The Playboy Club: men only

When Amy Poehler and Melissa McCarthy joked at Sunday night's Emmy awards ceremony that they were delighted to see men finally breaking through with "meaty roles" no longer simply seen as "handsome, pretty-pretty things to look at", it was a moment that as uncomfortable as it was funny.

For behind Poehler and McCarthy's jests was a salient reminder of the paucity of rounded, believable female roles on network television. While cable has given us the likes of Nurse Jackie, Peggy Olsen and Catelyn Stark with Laura Dern's repentant party girl in Enlightened and Clare Danes's paranoid CIA agent in Homeland to come, network television continues to prefer women to look good and say little, with the notable exceptions of the cast of The Good Wife and Friday Night Light's strong-willed, believable Tami Taylor.

Yes, the casts of Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives are predominantly female but increasingly those shows seem divorced from whatever minor reality they once inhabited and I'll eat my fanciest hat if anyone truly believes that Meredith "commitment is just so hard" Grey or Susan "whiny, I'll show you whiny" Delfino are anything other than a bundles of neuroses held together by a string of tics.

If anything, network television's women issue is only going to get worse this season. Let's start with the new season's two big historical dramas: ABC's Pan Am, which starts next week, and NBC's The Playboy Club, which debuts on Monday night. It's obvious with both shows that the network execs involved sat down and said: "Mad Men, that's the sort of thing we want, get me something that looks like Mad Men."

And so their willing minions did. The only problem is that they simply commissioned two shows that looked like Mad Men, rather than bothering to think about why Matthew Weiner's drama succeeds. Thus in place of Weiner's nuanced take on the difficulties of being a woman in a man's world we have NBC's crass assertion that while "men hold the key, women run the world" and Pan Am's triumph of stewardess style over any sort of substance. It's a Mad Men world certainly (and as such almost as beautifully shot as the original) but one that appears devoid of anything interesting to say.

Still, Pan Am and even the Playboy Club look like feminist manifestos in comparison with the new Charlie's Angels remake, which pulls off the improbable trick of apparently requiring its cast to wear less and simper more than they did the first time round.

At this point no doubt people are saying 'it's just entertainment' but I'm not alone in thinking that it would be nice to see female roles that involve more than the batting of eyelashes. As the Washington Post's Hank Stuever acerbically wrote last week about the current season:

It's all bunnies, baby dolls and broads – and bridezillas and bimbos, if you get into reality TV. It's still giggles and jiggles.

In fact Stuever is not entirely correct – in addition to giggles and jiggles you can also play Snow White or the wicked witch in Once Upon A Time, a ghost in A Gifted Man or a fish-out-of-water doctor in Hart of Dixie, which appears to be a sub-par rom com that somehow took a wrong turning and landed up on the small screen.

Then there are the season's new sitcoms. NBC's Whitney is a sort of Judd Apatow-lite, which hopes to capture the Bridesmaids audience by making fart jokes, Two Broke Girls takes the idiosyncratic and always watchable Kat Dennings and gives her some of the most predictable dialogue this side of Two and A Half Men, I Hate My Teenage Daughter wastes two likeable talents in Jaime Pressly and Katie Finneran and New Girl with its nauseating 'Adorkable' tagline is merely an excuse for Zooey Dechanel to twirl winsomely in the hope that we'll believe a 32-year-old singing to herself is lovable rather than arrested.

It's not even as though women get a break in the male-centric shows. ABC's Last Man Standing and Man Up centre around the problems of being an emasculated man in today's world while reminding us that the worst thing you can do to a guy is compare him to a woman's female parts.

Thank goodness then for Madeline Stowe's silk-over-steel matriarch in Revenge and Maria Bello's tough-talking cop in the Prime Suspect remake. To be honest, the former is little more than a campy bit of fluffy fun while the latter pales next to the original – it's just that in comparison with the rest of the 2011 season they seem like minor miracles at work.