Sad Sack Men vs. Power Women

Despite a sudden drop in female television writers this season, the fall shows are full of strong women characters played by billboard names like Kat Dennings, Zooey Deschanel, and Whitney Cummings. But they’re also full of a particular type of man: the sad-sack, depressed victim of the “mancession” who, Willa Paskin writes in New York magazine, is not very happy about all the powerful girls. Shows featuring male characters are “predicated on the idea that once, not so long ago, there was a code, a way to be a man that everyone understood, and now that code is gone, leaving Y chromosomes isolated and flailing in a tech-savvy world dominated by women.”