From the catty and vacant girls on shows like “America’s Next Top Model” and “Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll” to the sexed-up, lingerie-clad corpses on “C.S.I.”— women mostly get short shrift on TV. A new trend is making females even more one-dimensional. The names of the shows say it all.

Lifetime is getting ready to premiere “Army Wives,” a scripted drama about, you guessed it, women married to soldiers. The show follows in the footsteps of the BBC series “Footballers’ Wives,” which spawned an American version on ABC starring James Van Der Beek. And, although The CW left a little more to the imagination in the title of its series “The Game,” that too is based on the wives and girlfriends of football players.

Why does it continue to be so bankable to define women solely by their relationship to men?

On “The Game,” the main character (played by Tia Mowry) gives up going to Johns Hopkins Medical School to be closer to her boyfriend, a third-stringer for a fictional San Diego team. Rather than focusing on Melanie’s academic career and her conflicted feelings over missed opportunities, the show suggests her main worries are fending off girl-groupies and dealing with image consultants.

Certainly there’s nothing wrong with being someone’s wife or girlfriend. But by making such a big deal out of the word “wife”— whether in the show’s title or as a key part of the premise— these programs suggest that anything else these women may accomplish in their lives is less significant— or at least less entertaining to TV viewers everywhere, which is almost equally depressing. Betty Friedan is either spinning (again) in her grave or just happy there not to have a TV.