A Female Crime Wave Sweeps Over Networks : Television: Eight movies due in coming weeks focus on women accused of murder and other felonies. The films, targeted at females, overturn traditional concepts.

First came the puffballs: women who inspired eternal love in a matter of minutes because of their beauty, sweet dispositions and daffy giggles.

Then followed the victims: women who were captured by burly men, only to be freed by other burly men; women who were chased by madmen, only to be saved by sane men.

Now, meet women as potential criminals.

Starting this week and continuing through the November ratings sweeps period, ABC, NBC and CBS have scheduled eight TV movies involving women who are accused--sometimes wrongly--of committing serious crimes. Six of the protagonists are accused of murder, one of dealing drugs and another of kidnaping.

ABC’s “Wife, Mother, Murderer,” for example, which will air Nov. 10, stars Judith Light as a woman who poisons her husband and tries to kill her teen-age daughter. “Deadly Medicine,” which will air Nov. 11 on NBC, tells the story of a pediatrician (Veronica Hamel) accused of a series of murders actually committed by her nurse (Susan Ruttan).

Tonight at 9 p.m., CBS will broadcast “Locked Up: A Mother’s Rage,” which stars Cheryl Ladd as a mother imprisoned for selling cocaine.

Network executives say the reason for programming such films is simple: Most TV movies are aimed at women, and viewers were getting tired of the old woman-as-victim routine.

But others believe the draw for these programs is more complex. Author Susan Faludi, whose book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” looks at media images of women, said that some of the films show the frustration women feel at a society that tries to hem them in as wives and mothers. These women lash out as criminals--often killers--and the audience follows along.

Other films that show women accused of crimes they didn’t commit, Faludi and others said, carry a corollary message: It’s dangerous to be an independent woman. Those movies, feminist critics say, play on societal fears that women who reject traditional roles will have terrible things happen to them: They will be arrested, they will go crazy, they will murder men.

“The appeal of these pictures is that, in society, the whole idea of a woman killer strikes at some kind of primal fear,” said Barbara Hiser, executive producer of “The Rape of Dr. Willis,” which will air on CBS Sunday. “Women are the keepers of positive emotion and nurturing, and to turn that on its head” is very powerful.

Faludi said that film images of women have gone in cycles. In the 1930s and ‘40s, many women were depicted as strong characters and happy, often single, career women. But with the return of troops from World War II to compete with women for jobs, and the encroachment of the conservative ‘50s, the messages started to change. Women, particularly on television, were seen as cute, harmless homemakers.

The current cycle was set in motion by the ‘70s depiction of women striking out on their own and finding fulfillment in the workplace.

“In the early and mid-’80s, there were all these baby boom depictions of women freely returning to the home,” Faludi said. “Now, as the backlash has picked up steam, we’re seeing a lot of violent, angry clashes between men and women.”

According to Hiser, who exempts her film from the category of those urging women to return to the hearth, there is “a really strong primal draw in seeing women grapple with issues of violence, particularly issues of violence against her and her family.”

“The Rape of Dr. Willis” tells the story of a physician (Jaclyn Smith) who is raped by a man who is later admitted as a patient in the emergency room where she works. After he dies on the operating table under her care, she is accused of his murder.

“This is one of those ‘everybody’s worst nightmare’ stories,” Hiser said. “What if you were a woman and were raped and that’s one of the worst things that could happen to you, except that you’re a doctor and one day in the emergency room you are forced to operate on the man who raped you?”

Steve White, who produced tonight’s “Locked Up: A Mother’s Rage,” said that such “nightmare” scenarios are common in television movies--regardless of whether they’re about women--because they allow viewers to grapple vicariously with a situation they will probably never be in.

In fact, according to John Matoian, vice president of motion pictures for television and miniseries at CBS, there are a number of logical, less-than-sociological reasons that many of the movies programmed for sweeps show women involved in or accused of crimes.

“Most of them have a very visceral emotional female hook to them because the audience is predominantly women,” he said. “We have been, at this network, slightly less successful with the predominantly male movie.”

Men, Matoian said, are believed to be watching sports programming on cable or other networks on the Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights that most networks run made-for-TV fare.

Combine an audience of mostly females with the very common TV theme of crime, and you have a crime story about women. Add to that a desire to stay away from the theme of woman-as-victim, and you have woman-as-perpetrator, Matoian said.

“The derivative woman-as-victim movie has been seen a thousand times, so it no longer seems particularly fresh or interesting,” Matoian said.

Ruth Slawson, senior vice president of movies and miniseries for NBC, said that while female crime stories are part of the mix, they do not make up the bulk of network movie programming.

And she said films like “She Says She’s Innocent,” which aired Monday night on NBC and centered on a 16-year-old girl being accused of murder, focus more on the relationships in the protagonist’s life than on the crime itself.

“I think films that have female protagonists, whatever the situation, appeal to women,” Slawson said. “You have films where females are heroines or females are victims or whatever.”

Another element to stories about women and crime is the forced separation from children that occurs when mothers are incarcerated. Both “Locked Up: A Mother’s Rage” and ABC’s two-part “False Arrest,” which stars Donna Mills and begins Sunday, show the anguish of women separated from their children when they are arrested.

“Whatever these women have done, as long as it’s not child abuse, taking them away is very damaging to their children,” said “Locked Up” executive producer White. “In our story, it didn’t matter whether she was guilty or innocent. We wanted to (show) what happened to her and her family.”

White said that the purpose of his film is to further the cause of women who have committed nonviolent crimes and yet are separated from their children.

But Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, said that stories such as these strike a chord in large part because they play on a woman’s fear that her children might be taken from her or harmed.

And that, she said, lends credence to the idea that there is an unspoken message in some films that tell women to play by the rules--or else.