Blazing with large intentions, Norman Lear's new series All That Glitters … is a firebird that never takes flight: It flutters, sputters, then falls. Like Eve Merriam's entertainment The Club and Lina Wertmuller's Swept Away, All That Glitters is a dramatic exercise in role-and-gender reversal. The women here are queen bees in a corporation known as Globatron and have no need of subscriptions to Savvy—they've already mastered the martial arts of careermanship. The men are little more than stingerless drones, but unlike drones they are forced into labor as secretaries, toga-clad waiters, househusbands….

Fifteen years ago, it might have been subversive to mock sexual stereotypes, for those sterotypes were firm in the public mind…. Since then such stereotypes have largely melted…. What is a shock is that the women of Glitters are so rapaciously Nixonian. Is this intended to mirror the male corporate world, or is it meant...