"Big Shots," ABC's mostly-comedic take on male bonding, is a man's idea of a woman's idea of men. The show's heroes - each the head of a corporation - are adorable, sensitive, flawed, and yearning for love. And they're eager to talk about it. They gab about troubled relationships on the golf course, across the pool table, in the steam room at the gym. They buy each other drinks, and sometimes cars, for consolation.

It's a lot like "Sex and the City" for men, a comparison that surely came up when the show was pitched to network executives. Except that these characters aren't wrestling with empowerment so much as they're wallowing in victimhood. They're constantly beset by the women in their lives: badgering wives, cheating wives, fickle ex-wives, insidious ex-lovers.

This is the strange state of ABC's female-friendly Thursday night lineup: It has become a night of emasculated men and emasculating women. If the classic male pinup was the strong, silent, unattainable type, tonight's TV dream man is addled and fawning. And the empowered woman - once a happy departure from older stereotypes - has become not just self-sufficient, but kind of mean.

In one sense, this is gender-bending stuff as old as Shakespeare, imagining what things might be like if men were more like women, and vice versa. But on ABC, role-reversal is pursued with such vigor that it feels like a social mission: a feverish, wholly off-putting attempt to break free of the boy-meets-girl formula.

Nowhere is that clearer than on "Grey's Anatomy," ABC's wildly-popular lead-in to "Big Shots," where the character of Derek Shepherd - once known as "McDreamy" - has completed his transition from guy-the-heroine-pines-for-in-spite-of-herself to simpering McWeenie. When he was introduced in season one - a neurosurgeon seducing medical intern Meredith Grey at a bar - Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) was the classic TV bad boy. He was distant and commitment-phobic. He nursed a deep dark secret. He was "McDreamy" because he was a fantasy: attractive but unattainable.

Then Shepherd dated Grey, left Grey for his wife, left his wife for Grey, begged for Grey's affection, rescued Grey from a near-death experience, and wound up so pathetically attainable that he lost his appeal altogether. Lately, he's taken to staring moonily into the distance, moaning about lost love and looking as if his pet parakeet has died.

"She doesn't let me take care of her," he lamented two weeks ago to Cristina Yang, Grey's hard-charging confidante, as they watched a complicated surgery from an upstairs gallery. "It's not my job anymore. She won't let me."

"I'm taking care of her," Yang replied coolly.

On "Grey's," in short, empowerment has become a zero-sum game. And a show that once found creative ways to ogle men has evolved into a show that wants to see them punished or demeaned. Mark Sloan (Eric Dane), the womanizing plastic surgeon dubbed "McSteamy," is now in pursuit of Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith), a hard-charging heart surgeon who calls Sloan and Shepherd "Pretty and Prettier." And of late, the male character most successful in romance is George O'Malley, the nerdy intern who is going through a remedial year. One of the other characters nicknamed him "Bambi."