More on men (badly)

Rico says Alessandra Stanley's review of The Protector in The New York Times has the headline It’s a Crime That Men Are So Lazy, so you know he's gonna post about it:

Most crime shows open with a murder; a brutal park slashing or a nighttime break-in by a serial killer in a ski mask. The Protector, a new series on Lifetime, offers an even more chilling tableau of horror: a woman, late for work, trying to hurry two children through breakfast before they miss their school bus: “There’s never enough time,” the mother, Gloria Sheppard (played by Ally Walker), says.
Increasingly on television, there’s never enough time, because men are lazy. Also, they are not that bright. And that’s why women do almost all of the work at home, and the brunt of it at work, too.
That is certainly the premise of The Protector. Gloria is a divorced mother of two who does it all. She stays up all night sewing a school-play costume for her younger son, and still manages to solve complex cases that her dullard male colleagues shrug off.
As with the harried working mother Sarah Jessica Parker plays in a coming movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It, we don’t know how Gloria does it. But she obviously feels that she can’t count on any co-worker to pull his own weight or rely on a husband to share the load at home. (The pilot suggests that her ex was a philanderer, but the details are left out.)
Gloria does live with, and lean on, her younger brother, Davey (played by Chris Payne Gilbert), but he’s a recovering addict and can be entrusted only with small tasks.
Maybe it’s the timing: All this workload resentment comes at a point when real-life husbands are at an all-time down-low, be it sex-tweeting (twexting?) congressmen or international bankers accused of preying on hotel maids. But for whatever reason, male inadequacy keeps popping up in many a new show.
Sex-role fatigue is treated as a joke in comedies like Up All Night, which stars Christina Applegate as a working mother with a hapless stay-at-home husband (played by Will Arnett), and Last Man Standing, an ABC series that stars Tim Allen as a father who is forced to become a stay-at-home dad when his wife returns to work. Women’s work is not a laughing matter on The Killing, an AMC series about a single mother who, in one episode, sets aside a major homicide case when her own son goes missing.
The Protector plays it down the middle. Gloria is lighthearted and sardonic with her Los Angeles police partner, Detective Michelle Dulcett (played by Tisha Campbell-Martin), especially at the expense of their dim-witted colleagues. But at home she worries about her sons’ happiness and burns the candle at both ends to help them adjust to their new lives without a father at home.
Ms. Walker starred as a criminal profiler on the NBC series Profiler. Gloria’s sons call her “the protector” because when she is home, they feel safe. (Perhaps wrongly; Gloria is a mom who’s so much “fun” that she teaches her sons to toss knives.)
Ms. Walker is an appealing actress with a strong presence but, in the pilot, at least, her character isn’t as well formed or well written as other tough-talking television dames, particularly Mary Shannon, a federal marshal played by Mary McCormack on the USA show In Plain Sight. Gloria’s not as distinctive or idiosyncratic as Kyra Sedgwick’s character, Brenda Leigh Johnson, on the TNT series The Closer. And she’s not nearly as arrogant as Dana Delany’s character on Body of Proof on ABC, a brilliant, condescending medical examiner who is more fun to watch, mostly because she is so clearly not a people pleaser.
Gloria is happy to let other colleagues grab the credit, as long as she can take the lead in solving the case, which is a lot less gratifying. Especially on a network like Lifetime, we don’t know why she does it.