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Ellen Gray: Rough fall for TV's female doctors

* EMILY OWENS, M.D. 9 p.m. Tuesday, CW 57. * UNDEREMPLOYED. 10 p.m. Tuesday, MTV. IT'S BEEN a tough fall for TV's women doctors.

* EMILY OWENS, M.D. 9 p.m. Tuesday, CW 57.

* UNDEREMPLOYED. 10 p.m. Tuesday, MTV.

IT'S BEEN a tough fall for TV's women doctors.

On ABC's "Grey's Anatomy," Seattle Grace has lost one, and another's now legless.

On Fox, "The Mob Doctor" (Jordana Spiro) spends her spare time removing screwdrivers and other foreign objects from felons, thanks to a deal made with the neighborhood devil. And Mindy Kalin's ob-gyn on "The Mindy Project" struggles to find a man.

They're both also fighting for viewers, though they have more than Dr. Zoe Hart (Rachel Bilson). Her CW show "Hart of Dixie" returned this season to a nearly empty waiting room.

That's not good news for "Emily Owens, M.D." She starts her hospital internship Tuesday with "Hart" as her lead-in.

Mamie Gummer, who is, yes, Meryl Streep's daughter and who also played a doctor in the short-lived ABC series "Off the Map," stars as Emily, who arrives at Denver Memorial Hospital, where her med-school crush (Justin Hartley) is also interning, to find that the mean girl who tortured her in high school (Aja Naomi King) is there, too.

And still mean.

I've long thought of "Grey's" as a show about a hospital run by junior high-school students, but at least they're not bullies.

Saddled with a voice-over that makes Meredith Grey sound like the epitome of stability and plotlines that might have been ripped from "90210," "Emily Owens" had me cringing from its opening scene all the way through its second episode.

It's not Gummer; it's the words coming out of her mouth (and her character's head). And it's not the rest of the cast. (Philadelphia's Michael Rady is particularly sweet as a resident who's an oasis of sanity in what's not supposed to be a mental hospital.)

I should cheer the CW for not making people in their 20s and 30s play teenagers. But if life after high school is just more of the same, what's the point?

Gummer's best TV gig to date is guest-starring on CBS' "The Good Wife" as a thorn in the side of Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies). Michael J. Fox, Martha Plimpton and Matthew Perry having done the same, so this might be one of the best temp jobs network TV has to offer.

She's too interesting an actress to be trapped in "adorkable." Maybe when this internship ends, someone will write something where she won't have to giggle to make herself heard.

'Underemployed'

The CW's not the only youth-oriented network looking to follow its audience into their 20s.

MTV's push into scripted programming continues Tuesday with the premiere of "Underemployed," a dramedy about a group of college friends in Chicago confronting life after graduation.

I'd root for "Underemployed" just to guarantee another hour a week unavailable to some future project involving Snooki's baby, but I'll probably keep watching because it's charming.

Craig Wright, a playwright whose TV credits include "Six Feet Under" and who created "Dirty Sexy Money," told critics this summer that the show was inspired by the experiences of his 23-year-old son and his friends, but it's clear those experiences have been put through a TV filter. This is a more polished (and less annoying) show than MTV's canceled millennials show, "I Just Want My Pants Back."

And compared with, say, HBO's "Girls," it's a less raunchy look at the world of unpaid internships, minimum-wage jobs and the other "opportunities" out there for college graduates whose student loans may be the size of their parents' first mortgages.

Sophia (Michelle Ang), an aspiring novelist and the group's chronicler, is more adorable than acerbic - something that can't exactly be said of Hannah, Lena Dunham's splendidly obnoxious alter-ego in "Girls" - but she's just as likely a candidate to be the voice of her generation.

Or, you know, a generation.

Her friends include Daphne (Sarah Habel), an aspiring ad exec; Miles (Diego Boneta), an aspiring model; Raviva (Inbar Lavi), an aspiring singer and Raviva's college love Lou (Jared Kusnitz), whose own aspirations get drastically reorganized when Raviva turns up at his door pregnant, a significant number of months after they'd had breakup sex.

The plotting of the pilot is a bit too pat at times, but two subsequent episodes bolster the argument that "Underemployed" deserves a shot at going full-time.