Upon further review of my DVR "recorded" list, I hereby offer my sincere apologies to every woman I've every chided for watching "Charmed," "Girlfriends" or "Sex and the City."

My main objection to those and other femme-centric TV series (offended-male bias duly acknowledged) was not to the generally iffy writing and acting, but to their unabashed pandering to female wish-fulfillment fantasies.

"Charmed" always seemed to overreach with thick, oozy gobs of romantic melodrama. "Girlfriends" proffered an estrogenized world in which men and women exist to talk (endlessly) about their relationships — a comedy for all the wrong reasons.

And "Sex and the City" gleefully eschewed character complexity and ambivalence for easy stereotypes and bumper-sticker philosophy.

Sadly, unrealized by me, my high horse has been standing in a deep pile of its own hypocrisy.

How else can I explain the digitized presence of all of those Tuesday night FX original dramas on my digital video recorder? "The Shield." "Rescue Me." "Nip/Tuck" ...

Any one of these shows is better conceived and scripted than any of the straw-women I jabbed above. But how can I be sure that's why I watch when each is specifically designed to appeal to my gender's own set of wish-fulfillment fantasies?

In "The Shield," Michael Chiklis and company enact weekly morality plays that pit masculine codes of honor and loyalty against gentile concerns of propriety and order. That, and the dudes kick a lot of butt. The series brightened briefly with a season-long appearance by Glenn Close as a strong but essentially feminine foil for Chiklis' Vic Mackey. Close was eventually replaced by Forrest Whitaker in a move that upped the machismo stakes.

"Rescue Me" operates along similar thematic lines — conflicted but essentially decent blue-collar guys who hold male friendship above all other bonds. Here, guys of modest looks and abilities are given weekly opportunities to exhibit extraordinary heroism or, alternately, to score with really good-looking women.

The women of the show are impressively diverse: clingy, neurotic, cold, whorish, vindictive or any combination thereof. The best of them, however, are a little jaded, a lot streetwise, and bound by honor and duty — in other words, just like the men of the show.

"Nip/Tuck" confines the friendship and loyalty themes to a pair of old college friends who practice together as plastic surgeons. Here, male wish-fulfillment comes in the form of wealthy, good-looking (but masculine) guys with kickin' cars and unfathomable opportunities for wild sex.

And I watch all this stuff. Well, most of it. I started to fast-forward through "Nip/Tuck" after the fourth Dylan Walsh butt shot of the season. It might be time to DiVoRce my DVR.

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@honoluluadvertiser.com.