On network television right now, women supposedly rule. Two new shows have very different takes. 'New Girl,' above, stars Zooey De...
On network television right now, women supposedly rule.
Two new shows have very different takes. 'New Girl,' above, stars Zooey Deschanel as a woman who needs help from guys. 'Prime Suspect,' stars Maria Bello as Jane Timoney, who is a tough no-nonsense detective. 
But are they powerful potentates or flimsy figureheads?
Women's dominance in prime time has been the big TV story this fall, with female characters driving 15 of the 26 new programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and the CW, trend-watchers argue.
But this new feminine mystique isn't necessarily something the late Betty Friedan would have applauded.
For every positive new role model — such as Maria Bello's depiction of Detective Jane Timoney on NBC's "Prime Suspect" — there seem to be at least two throwbacks to a time when women on screen were ditzy, objectified, powerless — or all of the above.
"It's encouraging that there's a few female-centric [new] shows, because oftentimes that's not the case," says Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. "But I'm not sure I'd be willing to call it a trend yet, and certainly a lot of these are not exactly what I would think the National Organization for Women is necessarily going to be giving awards to."
In fact, NOW was especially alarmed by the two new shows set in the early 1960s.
"It seems like Hollywood has seized the pre-feminist [leading] woman trend right now, between 'The Playboy Club' and the 'Pan Am' show, and it's really a disturbing historical revisionism, this idea that it's glamorous for women to be overtly oppressed," Erin Matson, NOW's action vice president, said last week, shortly before it came to light that NBC's "Playboy Club" had been canceled. Upon hearing that news, Matson said. "This is just fantastic. Hugh Hefner is a creepy old man in silk pajamas right now and, to go back a few decades, he was just a creepy young man wearing silk pajamas. .. It's 2011. It's time to stop glamorizing women being just so blatantly subordinate."
Even the so-called "modern" shows can have a retro tinge. On ABC's new "Charlie's Angels," for example, the leads may not actually jiggle like their 1970s counterparts did, but they dress in very scanty outfits and still take orders from a disembodied male voice. On "2 Broke Girls," the leads — one a sharp scrapper, the other a rich girl left penniless by her Madoff-like dad — are funny, but hardly empowered. They work at a diner, aspire to open a cupcake business and are, meanwhile, broke.
And then there's Fox's "New Girl," whose title character (Zooey Deschanel) is dorky and adorable (hence Fox's "simply adorkable" ads for the show). Deschanel's Jess is a teacher in dire need of basic-life-skills tutoring — which is provided by three guys whose loft she moves into after catching her boyfriend cheating.
"In the old days, a woman on television needed a husband to keep her on track, and then, we had some single women, like Ann Marie [played by Marlo Thomas] from 'That Girl' [1966 to '71] — she needed a daddy and a boyfriend," says Thompson. "Now, with 'New Girl,' it takes three guys to try to teach her how to try to get a date and try to keep her life together."
Such cluelessness is puzzling, considering that "New Girl" was created by a woman, Liz Meriwether, who's part of a group of hot Hollywood writers who once called themselves "The Fempire."
What's more, women make up the majority of the prime-time audience on broadcast networks, accounting for 57.5 percent of viewers during the 2010-2011 season, according to Nielsen.
So why aren't there more empowered depictions on screen?
One reason could be that most shows about women are not being made by women.
Last season, 15 percent of the writers of broadcast network prime-time programs were women — down from 35 percent during the 2006-2007 season, according to a study by San Diego State University's Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. "If you have at least one woman in a position of power behind the scenes, as a writer, as a creator, you get more female characters on screen, and I do think you get more powerful and more multidimensional female characters," says Martha M. Lauzen, the center's executive director.
Her annual "Boxed In" study also looks at on-screen demographics. Most male TV characters, she says, are in their 30s and 40s, but most female TV characters are in their 20s and 30s.
"Typically, or at least traditionally, if you keep your female characters young, you tend to keep them powerless, or relatively powerless, because … as we age, we come into more power, professionally as well as personally," Lauzen says.
One exception to this rule — the CW's "Hart of Dixie" — is problematic in its own way. Rachel Bilson, who's 30 but looks even younger, plays Dr. Zoe Hart, a new New York City doctor bent on becoming a cardio-thoracic surgeon until she inherits a general practice in Alabama. But Bilson acts more superficial than she did on "The O.C," and, in the pilot, had such lines as, "Diarrhea and diaper rash? Ewww."
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