"Men on TV: Dumb as Posts and Proud of It"

By ANITA GATES -- Homer Simpson doesn't bother me. When he sits on his sofa, directly across from the television set, beer in hand, slack-jawed, with a blank stare to represent a brain set on stall, I don't really believe that our nation's nuclear power plants are operated by his kind. At least I know that Matt Groening, who created Homer and his sallow-faced, bug-eyed family, did not intend him as a role model.

Homer is, after all, just a really famous cartoon. If he were the only heterosexual adult male on television who seemed inordinately pleased with himself and blissfully unaware of his low I.Q., prime time would be in good shape. But in recent months I've been noticing his live-action counterparts.

Sometimes they can be caught in precisely the same pose. There's the title character of "The King of Queens" (Kevin James), whose lifelong dream is still to turn his basement into a private hideaway for watching sports on big-screen television. An episode of "Everybody Loves Raymond" begins with the title character's father and brother (Peter Boyle and Brad Garrett) seemingly hypnotized in front of a televised football game. When Raymond (Ray Romano) greets them, they respond with a single simultaneous grunt. And on reruns of "Friends," Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) -- witty, upwardly mobile Manhattan bachelors -- veg out for sports telecasts in their matching recliner chairs. (Chandler has since been resocialized by moving in with Monica.)

But television sports mania is not these characters' only fault. Men in a growing number of comedies are depicted as rude, crude, sex-crazed, sexist, childish and blindly egotistical.

The curmudgeonly title character of "Becker" (Ted Danson), a middle-aged doctor, says things like: "If you want to know about women, you don't ask a woman. If you want to know about meat, do you ask a cow?" When a patient tells him that an injection hurt, Becker replies, "Grow up, will you?" On "Friends," Joey eats steak with his fingers at Ross's wedding reception. On "Dharma and Greg," Greg (Thomas Gibson), a respectable married lawyer, can't have his wife (Jenna Elfman) work at his office because every time he looks at her, his legal training and his self-discipline vanish and he has to have sex with her, right there on the desk. Prime time gives us grown men who can't stop giggling in church, bawdy male magazine publishers married to women half their age and men who stick Montblanc pens up their noses in order to meet women in the emergency room. Anyone who watches television regularly could get the impression that one of the two sexes on this planet is not only dimwitted and uncouth but darned proud of it.

In their desperate attempt to lure male viewers (and all the dollars advertisers believe they are ready to spend), the powers that be in television seem to have decided to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And it's remarkably low.

Maybe this glorification of the dumb started with the research. Men, as any pollster can tell you, do watch football -- a contest in which, its fans point out, the best men really do win and it's all about sheer ability, not politics or personality, at least during the game itself. Men also watch wrestling, in which hypermasculine, hyperstrong men take on outrageous personas and act out the battle between good and evil. So what do the programming experts decide? Rather than developing or buying series that might appeal to those fascinations with ability, victory versus defeat or good versus evil, they give us shows about men watching football and wrestling. And doing little else. Now little boys across America want to grow up to be just like them.

Seriously. The last time Children Now, a California media advocacy group, surveyed 10- to 17-year-old boys, the top television role models they named were all sitcom characters, most of them a little off-kilter. One was Tim the tool guy (Tim Allen), the inept handyman who liked to growl to demonstrate his manliness on "Home Improvement." But he was a responsible husband and father -- and at least partly facetious. Two were smart-mouthed New York single guys from "Seinfeld": Jerry Seinfeld's namesake character, a likable enough stand-up comedian, and Kramer (Michael Richards), a complete lunatic who spent most of the show's eight-year run unemployed and couldn't manage to walk into a room without falling down. The two other people boys wanted to be like were, God help us, Homer Simpson and his chip-off-the-old-block son, Bart, whose contribution to the English language so far has been the admonition, "Eat my shorts."

Come on. Prime time is strewn with noble, brave, dedicated, attractive male characters that any little boy might be proud to emulate. Why does no one want to be Dr. John Carter (Noah Wyle) or Dr. Peter Benton (Eriq LaSalle) from "E.R."? Or Bobby Donnell (Dylan McDermott) on "The Practice"? Or any of the police officers on "N.Y.P.D. Blue"? A lot of these characters are single, good-looking, making good money and doing quite well with women. Presumably the younger boys are in bed by 10 p.m., when many of the serious dramas are on the air. But there could be two other answers.

First, these characters are all working themselves to death. As television dramas have become more realistic, they have increasingly depicted adults as stressed out, physically exhausted and in almost constant moral agony, often fighting uphill battles against the idiots at their hospitals, law offices, precincts and other workplaces.

Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) on "The X-Files," for instance, may be a big, tough, handsome F.B.I. agent who carries a gun and is smarter than everybody else (except his partner, Scully, played by Gillian Anderson), but he's also a little deranged, what with his fixation on flying saucers and government plots, and his immediate superiors constantly try to thwart him. Moreover, the man hasn't had a date in ages. If this unspoken, slowly building sexual-tension thing with Scully doesn't work out when the series ends, Mulder could end up alone for life.

So maybe it's just that 12-year-olds don't want to grow up to be burned-out, sleep-deprived misfits. The Peter Pan syndrome isn't all about fear of commitment, you know. Or -- more horrible thought -- maybe Dr. Carter, Dr. Benton, Bobby Donnell and the rest actually turn into slack-jawed, beer-drinking, sports-watching zombies after hours. Sure, medicine, law and law enforcement are demanding fields, but Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) always looked fresh, well rested and sure of himself. Marcus Welby (Robert Young) was cool, calm and collected for seven seasons. Of course, in their day, series heroes were almost infallible; neither of them had to deal with actually losing cases or patients.

Second, it may be simply that young men aren't watching these particular would-be role models. The dramas that feature sensitive, intelligent male adults are often shows with predominantly female audiences. You think George Clooney became the most bankable star on "E.R." because of heterosexual male viewers? And the more emotionally mature and aware the male character, the more likely it is that he's being written for a series aimed largely at women to begin with.

Take Rick (Billy Campbell), the boyish, fortyish divorced architect in "Once and Again," ABC's freshman drama about divorced parents in love. Rick is so sensitive that the first time he and Lily (Sela Ward), a fortyish divorced bookstore owner, meet, he gently, reassuringly tells her daughter how to take care of her soccer injury. On "Providence," NBC's treacly drama about Dr. Sydney Hansen (Melina Kanakaredes), a plastic surgeon who leaves her superficial Los Angeles life behind to move back to her hometown in Rhode Island, Sydney's father (Mike Farrell) is a sensitive type. You can tell because he's a veterinarian who's really gentle with pets and often sits around looking sad because his wife died. Sydney even actually finds love interests who open up. One, dealing with a health crisis not long ago, confessed to Sydney: "Some things are hard to admit. Some are even harder to say. I don't want to go through this alone." Good role model in terms of emotional communication, but it's doubtful that a lot of growing boys were watching; "Providence" is the prime-time equivalent of a chick flick.

Anyway, that guy was actually acknowledging that he needed help, that he was willing to be less than completely in control. The author Susan Faludi suggests that in our culture men have come to believe they aren't real men if they aren't in control. And in our culture it's hard to be in control of anything, which is what those workplace-based dramas often reveal. Even today's doctors, lawyers and cops are shown losing to forces beyond their -- oops, there's that word again -- control. In "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man," Ms. Faludi also says that at the turn of the 21st century, men are searching for a way to recapture the masculine camaraderie and purpose of World War II, their fathers' proving ground.

From the look of things, they are settling for camaraderie alone. But there's no reason that characters who watch football games and get a little drunk together can't be good human beings as well. Television's quintessential sensitive guy, Hawkeye Pierce of "M*A*S*H," as played by Alan Alda, was the class clown of his Korean War medical unit, an usually successful seducer of women and a dedicated martini drinker. Well, at least that was true at the beginning of the series; maybe the writers decided that viewers couldn't handle a character so complicated that he had those "faults" and yet was both wise enough to see war for the horrible waste that it is and sentimental enough to have sympathy for the other side. So they cleaned Hawkeye up as the seasons passed. Our loss.

It's not that the male television oaf is anything new. Chester A. Riley of "The Life of Riley," as played by both Jackie Gleason and William Bendix, was a classic big, dumb lug. But at least he was a little embarrassed about it.

And Riley was funny. Yes, it's important to remember that all of the current shows with idiotic male characters are comedies, and comedy thrives on exaggeration. Lucy Ricardo, the beloved heroine of "I Love Lucy," reinforced every 20th-century stereotype of women: she couldn't handle money, loved to gossip, took good care of her man and was singularly ditsy, but she didn't know how good she had it just being a housewife and mother. The female sitcom heroines that followed avoided that kind of automatic sexism. On "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," Mary Richards's problem was being too nice. On "Murphy Brown," the title character's problem was just the opposite.

Of course, any attempt in the year 2000 to base a female character on the old stereotypes would cause an outcry among viewers. Just look at the objections to "Ally McBeal," whose title character wears short skirts and worries as much about her love life as her law career. David E. Kelley, the show's creator, is actually an equal-opportunity stereotypist. The men on "Ally McBeal" are just as superficial and insecure as the women.

The demands of political correctness could be part of the problem as well. All that stored-up tension from being careful not to offend women, black people, gay people, animal rights activists or any nationality on earth comes out in the creation of grotesque male characters. As long as men are in power, they are the one group that television can ridicule without fear of reprisal.

Take a classic episode of "The Simpsons," in which Homer and Marge's intelligent, cheerful daughter Lisa goes into a funk when she realizes she has Homer's genes and so is destined to grow up to be just as big an idiot as he is. (This is a man who once threw his own wallet into the fireplace, so pickpockets would not be able to get it during his coming trip to New York.) Lisa's parents try to reassure her by gathering lots of Simpson relatives together, but they turn out to be jerks and failures of various kinds. Until Lisa starts meeting the female Simpsons, who are brain surgeons and professors and rocket scientists. "The defective Simpson gene is on the Y chromosome," one of the women explains, so it affects only the family's men.__"Arts & Leisure," N.Y. Times (April 9, 2000)