Television: What Do Guys Want?

Perhaps the best example of the tension between commerce and decency was a new ABC drama titled Doing It. Based on a British novel, it aims to be My So-Called Life for teenage guys, who, of course, think about sex roughly once a breath. Executive producer Stu Bloomberg describes the show as "life through the prism of hormones." ABC bought the series but out of post-Janet anxiousness changed the title to Life As We Know It--which may deter the decency cops but also sounds like something that would run on Lifetime.

At CBS, which, despite Janet and Survivor, has one of TV's older audiences, president Leslie Moonves pooh-poohed advertisers' youth fixation. "Are you looking for the people who actually buy cars," he asked, "or the people who say, 'Daddy, please buy me a car'?" Nice line, but CBS has scheduled Clubhouse, a drama about a 16year-old bat boy for a fictional New York baseball team, which Moonves told the admen would "make us much younger" on Tuesday nights. A show like Clubhouse, however, raises the question of what exactly male-friendly programming means. Last fall some executives blamed the XY flight on too many new shows with female leads (Karen Sisco, Miss Match). But casting men doesn't automatically mean attracting men. Clubhouse is a mostly male sports story, but it's also a coming-of-age tale that looks several notches too sentimental for the Punk'd generation. Likewise with NBC's action-and-bikini-heavy cop show Hawaii. Guys these days are used to video games in which they can orchestrate their own car chases, crashes and shoot-outs, with the violence--and even sex--rendered with cinematic accuracy. To them, even a slick action show in its safe-for-network version may seem as dated as Tom Selleck's Magnum, P.I. mustache.

So what's a network to do? One is following the classic dating advice: Act like you're not interested. A few years ago, UPN focused almost entirely on such boy bait as WWE Smackdown! and Star Trek: Enterprise. But last year the Tyra Banks reality series America's Next Top Model became UPN's biggest hit--and, despite its scantily clad, size-0 catwalkers, its audience is as girly as a little black dress. UPN now says it will complement Model with young-female-friendly romantic comedies and dramas like Kevin Hill, starring the hunkalicious Taye Diggs.

Then there is that old school of thought that network TV is a feminine medium: women make most viewing decisions, so it's best to create shows that women will seek out and men will tolerate. NBC's Reilly points to its Friends spin-off, Joey, centered on a character who's adorable to women and likable to guys. (Just in case, the network cast shapely Drea de Matteo as Joey's sister.) What, after all, do most men want? To be in the good graces of a woman. She's the one who has the remote. --With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles