'Big Shots' has swagger, but little else to recommend it

Type-A males get failing grades in 'Big Shots'

Dylan McDermott, Christopher Titus, Michael Vartan and Joshua Malina are alpha-dog males acting like mutts on "Big Shots."

"Men -- we're the new women," says a character on a new ABC drama tonight.

The show, "Big Shots," would like to think that. But saying it doesn't make it so.

"Big Shots" is sort of "Desperate Housewives" with men. It has the same daffy sense of satire peppered with comic slapstick and sexual farce. But make no mistake: This show might star men, but it's intended for women as a follow-up to ABC's "Ugly Betty" and "Grey's Anatomy" when it debuts at 9 p.m. today on WLS Channel 7.

The show is an embarrassment to men, as it treats them as the butt of jokes, but more than that it's an embarrassment to anyone who has anything to do with it.

Dylan McDermott, Joshua Malina, Christopher Titus and Michael Vartan are hereby stripped of their male credentials for starring as four alpha-dog men acting more or less like, well, dogs.

McDermott's Duncan Collinsworth is a cosmetics mogul still boffing his ex-wife (the ever-welcome Paige Turco) while trying to relate to his estranged daughter. Malina's Karl Mixworthy is the owner of a pharmaceutical company who is trying to balance doses of his wife and his mistress.

Titus' Brody Johns is a crisis-management expert whose main crisis is trying to keep his demanding wife happy. And Vartan is James Walker, who discovers his wife was having an affair with his boss -- immediately after his boss tried to fire him, only to die in an unfortunate country-club golf-cart accident involving a high-speed shipment of shrimp being delivered to Brody.

There, that should be sufficient for any self-respecting man to stop reading and make plans to watch "Mad Men" instead on AMC at 9 tonight -- if not the White Sox. For the rest of you, please continue on until you're fully dissuaded from giving this dog show a try.

Just how stupid is "Big Shots?" James finds out his wife was cheating on him when he gets a glimpse of her taking out a necklace she was given by his boss and considering it pensively as she stands over his casket -- no, really, in all seriousness. Then there are more farcical elements such as Duncan trying to cover up that he got busted in a bathroom stall with a transsexual prostitute or Karl getting a racy text message from his mistress while in couples therapy with his wife. And to top it off there is just plain theft in that Brody's rhymes-with-witch wife is never seen except at a distance from behind -- giving her just a little more screen time than Niles' wife Maris in "Frasier."

Hey, look, I don't want to come off as the defender of the macho faith here. Lord knows men do plenty of stupid things, and that Homer Simpson and Al Bundy only begin to strip away the legacy of centuries of white male supremacy. Yet "Big Shots" is just plain awful -- as drama, as comedy, as satire and most of all as entertainment.

McDermott breaks out his smug grin. Malina gets to play against type as his mousy facade gives way to a faux-studly sexuality. Titus at least comes off as half-human after his brutally unfunny Fox sitcom. And that leaves Vartan to carry the dramatic weight as James.

The series was created by Jon Harmon Feldman, who has done some interesting writing in the sci-fi genre for "Tru Calling" and "Roswell." Yet he's also done dreck like "American Dreams," and "Big Shots" finds him pandering even more in giving ABC a male companion piece to "Housewives" and "Anatomy."

The standing set piece finds the four talking out their troubles on the country-club golf course, but they really should be shouting, "Fore!" Because "Big Shots" is an errant slice of dramedy that threatens to conk unsuspecting viewers in the head.

In the air

Remotely interesting: AMC will be bringing back "Mad Men" for a second season. It runs at 9 p.m. today. … Fans of "John From Cincinnati" are taking out ads in industry publications in an attempt to get HBO to renew it. See the Web site www.savejfc.net.

"Survivor XV: China" was the top program of the night in its debut last Thursday, with 15.4 million viewers.

End of the dial: WXRT 93.1-FM will release the 10th edition of "ONXRT: Live From the Archives" on Tuesday through local Starbucks coffee shops.

Clear Channel's Chicago stations plan to originate the Hispanic Excellence Leadership Awards in a ceremony Oct. 9.

-- Ted Cox