Boys' nights a big yawn

By GREG DIXON

In marriage, no one can hear you scream.

So runs the catchline for this new sitcom from HBO, home of Sex in the City and The Sopranos.

As all good catchcries should, it pretty much sums up the whole shebang. The Mind of a Married Man is not original (the strapline's a rip-off of Alien's "in space ... "), it's not funny and it doesn't make much sense.

But what this silly slogan also undoubtedly signals is that this one is for the boys.

You can just imagine it. Some overpaid, under-imaginative programmer sitting around thinking, "We've got too much of that babe comedy %&$

on, we gotta get something for the guys, something with lots of heart to hearts over brewskis with buddies".

And so, in an American sitcom environment so dominated by women's sitcoms - Ally McBeal, Sex in the City et al - it's apparently been deemed time for the "men's" sitcom.

There is little difference to discern. The mind of the married man in sitcom-land is much the same as the mind of the unmarried woman, or for that matter unmarried man: it's filled with lurid sexual fantasy.

The married men of the title are late-30s newspaper columnist Micky, a borderline sleazoid, and his two buddies, Jake (a full-blown sleazoid) and Doug (a low-grade sleazoid). They have kids, they have good jobs, they have nice clothes and apartments. They probably have dogs. But this, of course, is not enough. Not nearly enough.

No, they have unfulfilled needs, they have unfulfilled desires, they have the unfulfilled aforementioned fantasies.

And, as you might have guessed, the women they are married to simply don't understand.

Tonight's pilot episode finds Micky in a bind. He's sure his wife has found porn on his computer and he's in a terrible stew.

"What kind [of porn]?" asks Doug.

"What does it matter what kind?" Micky fusses. "It was pictures of naked women, pictures of naked-not-my-wife-women. What does it matter what kind?"

So you can see we're not in deep and meaningful territory here.

As the first episode winds on, Micky hires a sexy secretary and has sexual fantasies about her while asleep in bed with his wife. Jake introduces his mates to the woman who gives him sex in his office and Micky's problems are worked out, for this episode at least, by having sex with his wife.

It's rather tawdry, low-rent and undoubtedly the product of somebody's midlife crisis. It is also the bastard son of Sex in the City.

Time and time again women (both single and hitched) have tried to explain to me why Sex in the City is just, well, sooooo funny. Apparently it's something to do with it being true and wise about sex and the single life.

The Mind of a Married Man is so obviously seeking to offer the wedded bloke the same sort of thing with the likes of tonight's message, courtesy of Doug: "You can be good and factual and still slowly choke to death in a sea of lies," he tells Micky.

Putting aside the fact that one would actually drown in a sea, this kind of superficial, pseudo-philosophical statement is obviously intended as counterpoint to the lurid sexual fantasy. But it's no antidote at all to the drivel that surrounds it.

Which makes The Mind of a Married Man more of an endurance test for the mind than an entertainment.

In the lounge, nobody heard me scream.

* The Mind of a Married Man TV2, 9.55 pm