The Entertainment Industry's Love Affair With Immature Men

You know the guy. He has a monosyllabic retro name like Hal or Earl or Chuck, mildly wacky hair and a death grip on his adolescence. He's got frat house furniture and dependency issues with his friends, and is hapless or commitment-phobic with women. The Act One diagnosis is usually that he just "needs to grow up."

No, not Michael Vick. Though the Falcon quarterback's explanation for dog fighting -- "I need to grow up" -- does show just how ubiquitous the Peter Pan excuse has become. Male leads in recent popular TV shows and movies are increasingly portrayed as victims of their own immaturity. If only instead of claiming he had found Jesus, Vick had said he'd found some fantastically attractive and accomplished woman, perhaps the viewing audience would've gone along. In today's romantic comedy scripts, the man-child always meets his Wendy. Only through the innate, successful, high-achieving grace of a female may our hero be saved.

Taken one at a time, it's easy to pass off this trend as a simple, comedic trope. But considering the storyline's popularity and how it is affecting gender relations at large, this narrative is worthy of closer attention.

Pairing a bumbling, oddly employed male lead with a hot can-do woman is the current rage in Hollywood. The Ben Stillers and Adam Sandlers gradually brought it to the big screen, but this summer Judd Apatow seems to have elevated the trope to a new level of success. First there was the June release of Knocked Up, a film that matched a successful TV interviewer to a man whose primary working relationship was with his bong. Then, teen couples in the August hit SuperBad were too young to mismatch careers, but unless porn consumption counts as extracurricular credit, their college tracks were assuredly divergent. September will bring us The Brothers Solomon, about a pair of socially awkward siblings' efforts to spread their seed, as well as Good Luck Chuck and Run, Fatboy, Run, which, as their titles hint, only further the trend.

TV echoes what the New Yorker's David Denby calls the "slacker-striver" dynamic. Promos for the new NBC comedy "Chuck" pan from a svelte blond spy to a disheveled computer techie earning, a low voice intones, "Eleven bucks an hour." In HBO's The Flight of the Conchords, one of the parody folk singers is unemployed. The other holds signs. Both get dates. And if the men and women are all similarly employed, as in Scrubs or The Office, when it comes down to it, the women tend to wear the proverbial pants.

Commentators have found as many reasons for the phenomenon as there are examples of it. It's because white males are safe targets of ridicule. It's the work of feminist critiques of the '50s passive homemakers. Some think it sanctions the infantilism of male culture. Others think it's simply a reflection of changing economics, that, A, advertisers are aiming for women, the primary spenders of many households' discretionary incomes and, B, because women are achieving new levels of occupational success. Females outnumber men in most colleges, and while nationwide incomes still aren't equal, younger women in cities like New York are now earning more per hour than their male counterparts. As put forward by books like Alpha Girls, the casting of women as confident high-achievers isn't so much a sitcom cliché as it is a cultural truth.

No matter its source, the archetype of the superwoman is a surely an improvement over the pre-Mary Tyler Moore moms, beer babes and cop-show rape victims. These women are smart and capable, and striving in enviable jobs. Perhaps they should even be flattered to play savior to the opposite sex. But for as potentially insulting to men and empowering to women, a look at the credits should give one pause.