The New TV season is upon us. And a yearly fall ritual that used to bring joy to men and boys, with shows like “Miami Vice,” “the Equalizer,” “Hunter,” and “the A-Team” is now more than ever, a female and gay ghetto.

Notable new series include “the Forgotten” with former movie star Christian Slater (in short, forget it), “Modern Family” which might as well be titled “Modern PC Family,” “Mercy,” “Cougar Town,” “Glee,” and “the Witches of Eastwick.”

What is interesting in them is how bad the shows are, all of them, how at least some of them have female fans. Showing how women, culturally, live in a parallel universe that never really intersects with men. The NBC promo for Mercy is below:

The Mercy show is one of the most interestingly bad shows, along with the “Witches of Eastwick.” The Mercy protagonist is a nurse back from Iraq, secretly addicted to drugs, who has little or no compassion for her patients, often older people dying of cancer.

As the review here makes clear, the central character is not long on compassion for her fellow Americans:

You treat a 6-year-old Iraqi kid who got his arms blown off because he thought a bomb was a toy . . . that’s sad,” she snarls at a tearful colleague in an oncology ward. “A 75-year-old man with cancer? That’s a trip to Club Med.”

Note the PC valuation (Iraqi kids are more worthwhile in their lives than older White Americans), the various character pathologies (she’s an addict, cheating on her ordinary good-guy husband with the hunky, powerful doctor) and facing no criticism from her co-workers who are either fabulously gay male nurses or “you go girl” female co-workers for her affair or lusting after hunky bartenders. Even more ridiculous is that the male doctors would not be lusting after female doctors, or the younger (and hotter) nurse played by “Buffy’s” Michelle Trachtenberg.

The show is an interesting expression of what Hollywood at least thinks is attractive to women: a lead character with massive personal problems, cheating on her good-guy husband she describes as her “best friend” with the Alpha male doctor in command. Meanwhile the character is a “bitch” to everyone lacking status (i.e. not the Alpha Male) particularly the young, naive, pretty, and “nice” character played by Trachtenberg. A fantasy aimed at women passing the peak of attractiveness and finding not much else in their lives. Note the power-relationships, the Latina nurse as the confident and near equal of the lead, and the junior, prettiest nurse as omega girl. Again, deeply appealing to older women is Hollywood’s bet. Noticeably lacking, however, is any semblance of a man with any masculinity. The good-guy husband is a cheated upon doofus, the “Alpha Male” is a cardboard cutout (who is obsessed with the lead character and followed her to a new city), and the male nurses, gay. Fairly revealing of what Hollywood thinks women want: not real men.

The Forgotten, centers around Christian Slater as an ex-cop leading a team of an older hotter (early forties) widow, a young woman (also “TV hot”), a doofus blue collar guy, and a broody artist in a volunteer effort to identify victims the police cannot and have closed the case on. If that sounds predictable  — it is. Slater, at least, plays a semblance of a real man, and his character actually has to do something  — lead a disparate team to the goal of identifying the victim. With something approaching real masculinity, it’s an odd-ball on ABC’s schedule, filled with Desperate Housewives clones and PC lectures.

“Glee” centers around a High School Glee club, with a wheelchair bound singer, a gay one, various women, and so on. Think “High School the Musical” except without naughty pictures of Vanessa Hudgens on the Internet. No actual men or even approximation of men appear in this series. The same holds true of “Cougar Town,” starring real-life cougar Courteney Cox, as a divorced Mom on the prowl for younger men, with the approval of her ex-husband and young son. Neither of whom mind her explicit retelling of her sexual exploits with young men not too much older than her teen son. I can imagine the pitch meeting. “Remember the Squid and the Whale? How the movie depicted how awful the parents were and screwed up their kids? This is just like that, except as a comedy. Plus Courteney Cox was hot … back in 1987.” Again no characters even approximating real men appear in this sit-com.

Modern PC Family centers around a gay couple with an adopted Vietnamese baby, a terminally hip White dad who embarrasses his kids (and is a doofus), and an older guy (Ed O’Neil, a shadow of Al Bundy on Married With Children) married to a Columbian younger woman with a fat, doofus son. The comedy centers around PC lessons on how Fathers are useless doofuses and women don’t need them, and also how cool gays are! No actual men appear in this show either, and I could imagine a parody of it, as Al Bundy’s nightmare, on Married With Children. Sadly, Ed O’Neil does not stick his hands down his pants and yell “Peg!”

The Witches of Eastwick however, is as bad as the Mercy show, and equally as revealing. One female reviewer did not like it and neither did Television Without Pity

Both reviews note the source material, the Updike novel, has the women wish for power, get it, and use it to cause cancer in female romantic rivals. They exist on the whims of the devil, and compete with one another to be his main girl in his defacto harem. The show is “Charmed” bad, with “hot chicks” empowered by magic, and Desperate Housewives. As the ultimate female power fantasy (they use their magic to get hotter) they all compete for the same guy with lame 1980’s hair. While dumping their loser husbands or what have you. Take equal parts Sex and the City, Charmed, and Desperate Housewives. Mix, stir, and remove any male characters that might have a smidgen of masculinity. All the women can do, with all that power, is chase after the same guy. One of the more obvious takes on female hypergamy. Moreover, showing how accepting the female audience really is with expressing this on television, along with some fairly explicit implied sex, and demands for “having it all.” In a deep Recession, none of these characters worries about money, jobs, or security. Just having the hunkies man available. Even or especially if it means sharing.

These, besides the LA NCIS spin-off, are the notable new shows for Fall 2009. All that is missing is men. And presumably, male viewers.

But that is why man invented both College and Pro football.