WHAT PASSES FOR ENTERTAINMENT TODAY:

It’s a cop show, but it’s really about the uncomfortable transition an English town is experiences as it turns into a welfare-state matriarchy. The women are mostly Strong, of course; a slight majority are Victims, but even then they’re not only Strong but Resourceful. The men are useless. The male cops are callow. The working men are brutes. The men who don’t work are worthless yobs on the dole. One of the main detectives is a philanderer who is weak and vain. Go to the hospital? It’s run by women. Go to a classroom? When they introduce a new teacher, you can bet it’ll be a woman, because the idea of a male teacher – well, that was the problem, wasn’t it. Nothing but those types, and look where that got everyone.

Of course this show is meant to redress previous injustices – they wouldn’t say so, but you know it’s payback. It’s the shoe on the other foot, one that hasn’t seen a pedicure in a year because the job’s just too bloody demanding. But I still don’t recall the police show where the hero cop kicked a female suspect in the groin in the first season and Tasered a woman in the genitals in the second, and then told the story to great laughter in the squad room, and we were expected to smile along because women getting an electrical charge in the clitoris, c’mon, lighten up, it’s funny.

Matriarchies exist primarily in failed or colonized societies, or in those about to fail or be colonized.