Women play an enormous role in the new television season.

They're paralyzed by exotic spiders, after which they can put up no struggle as they're raped and murdered.

They're locked in the house for a couple of years by a husband who chains them in the basement in a dog collar.

They're impaled on the ceiling, where they spontaneously combust.

They have strange unnamed things done to them by aliens during a hurricane and wind up, in shock and naked, in a swamp.

They are abducted while test-driving a vintage sports car they saw for sale on the Internet, have their mouths and eyes covered with duct tape, and are tossed into cages at a remote shipyard, where their terror is monitored and recorded for about a week before they're murdered.

And the pregnant ones get pulled out of the shower at night by hideous wolflike creatures who rip the fetuses out of their wombs.

Yes, there's lots and lots of work -- albeit short gigs -- for actresses on new series this TV season.

And these great roles were created by -- two guesses -- men.

Trying to get them to discuss the Season of Die, Women, Die! can be difficult. Because the men who made the shows, and the suits who ordered them, while not timid about slicing and dicing up the female characters in these drama series, go shy all over when asked about the trend.

"Is it a bad thing to be a woman on this show?" one television critic asked the panel of creative minds behind WB's "Supernatural" at the summer TV Press Tour in Beverly Hills. (That's the show in which Mom goes in to check on little baby Sam and winds up stuck to the nursery ceiling oozing blood -- a spectacular feat she then trumps by bursting into flame. Fast-forward 20 years; Sam's live-in girlfriend suffers the same fate.)

"It's certainly dangerous, apparently," executive producer Eric Kripke replied. Then, remembering his prepping from the network before the Q&A session, he did a hasty 180 to get back on-message with "No, not at all, not at all.

"It's -- you know, we're going to be -- you know, every -- we just -- you know, this show to me is, there's kind of this mythic, you know, purity," continued Kripke, who is one of the writers on this series.

Jeff Davis had much the same reaction during a Q&A session for the show he created for CBS, "Criminal Minds." (That's the one in which the would-be used-car buyer winds up in a cage with her eyes and mouth duct-taped, awaiting execution.)

Specifically, the question Davis took was: "One of the things we've noticed this season in all the pilots we've seen is the level of violence, particularly against women, has been ratcheted up to some really gruesome levels. You have the woman in the cage before she's raped and murdered. ... Has that become necessary now, with so many shows on the air, that to become noticed, you've got to think up a crime that's so heinous that it's almost beyond imagination?"

"Actually, I don't think so," Davis responded, bravely ignoring the obvious.

"The most gruesome scene that we see [in the pilot episode] is this woman in the cage getting her fingernails clipped. ... When I wrote that scene, everybody told me I was sick. But it's just a woman getting her nails clipped."

Then the rest of the team jumped in and noted that the show's crimes are based on real ones.

"Hey, it's not us; it's reality" was one of the first lines of defense tossed out by show creators and network suits; critics already had heard it several times before "Criminal Minds" had its news conference.

"That's something we've been hearing," one weary critic responded. "It's just that ... we've seen about seven of [these types of shows] and to see them all in one season you have to wonder ... is this what it takes to get noticed?"

"There was actually a mandate from the network saying we want only shows that perpetrate violence against women," executive producer Mark Gordon quipped. "We're just trying to get on the air. We're doing the best we can."

"Well, I don't find it as funny as you do," the critic shot back.

Series star Mandy Patinkin, sensing the lack of love, jumped in:

"If this show isn't fair to women, it won't make me happy, either. I don't think anybody is being funny up here," said Patinkin, an accomplished actor and singer. "I hope a show like this heightens your awareness. ... The next time you're washing your dishes at a kitchen window and your 4-year-old is in the yard, before you go answer the phone you'll consider who might be able to get into that yard and take your child, et cetera. ... And yes, we're doing it through an example of an explosive, neon-sign kind of behavior of serial violence."

The old "We're doing it for the women" ploy.

Patinkin informed critics that the FBI is grateful for shows like "CSI." The bureau has told him it has "absolutely changed the criminal justice system, in terms of people's attitudes towards DNA. It has convicted a number of killers because the juries understand this system better."

Which is interesting because what we've heard is that prosecutors hate "CSI" because it has given juries unrealistic expectations about the quality, quantity and patness of evidence they'll be presented with in trials.

But Patinkin does bring up a good point. Almost all of these new crime dramas celebrating their debuts by doing heinous things to women are chasing "CSI," the Holy Grail of Broadcast.

What does "CSI" have that other shows lack? (Besides a preponderance of story lines about kinky killings of lovely young women, that is.)

Young men.

The entire television industry these days is obsessed with the pursuit of young male viewers. Young male viewers are the most elusive viewers. It's because they're so busy doing other things: playing Xbox, downloading music on their iPods, playing Internet poker. Advertisers pay top dollar for ad time in a show that attracts more males 18 to 34 years old because it's so hard for advertisers to reach them.

And did you know that last season's highest-rated scripted, live-action series among males ages 18 to 34 were "Desperate Housewives," an ABC prime-time soap about a bunch of forty-something hotties on Wisteria Lane, and "CSI"?

From which, we conclude, young men like their older women in teddies having sex with the teenagers who cut their grass (or, in the case of Teri Hatcher, naked and in the bushes), but they like their younger women -- well, dead.

Which explains why, on all of these new Die, Women, Die! series, the victims are pretty young women. Mostly white, too -- just like on the cable news networks.

"About 98 percent of this is about 'CSI' and its spinoffs, which also worked," notes Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel TV critic Tom Jicha, who was asking most of the Die, Women, Die! questions at the press tour.

At least once during a Q&A session, someone promised critics that in the course of the TV season, they'd show crimes perpetrated against men as well. But, as Jicha noted, "When they're looking to sell the show, they always put the women in chains."

Fox programming chief Peter Liguori was specifically asked about the opening episode of his new series "Killer Instinct." (That's the one in which a guy sends big hairy spiders under the door of a woman's home so they can bite and paralyze her, so he can then rape and kill her.)

"I think the goal should be to ... expand the envelope with taste; it should be to expand the envelope with creativity," Liguori began.

"When you look to something like that, you know -- again, we're gearing those crimes to almost be popcornish. Suffering from arachnophobia myself, yes, I cringed also when I saw it. But the intent there is actually to create creative, fun crimes as opposed to attempting for... "

"Would you like to reconsider that phrasing, talking about spiders and then getting raped and murdered?" the critic interrupted.

"Well, I was referring to the spider more than ... more than the aftermath of what occurs," Liguori said.

Aftermath?