Seth Green

Ellen Gray | Romantic comedies for men?

IF WE’RE to believe HBO’s "Sex and the City," single, attractive, heterosexual men who might be willing to settle down are about as rare on the island of Manhattan as unicorns.

The unicorns must have set up a breeding program, though, because next month, the one named Ted (Josh Radnor) on CBS’ "How I Met Your Mother" will be joined in his quest to find a co-parent for his future children by a soulful young record-company executive named Tom ("Ed’s" Tom Cavanagh), the star of CBS’ hourlong comedy "Love Monkey," which premieres Jan. 17.

On Jan. 9, ABC’s "Jake in Progress," which stars John Stamos as a public-relations guy and celebrity handholder who’s also looking for love, returns to the air on the same night as the latest edition of "The Bachelor" (though that guy, an ER doctor from Nashville, Tenn., will be doing his wooing in Paris, not New York).

On Jan. 5, NBC will introduce "Four Kings," a sitcom about a quartet of childhood buddies - played by Josh Cooke, Seth Green, Todd Grinnell and Shane McRae - sharing a Manhattan apartment one of them inherited from his grandmother.

OK, only one of them, Cooke’s Ben Wolf, seems really ripe for commitment (and like Cooke’s last show, NBC’s "Committed," most of his efforts in that direction will likely be short-lived).

But like those other shows - and unlike, say, ABC’s new Heather Graham sitcom, "Emily’s Reasons Why Not" (Jan. 9) or CBS’ Jenna Elfman half-hour, "Courting Alex" (Jan. 23) - "Four Kings" is a relationship comedy told from the male perspective.

I’m just not sure where they’re all coming from.

Oh, it’s nothing new for TV to be interested in young males. They watch less TV than women and less than older men and so are much sought-after by advertisers trying to draw their attention away from their video games long enough to sell them more video games.

I tend to believe the results of a Spike TV poll that, as Sunday’s New York Times put it, suggested that young men "responded not only to brave and extremely competent leads but to a menagerie of characters with strikingly antisocial tendencies," including "House’s" Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), Sawyer (Josh Holloway) on "Lost," "The Shield’s" Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and "Prison Break’s" Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller).

What I don’t remember reading anywhere is a survey that suggested young men were interested in watching other young men - date.

Yet since the early days of "Sex and the City," I’ve heard producers talking about shows that would be like "Sex and the City," but with guys.

The joke, of course, is that "Sex and the City" was groundbreaking mostly because it wasn’t about guys but instead about women who talked about sex in the way we’ve always been told men do when they’re in unmixed company.

Like Jane Austen, who’s said to have never written a scene in which a woman wasn’t present, I don’t presume to know what men talk about to one another. Maybe many of them really do long for romantic comedies where they’re the ones trying to find the right person and start a family, and it’s the women’s fault that it never really works out.

And maybe unicorns really do exist.