But these, I will miss.

Yesterday, I talked about what shows I was overjoyed to see banished from the idiot box.

Today, I’m mourning fallen shows that, to varying degrees, were interesting for women. Unfortunately, this list is a lot longer:

The L Word (Showtime). I’m actually impressed that The L Word made it as long as it did. The show was a wonderful exploration of the mania of living in a community bound by a life of otherness. And it did so without being preachy. The final two seasons moved away from this exploration in favor of scandalous hook-ups, which proved to be the show’s ultimate undoing. The series’ finale, “Last Word,” was more a manic surrender than anything else.

Lipstick Jungle (NBC): I’ve said it here before: it’s tough to make a show that needs to capitalize on the Sex and the City void to be successful when you have to censor the gratuitous sex and swearing to squeak it through network approval. After just two seasons, Lipstick Jungle finally lost the fight. It turns out that women’s problems that aren’t solved by Jimmy Choo’s aren’t as commercially viable, which is a sad social comment.

Privileged (CW). Privileged might have made it on a different network, but it’s not right for the CW’s demographic, who tune into Gossip Girl, America’s Next Top Model, and 90210. The quarter-life crisis of a Yale graduate just didn’t fit in the line-up. It’s a pity, Megan (Joanna Garcia) was one of the most relatable characters on television for the twenty-something crowd that, like this author, hasn’t quite realized their ambitions for what they want to be when they grow up.

The Starter Wife (USA). This cancellation might be one of the saddest, if only for the realization that, when the boys make fun of the more ridiculous qualities of Hollywood on Entourage, it’s a blockbuster, but when the girls do it on The Starter Wife, it gets cancelled. Plus, I’m a sucker for Debra Messing, and think it’s sad that she’ll probably never find a post-Will and Grace home.

The Unusuals (ABC). This show not finding a following is one of those things that make me think I’m hopelessly out of touch with popular reality. The show was packed with talent like Amber Tamblyn (Gilmore Girls and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), Harrold Perrineau (LOST), and Adam Goldberg (Entourage and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days). The script had a Seinfeld-esque quirkishness that made you laugh, shake your head, and see bits of yourself and your friends in everyone on the screen.

So long, friends! It is with a heavy heart that I delete you from the DVR prioritizer.

Woman in Crisis

The "quarter-life crisis," occurring a few years after graduation from college, is usually induced by a sense that all the work you put into your degree and the promises it held let you down: you are not making any discernible progress toward landing your dream job (or even a job that you don’t hate), you are drowning under student loan debt, your latest relationship was a flop while all of your friends are getting married and having babies, you’re withdrawing from your friends because you’re so depressed about the state of your life. This phenomenon seems to attack women much more than men—mostly because of the marriage and baby angle, but perhaps also because of this period’s frantic sense that if you debunk “go to college and get your Mrs.” mentality you really have rolled the dice.

This week’s episode of Privileged, November 11’s “All About Insecurities,” captures the confusion and pressure that comes with women’s mid-twenties really well. Megan (JoAnna Garcia), Yale journalism grad-turned-live-in-tutor, is visited by Caryn (Sarah Drew), currently employed as an assistant flunky at an elitist New York magazine that sounds an awful lot like The New York Review. The trip is meant to be a group commiseration session about their respective failures to launch, but Caryn gets a call on the very first night telling her that she’s been promoted to an assistant editor position. Megan then finds herself in that awful position of being happy for a friend but wondering why it couldn’t have been her: The mantra “The race is long and only with myself” doesn’t provide much solace. The reality is that Megan’s most recent project of writing the biography of her employer, cosmetics giant Laurel Limoges (Anne Archer), was pronounced DOA after she uncovered a terrible secret of Laurel’s. Laurel is now making her miserable, the girls have hired a publicist, Megan’s had a fall-out with childhood best friend Charlie (Michael Cassidy), her most recent relationship was a disaster, and she’s still on the outs with her sister. Juxtaposing these life parameters against Caryn’s phone conference with Pulitzer prize winning Michael Chabon, and it looks like Megan has escalated from crisis to nuclear meltdown.

The continuation of the series leaves no other option than for Megan to stay on in the baffling belief that she will somehow be able to write in Palm Beach, an option she sincerely believes more meaningful employment will somehow preclude. It’s a cheap sitcom solution, but in a lot of ways I like that writer Scott Weinger didn’t attempt to put a verbal band-aid on the situation. The drawn out sense of impending doom is the essence of the quarter-life crisis, which makes this “privileged” generation seem just slightly less so.

The show ends with Megan making out with her billionaire neighbor, Will Davis (Brian Hallisay), who used to date her sister Lily (Kristina Apgar). That should make her life less complicated.

Let the Woman Speak!

Both networks that housed Buffy the Vampire Slayer have since collapsed under the weight of expensive sci-fi shows no one watched and teenage drivel that… well… no one watched. The CW Network, which rose from their ashes, hit a home run with Gossip Girl, which now seems to be providing the boiler plate for every show they intend to produce from now until someone pulls the plug.

Privileged is the CW’s latest of these attempts to make us see celebutantes as human beings worthy of our empathy. And I’ll admit, I was glad to see that Lucy Hale apparently survived the ill-fated Fox American Idol spin-off, American Juniors. The then fourteen year-old brunette, who was named to the show’s prize group for her (hopefully uncomprehending yet scarily suggestive) performance of Blondie’s “Call Me,” was the only member of the resulting group that anyone actually thought could sing. If Fox wasn’t going to deliver on their promise to make her a recording star (which they didn’t), they could at least not suck every last bit of life out of her, like they usually do to their washed up reality show contestants. Way to show uncharacteristic restraint, Fox!

Privileged follows the Gossip Girl template with minimal variation: Prada clad, platinum VISA toting trust-fund twins Rose (the aforementioned Lucy Hale), nice but clueless and spineless, and Sage (Ashley Newbrough), ill-tempered and manipulative, are simply a related version of Serena and Blair. Well-educated, well-meaning, and unwell-financed tutor Megan (Joanna Garcia), a Yale graduate who gets fired from her job as a tabloid journalist (ouch!) and is forced to take a position tutoring the twins in the hometown she fled years before, is a female, older version of Dan.

Like Gossip Girl, Privileged also takes its plot inspirations from teen health textbooks. This week’s episode, “All about Friends and Family,” aired on Tuesday, September 3, tackled pre-marital sex. Megan discovers a porn DVD in the collection the girls ordered in an attempt to avoid their reading list for English. Rose, not embarrassed in the least, says that she intends to use it to “brush up” on her “technique,” because she’s afraid she won’t measure up to the very experienced ex-girlfriend of Max (Andrew J. West), the flavor of the month. Megan confiscates the DVD on the pretext of wanting to talk to her about making smart decisions about who you open your legs for at the ripe old age of sixteen, then learns that Rose gave it up to a different boy entirely four months earlier. There’s a cut to Megan’s usually blank Powerbook screen, which this time bears the bold-faced title “Pornography Happens to Women,” and for a dizzying second it looks like the Yalie might get a chance to say something of meaning. Not on this show! The phone rings, it’s her boyfriend, and the very real ethical grey area surrounding women and pornography never rears its complicating head again.

Instead of hearing more about Megan’s desire to write about meaningful things, we’re distracted by her lack of sexual confidence. Or maybe it’s her sexual confidence and everyone else’s lack of sexual confidence, since she seems to be the only character on the show comfortable with saying when she is ready. Of course, that winds up being by the end of the show, after Rose has a convenient revelation that she isn’t required to have sex with Max just because she’s no longer a virgin. Hey—I’m not unreasonable! That’s an important revelation for teen girls to have. Way to go, Rose!

I haven’t read the book on which this series is based, How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls, written by Zoey Dean. But I’m going to hold onto hope that screenwriter Rina Mimoun can find a way to give Megan, far and away the most interesting character, a real voice, making her more than a sexier version of the voice-over at the end of an after-school special. They don’t have to resolve each issue in an hour. And frankly, the show would be better if they didn’t.