Sorry, Angels.
On the strong side, two sitcoms with the word girl in their titles are among the season's best new shows, and a cop show and a revenge fantasy, one rough, one glamorous, are also thoroughly worth watching.
There may be a more substantive reason than Amazon interference to explain TV's distaff display. Advertisers' main target in network prime time is women 18 to 49 years old, and network chiefs have decided that members of that audience like to watch more interesting versions of themselves.
" 'Empowered women' is definitely a theme of the network," ABC programming boss Paul Lee told TV critics at their annual summer meeting. "It's one of the reasons why we do so well with affluent women, and it's one of the reasons why our [advertising rates] are so high, because our advertisers know that we deliver that audience."
As to the male viewers, studies have shown that little boys don't particularly care to watch shows starring female characters. Big boys have different attitudes.
The new series, ranked by my estimation of their quality:
2 Broke Girls. (Mondays at 8:30, CBS). Bryn Mawr's Kat Dennings stars as a waitress on her home turf in a down-at-the-heels diner in Brooklyn. Newcomer Beth Behrs comes to work at the joint. She's the recently impoverished daughter of a Bernie Madoff type and found the job online, by "typing in places where nobody from the Upper East Side would ever go, ever."
Sitcoms these days are drawn to off-color jokes, and 2 Broke Girls has its share, but it's distinguished by the spark between its stars, whose opposite characters are already bonding strongly by the end of the first episode.
