There are two reasons I'm giving ABC's new, likely not long for this world comedy Man Up any attention at all. Primarily, it's because Fox has decided to preempt two of its top-rated shows for the sake of an American Idol knock-off nobody seems to care about, so there's a little extra room on the Tuesday slate for the next couple weeks. I'm also reviewing Man Up because I feel like the recent glut of network TV shows about the utterly mythical "feminization" of men needs to be addressed and this show just happens to be the best of the sorry lot of premieres. The abysmal, horribly dated How To Be A Gentleman has already been canceled and Tim Allen is desperately attempting to recapture the thunder of Home Improvement with Last Man Standing at this very moment, so ABC and Man Up get this place of dubious honor. Amazingly, the fact that it's based on a social philosophy that's both wrong and offensive isn't the only (or the worst) reason it's a terrible show.

Man Up fails on every level and in ways that are far more timeless than its adherence to a stupid fad. It breaks certain rules of good storytelling that defy era or philosophy. The biggest problem with the show is that it's a comedy that lacks even a single likable character. It's to be expected for a show about decidedly un-manly men who are sick of not being manly to feature nothing but evil, condescending, emasculating women, but its male characters really aren't much more sympathetic. There's Craig, a super-sensitive schmuck who's obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, Kenny the fat, immature jerk who screams half his lines and Will, the requisite well-meaning but ineffectual dad whose only charm comes from the fact that he's played by the perennially misused Mather Zickel.

The entire point of Man Up seems to be to make everyone on screen look pitiable and ridiculous. The testosterone-driven meatheads who antagonize our three hapless heroes aren't raised to any sort of ideal, but their monstrous behavior doesn't serve to make the protagonists any less awful themselves. Man Up exists in a hateful world, which makes for terrible comedy. It's impossible to laugh when everybody in the story is so repulsive.

The aesthetic of the show is also pretty wishy-washy. It's a single-camera, quasi-documentary style sitcom, which makes it look like Modern Family without the talking head segments. There's really no point in shooting the show this way. It doesn't aspire to realism or attempt to capture more intimate moments between characters. Applied to a show this broad and outlandish, the cinematography and direction just seem like somebody's sophomoric attempt to make it look like the best comedies of our time rather than actually making it a good comedy.

And then, of course, there's that repugnant philosophical core that panders to a totally made-up perception in a way that's eerily similar to the way MTV pretends it can tell kids what they're supposed to like. Man Up tries to justify itself by instilling its male characters (and thereby its male audience) with shame over having never fought in a war and having raised sons who feel feelings instead of, what, fighting all the time? This is especially hollow in a time when thousands of young men in our culture actually have fought in wars over the past twenty years and we're all too aware of the problems that resulted from the emotional repression, hard drinking and casual misogyny of past generations.

When the best this recent crop of false masculine unity shows can offer is a lazy, hackneyed disaster like Man Up, I think it's safe to say the whole trend is ready to be buried and forgotten. It's the Crystal Pepsi of gender politics. Only a few people ever bought it, most people found it disgusting and now it's only good as a punchline.