Ellen Gray: Our TV critic puts the new fall season on the couch

I'M NOT A licensed therapist - nor do I play one on TV - but if I could put the 2011 fall TV season on the couch, I'd probably begin by asking about its mother.

Because I'm guessing they had some issues.

Certainly the TV season has a lot on its mind: It's worried about the economy (but then, who isn't?; it's concerned it might have lost touch with its masculine side and 21st-century women seem to make it a little nervous.

Especially some of the younger ones.

The result? A broadcast-network lineup that includes among the more than two dozen new series that will debut over the next several weeks:

* Two dramas, NBC's "The Playboy Club" and ABC's "Pan Am," set in the "Mad Men" era of the early 1960s.

There was a lot of talk during a recent press conference for "The Playboy Club" about the "empowerment" of those early Playboy bunnies, and let's just say I'm waiting to see the show in which men are empowered by serving cocktails in outfits so restrictive they required adjusting so the actresses wearing them - who get paid considerably more than those Playboy Club waitresses did - could breathe.

* Fox's long-awaited "Terra Nova," a man-meets-dinosaur thriller from Steven Spielberg that sends its characters even further into the past - 85 million years - to a world in which a man of action (Jason O'Mara), whose instincts caused him major problems in the 22nd century, can feel every bit as appreciated as his super-doctor wife (Shelley Conn).

* ABC's remake of that '70s show, "Charlie's Angels," in which three beautiful women - or "three little girls," as a network promo still calls the characters now played by Rachael Taylor, Annie Ilonzeh and Minka Kelly - once again work to solve cases for a guy they (and we) never get to see. (Other "girl" sightings this fall: Zooey Deschanel as an adorable geek being made over by her male roommates in Fox's "New Girl," and Bryn Mawr's Kat Dennings and Lancaster's Beth Behrs as Brooklyn waitresses in CBS' "2 Broke Girls.")

* Several sitcoms - CBS' "How to Be a Gentleman," ABC's "Man Up!" and "Last Man Standing," NBC's "Free Agents" and "Up All Night" and even "New Girl" - whose male characters struggle to some extent with what it means to be a man (some of the women in these shows have their own issues of identity).

* A drama, "A Gifted Man," about a surgeon (Patrick Wilson) who's about to undergo a psychological makeover, courtesy of his dead ex-wife (Jennifer Ehle).

* Two shows, ABC's "Once Upon a Time" and NBC's "Grimm," that suggest that fairy tales can come true, complete with Snow White, evil queens and big bad wolves. (A Freudian would have a field day, but might fail to note that both networks are owned by companies that also own theme parks.)

* An NBC remake of the British "Prime Suspect" in which the lead character, a New York police detective named Jane Timoney (Norristown's Maria Bello), faces considerably more resistance from male colleagues than we've seen on most police dramas in recent years.

* A Hamptons-set soap from ABC, "Revenge," that casts Emily VanCamp - yes, that nice girl from "Everwood" and "Brothers and Sisters" - as a steely-eyed instrument of vengeance whose major opposition comes from an equally terrifying character played by Madeleine Stowe. There are men in this, too, but we probably shouldn't get too attached, as most seem targeted to be killed and eaten.

* A couple of comedies, ABC's "Suburgatory" and Fox's "I Hate My Teenage Daughter," that look at the way some adolescent girls are turning out and, in the latter case, at least, come to some unfunny conclusions.

So what's happening here?

Some of it's just business.

As ABC entertainment president Paul Lee noted recently, his is "a network that's dominated, and certainly in terms of the value of our sales, [by] affluent women's audiences."

Television, Lee argued, has always looked "at the plight of men [and] . . . the plight of women."

And so, looking around for a few good men to balance all the women watching "Grey's Anatomy" and "The Bachelor," ABC got back in business with Tim Allen, whose "Home Improvement" was one of the most-watched comedies of the 1990s.

Turns out Allen was frustrated by TV roles he was being pitched.

"It was never the same show" as "Home Improvement," he complained to reporters last month. "I said, 'I don't know why we would not do a version of the same show, rather than put me in a legal drama.' And there were several of those . . . . At one point, they cast a woman in the part they actually looked for me in."

Allen refused to confirm a reporter's suggestion that the show was NBC's "Harry's Law" - which stars Kathy Bates - but he did say he'd been interested in reversing the "Home Improvement" dynamic by giving his macho "Last Man Standing" character three daughters instead of three sons.

What being a man means to Allen: "I think men that tend to their own knitting, as my mom used to call it. I really believe that men need stuff to do . . . . You have to have hobbies, and you should be able to fix stuff. I really have always believed that men should do that stuff, and my grandma, my aunt, both said, 'There's nothing more attractive than a guy busy doing something.' "

"Last Man Standing" executive producer Jack Burditt said that he was "fascinated" that "for the first time in history, more than 50 percent of the workplace is women and that 60 percent of all college graduates are women," and the women of the show are unquestionably busy, too. Allen's wife on the show, played by Nancy Travis, has a thriving career, even if her biggest job in the pilot seems to be to taking some of the bite out of her husband's bark.

Which makes her a lot kinder than Teri Polo's character in ABC's "Man Up!" who tells her husband (Mather Zickel), after he complains that they "need more hazelnut creamer" and frets about how to communicate manhood to their 13-year-old son:

"I'm sorry, honey, but your grandfather fought in World War II, your father fought in Vietnam, but you play video games and use pomegranate body wash."

Ouch.

ABC's not alone in thinking that men need to busy themselves with more than video games (the bane of most TV programmers).

One of CBS' most-anticipated dramas, "Person of Interest," not only taps into our need to believe that amid all those cameras focused on us in a post-9/11 world, there's someone actually watching out for us, but also offers a prescription for a character overwhelmed by past events.

"I don't think you need a psychiatrist or a support group or pills," the mysterious "Mr. Finch" (Michael Emerson) tells the homeless man (Jim Caviezel) who used to work for the government. "You need a purpose. More specifically, you need a job."

Most of us do, of course. But what happens when there aren't enough jobs to go around?

Maybe TV, worried as the rest of us about staying employed, grows wistful for a world in which men are men and women are, well, girls.