When will they ever learn? Over the next few weeks, beginning with this Thursday's debut of NBC's amusing but ordinary "Four Kings,"the broadcast networks will renew their never-ending quest for a new sitcom to match the mega-success of "Friends." But in doing so they demonstrate their continued inability to deconstruct the basic truth that made "Friends" (and most other successful sitcoms of the last half-century) a hit: the presence of appealing, funny women, and the bumbling, inept men who love them. Instead,21st-century sitcoms keep failing - due to the continued domination of Hollywood by male comedy writers who believe there is nothing quite so funny in life as their penises.

The appeal of "Friends" derived, at least in the show's years at the pinnacle of the Zeitgeist, from its sexy and sensitive sextet - three smart, funny women and two soft, insecure men. Joey was its single sop to television's standard over-sexed, heterosexual male; Chandler didn't even like watching sports on the tube, and Ross was a science geek into commitment and children. At its core, "Friends" was a show aimed at the audience that comprises any truly successful show on television: women. Men only began tagging along later, amused enough by the jokes to tolerate the show's essentially feminist attitude. (The show benefited from the perspective of its creators, a gay man partnered with a married woman.) Viewers howled at episodes like the one in which Joey gave Chandler a friendship bracelet - a situation that would humiliate most men in real life, but made for unforgettable comedy.

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