• Accidentally on Purpose, 8:30-9 p.m. Monday, WFOR-CBS 4

• Cougar Town, 9:30-10 p.m. Wednesday, WPLG-ABC 10

Back in the Dark Ages of television, female TV characters had no sex lives. Man, do I wish we could go back to those days! The first bare trickle of female eroticism, Mary Tyler Moore's birth control pills, that eventually grew to a tidal wave of promiscuity with the Sex and the City tarts, has finally hit Al-Gore-global-warming-flood proportions, with entire shows built around celebrations of sluttiness.

There is something seriously wrong when Jenna Elfman and Courteney Cox, two of the outstanding television comediennes of their generation, can't get shows on the air without turning themselves into tawdry clichés out of a 1965 Playboy jokebook.

Back then, the characters they play in Accidentally on Purpose and Cougar Town would have been horny housewives, jumping the bones of mailmen and meter readers in between morning laundry and making the kids' lunches. These days, they're horny career women, prowling bars in search of young hunks for one-night stands. But the smuttiness and smallness -- the reduction of every human impulse to a cheap, hormonally charged punch line -- remain the same.

Accidentally on Purpose, if nothing else, should get an award for truth in packaging. It establishes its sleazy bottom line in literally the opening seconds, with Elfman tweaking her nipples as she prepares to go into action at an office party. A friend applauds the results, but warns Elfman that she will have to fly solo: ``I've already slept with everyone here.''

What follows is familiar to anybody who's seen Knocked Up (though in fact Accidentally on Purpose is based on a 2008 memoir by San Francisco writer Mary F. Pols). Elfman's character, a cusp-of-middle-age film critic reeling from the end of an affair with her boss, takes home a sculpted kid (Jon Foster, Life As We Know It) for a quickie -- only to find herself pregnant by a guy who lives in his van and brings over his friends to use her mother's cremation urn as a water-pipe.

Except for the occasional Opraesque complaint about men who won't commit -- whether they're intentionally ironic or merely the product of profoundly stupid screenwriting is impossible to tell -- virtually everything in Accidentally on Purpose is some kind of cheap sexual crack or double entendre. The essential sweetness Elfman showed in Dharma & Greg and the later, unfortunately little-watched Courting Alex curdles into mean self-parody as she scorns her new boy-toy as an intellectual and economic inferior even as she grovels before his bedroom skills.

If Accidentally on Purpose is dispiriting and unpleasant, Cougar Town (which doesn't debut until Wednesday, but I wanted to give you time to disconnect your TV set) is downright unwatchable, an agonizingly unfunny gutter-ball that will almost certainly be the first of the new season's shows to be canceled.

Cox plays the 40ish mother who, five months after her divorce, has concluded that all the men her age ``are either broken, gay or chasing younger girls.'' And, judging from Cox and her gal pals (Christa Miller, The Drew Carey Show, and Busy Philipps, ER), all the women her age are either critiquing other women's boob jobs, spying on neighbors for vicarious thrills, or flashing random teenagers in the street.

Cougar Town's obsessive sexual desperation is only amplified by its disturbing incestuous undertones. They include not just Cox's continual attempts at sexual banter with her teenage son (Dan Byrd, Aliens in America) and a scene when he catches her performing what in the quaint old days we called an unnatural act on a kid barely older than himself.

``Why don't you ever laugh at my jokes?'' wonders Cox after one particularly lewd crack. ``Because they make me sad,'' replies the boy. From the mouths of babes . . .

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