Prime-time puts softer side of men on display

updated 5:45 p.m. ET Aug. 20, 2007

LOS ANGELES - Michael Vartan considers himself a guy’s guy — just as much as the next guy’s guy. He swears like a sailor, likes fast cars and enjoys a good high-testosterone action flick. “I can’t wait to see the next Jet Li movie!” he says.

And yet, says Vartan, “I’m a lot more sensitive than anyone would really know, and it’s definitely interesting to portray that in a character.”

As the star of ABC’s hourlong fall dramedy, “Big Shots,” the former “Alias” secret agent is just one of a number of actors playing complex, emotionally evolved, heterosexual alpha males putting their softer side on display in prime time.

In the late 1990s, “Sex and the City” ushered in a new portrait of single women with their frank discussions of their sexual exploits, desires, fantasies and beliefs about men. Of late, however, it’s the less-fair sex going sensitive.

In a number of broadcast ensembles premiering this fall, men are opening up about issues beyond sports, money, power and sexual conquests. They’re expressing their feelings — often to other men — on fatherhood, intimacy and love.

One such series is ABC’s “Carpoolers,” which centers on commuter pals who commiserate about everything from their jobs and their wives (“If we don’t provide for our women, do they really need us?” queries one character) to their personal secrets (one confesses to losing his virginity to Air Supply’s syrupy ‘80s ballad, “All Out of Love.”)

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“The whole idea behind the car pool is that anything can be said,” says co-star T.J. Miller. “It’s almost like the huddle before they go into the football game that is life. Then they go back into the huddle because there’s another game at home. So it’s guys trying to figure stuff out and wanting to get the perspective of other guys.”

Other series featuring men bonding include HBO’s popular comedy, “Entourage,” just renewed for a fifth season and CBS’ returning “Rules of Engagement,” highlighting the friendship of three men: one married, one engaged and one happily playing the field. Then there’s the new ABC sitcom, “Cavemen,” which follows a group of modern-day Cro-Magnon men who are far more enlightened than their counterparts in the days before fire.

“There’s a bit of an evolution, the idea of male bonding, which has always been around in entertainment, but in the past it was done with a little more machismo,” says Nicole Vecchiarelli, entertainment director of Details, a men’s fashion and lifestyle magazine. “But in the post metrosexual era guys bonding isn’t necessarily about guns and action and high testosterone activity. They’re exposing their more sensitive side because that’s a reflection of the typical urban male.”

Although the idea of the metrosexual man focused on outward appearances, where men were as conscious about the way they looked — and smelled — as women, “now it seems they can, on the inside, feel a little bit more like girls and that’s still OK,” adds Vecchiarelli.

The men in “Big Shots” are very in touch with their feminine sides. Vartan, Dylan McDermott, Joshua Malina and Christopher Titus play high-powered Manhattan CEOs with everything in the world they could want, except for stable relationships at home. In the pilot, the men groan so much about their dysfunctional marriages, their need for intimacy and fidelity, McDermott’s character declares: “Men. We’re the new women.”

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