Female Characters, Made To Suffer for Our 'Art'

From which, we conclude, young men like their older women in teddies having sex with teenagers who cut their grass (or, in the case of Teri Hatcher, naked and in the bushes), but they like their younger women -- well, dead.

Which explains why, on all of these new Die, Women, Die! series, the victims are pretty young women. Mostly white, too -- just like on the cable news networks.

Is it any wonder that CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler, when asked about the trend after one of her network's Q&A sessions, responded, "Perhaps we should take a look at the society as a whole.

"We're particularly sensitive," said Tassler, whose network boasts all three "CSIs" as well as the new "Close to Home," in which a boy sets the family house on fire with him, his little sister and his mom inside, in hopes the fire department will come and save them from Dad, who's kept them locked up there for a couple of years -- some of which time Mom has spent wearing a dog collar, leashed up in the basement.

"We look to programming practices [department], we look to our producers to be responsible. In future stories we're going to try to monitor things like that," she said.

"About 98 percent of this is about 'CSI' and its spinoffs, which also worked," notes Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel TV critic Tom Jicha, who was asking most of the Die, Women, Die! questions at the press tour.

At least once during a Die, Women, Die! show Q&A session, someone promised critics that in the course of the TV season, they'd show crimes perpetrated against men as well. But, as Jicha noted, "When they're looking to sell the show, they always put the women in chains."

It's true, in the pilot of "Invasion" -- that's the one in which unseen alien-things swoop into a Florida town during a hurricane and do unnamed things that leave some of the citizens, including the sheriff's wife and the local minister, smelling different -- it's the sheriff's wife who's found naked in the swamp, not the pudgy male minister. Wonder why that was?

Interestingly, other network suits didn't do much better than the show creators at answering the Die, Women, Die! questions.

Fox programming chief Peter Liguori was specifically asked about the opening episode of his new series "Killer Instinct" (formerly called "The Gate"), which was created by one of the guys who used to work on "CSI." (That's the one in which a guy sends big hairy spiders under the door of a woman's home so they can bite and paralyze her, so he can then rape and kill her.) Jicha noted that a trend is "emerging -- and it's happened on a Fox show in particular" in which "crimes are getting a little more grotesque" and he wondered, "Is that necessary to distinguish yourself from the crowd?"

"I think the goal should be to . . . expand the envelope with taste; it should be to expand the envelope with creativity," Liguori began.

"When you look to something like that, you know -- again, we're gearing those crimes to almost be popcornish. Suffering from arachnophobia myself, yes, I cringed also when I saw it. But the intent there is actually to create creative, fun crimes as opposed to attempting for -- "

"Would you like to reconsider that phrasing, talking about spiders and then getting raped and murdered?" the critic interrupted.

"Well, I was referring to the spider more than -- more than the aftermath of what occurs," Liguori said.

Aftermath?