal attacks, drug busts or booby-trapped birthday cakes. Watching someone banter about the impeachment trial and her boyfriend and a woman in England who had 20 kids, all the while knowing that her chance at national TV stardom is at stake — that’s edge-of-your-seat TV.

Consider the chitchat minefield facing she who would be Matenopoulos. You have to ingratiate yourself while striking provocative sparks. You can’t be too bubbly (heed the ghost of Debbie!) or too dour (delightfully grouchy New York Post writer Amy Kean may have hurt herself grousing about being shushed at the movies by “some freak! Who probably came to the movies alone!”). You have to remind us that you’re young without implying your co-hosts are old. And you have to discuss oral sex with Barbara Walters without plotzing on camera (you don’t know from “the coarsening of American discourse” until you’ve heard the doyenne of soft focus say “penetrated”).

The candidate with the biggest fan base (and, judging by her being invited back for a third day, the inside track) was Rachel Campos, best known to viewers of MTV’s “The Real World” href="http://www.mtv.com/mtv/tubescan/rw7/where/sf.html">season three as the comely, big-eyed 22-year-old conservative who messed around with psycho bike messenger Puck. A “View” spokesperson says more candidates may yet be auditioned, but if Campos lands the gig, she’ll continue one of the strangest careers in showbiz history. The first “Real World” cast member to snag a national TV platform outside MTV (whose “Road Rules” specials, reunions and dance-party shows provide GI Bill-style support for “Real World” vets), Campos will have made a life as a professional twentysomething.

In other words, she’s a new type of star, the personality famous for being representative. On “The Real World,” Campos pushed a whole row of popular youth-type buttons — rebellious Hispanic Catholic with Republican politics and a wild side — plus, as an easy-on-the-eyes conservative, she presaged Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, Ann Coulter and the whole raft of male and female MSNBC Friends. (The candidates, by the way, skewed decidedly rightward, showing the enduring value of the ever-popular betrayal-of-the-’60s schtick.) Five years later, she stands for the maturation of the “Reality Bites” crowd, having lost the convent-schoolgirl skirts and become a teacher and even, in a segment detailing Puck’s recent jail stint, assuring us that while the publicity-crazed bike messenger is a dear old friend, she’s moved on now. Like each candidate, Campos delicately but firmly pushed her Class-of-18-to-34 cred, with a combination of obeisance to her baby boom overlords (“Your generation had a defining moment; all we have is this Clinton scandal”) and asserting herself as a Gen-X spokeswoman in classic fashion, by denouncing the label as a media construct — all, of course, while applying for a job whose chief qualification is her birth date.

Still, I can’t begrudge candidates’ milking their youth, since, judging by the (willing! willing!) departure of their predecessor, it could also be their biggest liability. The four older hosts had far greater chemistry with one another than with Matenopoulos, as a “View” producer acknowledged to the New York Post. And isn’t that just like the office too? As middle managers get replaced by cheap, energetic youthbots working 80-hour weeks, as the business press fawns over 30-year-old zillionaire entrepreneurs, age is thicker than any other unifier in today’s office — a situation only intensified in the “Logan’s Run” world of women broadcasters. And generational tension bubbled up during the tryouts, at least in jest, as when Kean dissed women who take weight-loss pills: “It’s great that we have another skinny little bitch on the show!” Behar ripped, smiling.

Now that’s entertainment. Indeed, maybe this happenstance crossing of “The Real World” and “The View” suggests something bigger than a “World’s Craziest Job Interviews” one-off: the 24-Hour Work Channel. With hidden cameras throughout the workplace, the wiring’s already in place, along with an even more crucial piece of infrastructure. The office, not the home, is really where the heart is now.