Where have all the lead male TV characters gone?

“Where are all the men?”

Such is the question I have thanks to the increasing number of so called made for cable “We know drama” television shows I have seen aired in recent years featuring Hollywood’s top actresses in roles once played by male actors.

Tinseltown, it seems, no longer cares about what the male audience wants to see in terms of TV shows. Their primary goal now is to make sure most, if not everything they air, pertains to women only.

I have found such recent programs as TNT’s crime drama, “The Closer”, starring Kyra Sedgwick and the medical shows HawthoRNe starring Jada Pinkett Smith, and Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie” starring Edie Falco might as well be called “The I am woman, hear me roar hour.”

Up until recently, I refused to watch “The Closer” thanks to the commercial promotions I saw last season. One promo, in particular, showed a few people confessing their sins to Sedgwick’s L.A. Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson from an overweight African American chowing down on donuts who tells her “My wife thinks I am on a diet” to the little girl who says, “My daddy cheats on his taxes.”

I got the impression the makers behind the show, and perhaps Sedgwick herself who also serves as co-executive producer, feel the series’ main selling point is that women and men get sexually aroused confessing their deepest, darkest sins to a take charge female, who isn’t afraid of beating the hell out of them if the situation warrants it.

The one word that came to mind watching a recent episode dealing with the murder of two Los Angeles police officers by a couple Nazi racists was “catfight.” I sat there wondering if Sedgwick’s Johnson, who oversees a department of all male detectives, would throw down and start trading body blows against co-star Mary McDonnell’s Captain Raydor whose job was to paint the criminals as victims and the deceased cops as the ones who started the shootings.

Sedgwick’s Johnson is like a dominatrix without the whips, leather, and black stilettos, though she does have the handcuffs. She doesn’t need a whip or a dungeon. She has that stern southern, no nonsense New Orleans accent of hers she can use to threaten any suspects with prison time.

"You don't need an attorney because if you get an attorney I plan to sit down with your fiancée and have a nice long chat with her about what you've been doing with your penis,” Johnson tells a suspect in one episode.

If the Bush/Cheney Administration had someone like her to carry out interrogations of terror suspects at Guantanamo or in Iraq, we would have never heard of water boarding.

Some of my favorite “male” fictional characters in past medical dramas were those that were egotistical, self-centered assholes like Mandy Patinkin’s Dr. Jeffery Geiger on “Chicago Hope,” William Daniels’ Dr. Mark Craig in “St. Elsewhere” and Paul McCrane’s Dr. Romano on “ER.” I just know I was the only one in mourning when McCrane’s character got killed off when a helicopter crashed on top of him.

Now those roles have been taken over by actresses like Jada Pinkett Smith and Edie Falco.

I just know females were rooting for Pinkett Smith’s head nurse on “HawthoRNe”, a widow and mother who pays more attention to her patients than she does her own family. In one episode I saw parts of, Hawthorne tells her daughter how she didn't ask for the job of teaching her how to drive. That job was supposed to be her late husband's.

"I didn’t ask for this particular rite of passage," Hawthorne says. "You know potty training; I filled that stupid chart with all kinds of gold stars. Riding a bike, I kissed every dang booboo. Your first bra I took you to Macy’s. I got you one of those training deals, which by the way you didn’t even need, but this right here, driving lessons? That’s not for me, that’s daddy’s gig."

Yes. Nothing like a mother, who when her daughter needs someone to teach her how to drive, the parent wants some "Me time" only. How will Nurse Hawthorne react when her daughter needs someone to talk to when she's in serious trouble? Perhaps she'll get one of her nurses to do it the way she asks one of them to teach her daughter how to drive.

Like episodes of “The Closer” where Johnson utters quotes that easily define male bashing like “I'm going to have to deal with some pompous, arrogant oaf who doesn't know thing one about investigating a murder”, the promos I have seen for “HawthoRNe” show scenes of male nurses being portrayed as incompetent and are mocked and scolded by the female staff.

I have no desire to sit through one complete episode of Pinkett Smith’s series to find out if I am actually right in my assessment.

At least the nursing community is not too happy with Edie Falco’s pill popping-Vicodin addicted, adulteress Jackie Peyton on “Nurse Jackie.”

"I almost fell out of my chair when I saw 'Nurse Jackie'," said President of the National Federation of Nurses Barbara Crane in an article by the New York Daily News dated June 9, 2009. "I found those things she did - forging a donor card, stealing money, throwing people's body parts away - extremely insulting. It makes me really sad. That's not who I am, that's not what I do."

“We’re not saying this is a show about nurses,” Falco said in the Daily News article. “This is a show about a nurse.”

Falco’s comments lead me to make a predictable conclusion. If Nurse Jackie were a show about someone going through real life issues at home and at the workplace that those in the nursing profession could relate to, no one would watch it.

“This is a show of fiction, and its purpose, first and foremost, is entertainment,” said Stuart Zakim, vice president of corporate communications in the Daily News article. “We are confident the viewing public will understand that and can differentiate between a work of fiction and a documentary, which this clearly is not.”

I don’t share Zakim’s confidence. I find a majority of television’s audiences to not be all that bright and that most actually believe what they are watching goes on in real life.

If the lead characters in “The Closer,” “HawthoRNe,” and “Nurse Jackie” are the kinds of females women aspire to be, they should start looking for some better positive role models.

There is no disputing that Sedgwick, Pinkett Smith, and Falco are as talented as they are attractive.

I can’t stop Hollywood, excuse me, “Hollyweird”, from waving its pro-feminist flag and offering more shows that feature women in take charge roles once held by male actors.

They cannot, however, stop me from shouting at the top of my lungs the line “This is a man’s world” from a classic James Brown song either when it comes to what I prefer to watch on network and cable television.

When it comes to the entertainment industry, there should be a rule that says when it comes to actresses taking on roles once held by male actors, “Don’t send a woman in to do a man’s job.”

©8/6/09