THAT P.J. Franklin (Jordana Spiro) makes a great girlfriend, no? She's plucky, accessibly attractive and unreasonably into sports. Sure, she's a baseball beat writer for a Chicago daily, but her ardor isn't limited to the Cubs. She'll watch the Bears or the Blackhawks too, and then host a poker game at her not-too-frilly apartment. Perfect, no?
Most crucially, she would never, ever leave you for one of her bros. At the end of the first season of "My Boys," P.J. was in amorous lip lock with Brendan (Reid Scott), one of her all-male circle of friends. At the outset of the second season, which returns Monday (TBS, 10 p.m.), we find out that, hey, that was awkward. So much so that it wasn't repeated, even though their attraction dated to another errant kiss in college.
More important, it means P.J. is still single, a frat boy's dream catch. But giving hope to sports nebbishes nationwide does not a sitcom make. And "My Boys," which is essentially a gender-tweaked "Sex and the City" right down to the unwieldy metaphor voice-overs (about sports, in this case) that pepper each episode, does its centerpiece a disservice by downplaying her beauty at every turn, including with wardrobe and lighting. That P.J. is one of the boys is clear; that she's something more is not. "My Boys" is as interested in womanhood as "Entourage," another show it recalls. Which is to say: not so much.
P.J. is continually denied complexity -- her make-out session with Brendan could have been a launchpad for a conversation about how to navigate a friendship blooming into romance. Instead, after a couple of awkward encounters -- "Is it time that you grew up and dealt with the fact there are other women in our lives that we would rather spend our time with than you? Because there are, so get used to it," Brendan tells her, with a half-hearted attempt at malice -- the two ebb back to platonic bliss.
On one of Monday's two episodes, P.J. guests on a local sports-talk TV show and is woefully out of place amid the blustery catchphrase-dropping men on the panel. But instead of finding a fresh way of asserting, and inserting, herself into the proceedings, she merely attempts to ape the others, and fails, another feminist opportunity lost.
