The pilot episode of CBS’s “Love Monkey” delivers the opposite of its implied message – that we should follow our own passions, our own dreams, and hold out for what we really want. The real meaning of “Love Monkey” seems to be that if you want to keep your job, you’d better give your boss exactly what he wants. And by the boss, I’m not referring to the record-company executive played by Eric Bogosian in the pilot, who fires Monkey halfway through for daring to speak from his heart in a staff meeting. No, I’m talking about Leslie Moonves, the president and chief executive of CBS Corporation. Despite his girly-man name, Mr. Moonves seems determined to fill his network’s prime-time schedule with male-driven dramas and comedies that represent women as sex objects and victims.

And not only is it a Moonves-fearing executive who’s developing these Neanderthal concepts – it’s a woman. Her title may be president of CBS Entertainment and her development talents may be prodigious, but Nina Tassler knows the truth: Like most women in Hollywood, she’s serving at the pleasure of a man committed to the superiority of his gender.

“I love just watching the guy trip over his own feet,” Ms. Tassler told the Wall Street Journal recently about Tom Cavanagh, who plays Monkey – a talent scout for a record company who has an unbroken string of successful discoveries but doesn’t have the same record in his emotional life. I kept waiting to see Monkey trip and fall, or even stumble slightly in the first hour of the show, which debuts tonight at 10 p.m. But it never happens. Monkey doesn’t get dumped by his girlfriend; she wants him to commit to marriage, and he doesn’t want to. Monkey may have been fired, but within minutes he’s back on his feet; his sudden job loss doesn’t seem to cramp his Manhattan spending habits. By the end of the pilot, Monkey has a cooler job and a better-looking girlfriend. How many monkeys do you know who can pull that off?

This monkey can play basketball one minute and share sensitive girltalk with his platonic female friend the next. He can walk into a bar only hours after his breakup, flash a smile, and have the prettiest woman in sight start drooling. He can sweet-talk the young singer from Michigan he has just discovered into signing with his new label – even though he doesn’t have a label. (CBS insists that it based this series on a novel called “Love Monkey,” but the pilot blatantly steals several plot points and ideas from “Jerry Maguire.”) The network shades the truth when it represents this show as anything but a celebration of male superiority. Monkey and his requisite generic buddies – one black, one married, one gay – remind themselves regularly that men control their own futures, and women are the monkeys who dance to their tunes. We’re meant to be charmed by Monkey; he’s the kind of guy television executives think all women want and wish they could be.

The Moonveses of the world just don’t get it; they keep putting on male-oriented shows like “Four Kings,” “How I Met Your Mother,” and “Two and a Half Men,” and wonder why they’re not getting “Friends”- type numbers. Has Mr. Moonves forgotten the lessons of “Everybody Loves Raymond” so soon? That’s show’s producers let Ray be a true jerk – and gave his confident, appealing wife the task of teaching him lessons.

The monster success of “Everybody Loves Raymond” showed that women set the agenda for what to watch on television, not men – and that men don’t mind seeing themselves as weak and love-crazy but fundamentally decent, so long as they get off some funny lines along the way. No one’s going to be fooled by Monkey’s phony decency. He may have soft eyes and a sweet smile, but he’s still a lecherous jerk who chooses his women by the cut of their jib, not the shape of their character. Trust me, ladies – marry Monkey, and you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what pretty woman he’s talking to in a bar when he should be with you. Instead you’ll be home, alone, flipping channels in a vain search for a television comedy that isn’t about your lousy husband.

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The creative failure of CBS’s other midseason replacement, “Courting Alex,” results from the same mistake; it’s no surprise that this show once had the title “Everything I Know About Men.” It’s yet another series (debuting next Monday at 9:30 p.m.) ostensibly about a woman – played by the attractive and winning Jenna Elfman – that ends up glorifying the dominant males in her life. She’s a successful lawyer with a high-powered career who has managed to do everything except snag a man. In the pilot, a legal case puts her into a romantic entanglement with another controlling, egotistical jerk whom Mr. Moonves probably found quite lovable. I long for the old days, when the central female characters of CBS’s television comedies, such as Mary Richards and Murphy Brown, controlled their own destinies, and weren’t ruled by the men in their lives. The results were syndication hits worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the CBS bottom line. Sadly, the male-fixated shows Ms. Tassler now develops for CBS – mostly to tickle Mr. Moonves’s fancy and to keep her big, important job – represent a step backward not only for women, but for television itself.