She is young, perennially confused, perpetually underemployed and adorably confounded by men. In her teens and early 20s, she is smart and spunky, but approaching 30 she is mysteriously stricken with an unnamed disease that renders her increasingly incompetent. Miraculously, her cuteness is left intact. A few sophisticated aliens may wonder, as many earthlings do, how these images have come to define femininity in the 1990s. Although the heroines of this season's Maggie Winters, Costello and Jesse are more working class than past seasons' Caroline, Susan, Veronica and Ally, it's not hard to imagine them all at a slumber party, scarfing down low-fat Doritos and competing for Most Charmingly Pathetic.
Women are simply adorable dopes.
Those shows weren't Shakespeare or Chekhov, but at least the characters knew who they were. The joke was rarely on them. It depends on whom you talk to. In the lightning-fast world of television development, everyone passes the buck. The writers blame advertisers, market research and, by inference, network executives who, they say, kowtow too easily.