Ripped from the headlines of GQ

The WB sitcom “Modern Men” begins as a freelance article pitch toward some thesis about gender politics. “Women make the same money as men, we’re as well-educated, and with sperm banks we don’t even need you to have kids anymore.”

It’s what Molly (Marla Sokoloff) tells her brother Tim (Josh Braaten) when he comes to her for relationship advice. Tim, “almost 30” and twitchy about his dating history, does the math. As he tells his mates: “We can’t live this way anymore. You wanna be sitting in my apartment in 10 years, still single and having the same conversation?”

Insert beat and punch line here. Deep into a television year that has already seen its share of “Sex and the City”-influenced dating comedies comes one that does a little riff on stereotypes: It’s about guys desperate to be desperate about settling down in a world gone mad, where the ladies want sex but don’t need their sperm, look at them cross-eyed about cuddling and would just as soon forgo the pre-coital sharing of dinner conversation.

As the success of “Wedding Crashers” and “Failure to Launch” suggests, audiences continue to gobble up little Mars-Venus romantic comedy parables that begin from the premise that guys are horrible managers of their own love lives (sex, yes, but no meaning) and have to be beaten, tricked and lassoed into healthy commitment.

“Modern Men,” which premieres at 9:30 tonight, treats the journey as an exercise in self-flagellation. In the pilot, Tim, who’s just been dumped by a girlfriend who wants “more,” seeks the aid of a cupid-like life coach named Victoria Stangel (Jane Seymour).

And here is your show. It’s a plot device that feels culled from a first-person article in GQ and instantly sends “Modern Men” from believable in a mildly amusing way to not-as-believable in a mildly amusing way, particularly when Tim drags his two friends into therapy, Kyle (Max Greenfield) and Doug (Eric Lively).

Tim, Kyle and Doug line up roughly like Carrie Bradshaw and her gal pals, with Kyle as the oversexed one; Doug as the divorced, slightly ditzy one; and Tim as the embodiment of the yin and yang of it all (although to be clear we never see him typing). Instead he works at the bar-restaurant owned by his father, former football player “Tug” Clarke. It’s a role bequeathed to George Wendt of “Cheers” in the way that somebody has a standing reservation at the Palm.

But don’t blame Norm; the problem with “Modern Men” is that the scenes between the guys and the life coach don’t play. Having asked us to buy into the idea of this group therapy, the writers seem as restless being there as the characters do, and too many scenes settle for jokes, pop psych primers and quick, electric-guitar riff skedaddles.

Seymour, meanwhile, plays her role at a porcelain remove. This is kind of her thing (she fared much better as a sex-starved wife in “Wedding Crashers”), but here it rather stalls the proceedings. In the original pilot, the WB had the always-game Wendie Malick (“Just Shoot Me”) as the life coach but then lost her when ABC picked up more episodes of its own man-goes-on-dates laugher, “Jake in Progress.” That show, along with its companion piece “Emily’s Reasons Why Not,” was yanked from the air after one week.

It is on such delicate conference-call agreements that a TV show’s fate is perched. And so “Modern Men,” which is clever at times, is just as easily not. And with the WB and UPN joining as one next season, the show doesn’t have much time to convince anyone it’s worthy of wearing the CW mantle on its chest. These days, there’s commitment phobia everywhere you look.

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‘Modern Men’

Where: The WB

When: 9:30 to 10 tonight

Ratings: TV-14 DS (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with advisories for suggestive dialogue and sex)