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The Man Show, which was snapped up by Comedy Central after ABC passed on it, is sure to generate the most chatter, given its time slot following the channel's successful animated comedy South Park. Instead of words of wisdom from exotic dancers, here we get household hints from adult-film stars, girls jumping on trampolines, and hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla (the show's creators) drinking beer as they make fun of marriage, Oprah and movies starring Bette Midler--subjects lots of awful sitcoms already skewer, and for free.
There are, however, genuinely unnerving moments on The Man Show. One segment has the hosts setting up a table on the boardwalk in Santa Monica, Calif., and getting women to sign a petition to end suffrage. Their point is that women are not smart enough to know the difference between the meaning of the words suffrage and suffering. (It goes without saying that any number of men might have responded exactly as the women did.) But for the most part, The Man Show, like its FX counterpart, is less offensive for its sexism--most of which is just silly--than for its comic unoriginality. After all, Howard Stern has been getting strippers and porn stars to say and do outrageously stupid things for years.
One could try to make the contrarian argument that the ghettoization of crude male programming on cable television represents some triumph for feminism, however minuscule. But what the trend really signals is a feverish effort on the part of cable enterprises to reach a segment of the population not yet served by its own self-identifying slice of not-very-good television entertainment.
Men ages 18 to 34, according to media analysts, have traditionally watched fewer hours of TV than other demographic groups and remain an especially elusive audience today. "These guys have more media options than any other age group in history," notes FX president Peter Liguori, "and their tastes are more eclectic than ever." Advertisers find it hard to tap into this desirable group, says Larry Divney, president of Comedy Central, the No. 1 cable channel among young men. "Advertisers can get them through network sports, etc.," he says, "but then they have to pay for the waste"--marketers' parlance for middle-aged and older viewers.
Despite the demographics and marketing, we are still free to debate why the celebration of men as regressive louts--as opposed to the celebration of them as something else--is cropping up in the popular culture at this particular moment. The FX's Liguori argues that "only recently has it become O.K. for guys to be guys again. Men are attracted to women. Ten years ago, that was harder to articulate in an entertainment product, and in reality." Or perhaps it's that men's magazines and TV shows are simply offering up images of masculinity that stand in high relief to the ones recent pop culture has provided: the wimpy and neurotic males on Friends, the fey brothers Crane on Frasier, the emotionally broken Detective Sipowicz of NYPD Blue, the guys in the movie Swingers, whose nostalgia for Rat Pack swagger never really expresses itself in anything beyond a taste for suits and cocktails.