The nerve of these gals ! Young women on TV deal with everyone from the bad guys to the Big Guy himself They’ve come a long way, baby. It’s easy to forget how little younger actresses have been allowed to do on television for most of the medium’s history. Mostly they got to play adorable airheads and ditzes. If they had any power, it tended to be supernatural - and cute. A witch or a genie who could make life crazy for her husband or "master" with a blink or a wink.

Things changed. Along came Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, "Wonder Woman," "Charlie’s Angels" and vampire-bane Buffy Summers. But a handful of super-heroines over several decades notwithstanding, there have never been more empowered young female characters on TV than there are this fall. If you require proof beyond the sheer number of new prime-time series built around complicated young women who aren’t there to be laughed at, look no further than this Tuesday’s third-season premiere of Fox’s "24." Agent Jack Bauer’s daughter, Kim (Elisha Cuthbert), who spent the show’s first two years being literally or figuratively a babe in the woods, now has a responsible job at the same counterterrorist agency as her pop and takes guff from no man.

A new millennium ? No, just what advertising executive John Rash calls "a confluence of several dynamics," including the gradual change in gender roles and the way Americans perceive them, the rise of multiset TV households and expanded cable options that have siphoned off male viewers from the traditional broadcast networks.

"Network audiences have become predominantly female," said Rash, a senior vice president of Minneapolis’ Campbell-Mithun agency, whose specialty is analyzing programs and trends. "The average prime-time program is usually 60 percent to two-thirds female viewership. And the networks are programming to whom they perceive as the available audience.

"Sociologically, women, in a generation, have been encouraged and have experienced great advances in the workplace, [and] in traditional portrayals of femininity from ’Charlie’s Angels’ to Brandi Chastain and her famous goal that wins the World Cup. And television always has an element of fantasy. Many Americans of both genders’ fantasy is often to be more empowered."

What’s really interesting this fall is that the empowerment of young female characters mostly doesn’t involve sticking guns in their hands. Although the title character of ABC’s "Karen Sisco," a U.S. marshal, gives "Alias" superspy Sydney Bistrow competition in the "tough babe" department - in the season opener, Sisco shot her thieving boyfriend when he tried to sweet-talk her and walk away - most of this new breed are empowered by opportunity and responsibility, not artillery.

Amber Tamblyn, star of CBS’ new hit "Joan of Arcadia," loves the fact that her character is not the type who has "to, like, drop corny lines every time you kick someone’s butt. This is really a show that I hope is going to bring out some existential ideas for people and get them to sort of think beyond themselves."

Joan, a high school student, doesn’t fight crime or even face physical jeopardy regularly. What she does is see and hear God, who appears to her in assorted human shapes and encourages her to engage in small catalytic acts. Joan is discovering that she has the power to change lives - and that the power is something she had all along, if only she had recognized it.

In Fox’s "Tru Calling," which premieres Thursday, Eliza Dushku, who formerly slew vampires at Sarah Michelle Gellar’s side, is cast as a newly graduated premed student who discovers she has the fates of others in her hands. At the morgue where "Tru" Davies works nights, she hears cries for help from the recently deceased and, like Bill Murray’s character in "Groundhog Day," is forced to relive the previous day with new knowledge.

"I think it’s kind of an appealing premise," Dushku said. "Tru reliving days and possibly getting to save people. It’s kind of a small, concentrated, dramatic way to show situations that life puts us in where, like, our actions or failure to act make all the difference."

It’s a pressure as well as an empowerment, she said. "Being 22 years old, you already feel you’re kind of carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. How would someone act and react if suddenly they really were ?"

Showtime’s "Dead Like Me," which concluded its first season Sept. 26 and has been renewed for a second, and "Wonderfalls," due on Fox in January, are similarly quirky, metaphorical explorations of responsibility and purpose. In "Dead Like Me," listless college dropout Georgia Lass (Ellen Muth) dies in a freak accident and discovers that the hereafter, for her, is a stint of unspecified duration as a grim reaper. She is charged with collecting people’s souls just before they die. She also has to take responsibility for her own care and feeding, since she can no longer sponge off her family.

"Wonderfalls" revolves around a 20-something woman (Caroline Dhavernas) who has finished college but is so rudderless and indecisive that she’s sales-clerking in a Niagara Falls gift shop. Then one day, the toys and stuffed animals start talking to her, delivering cryptic instructions that require her - like Joan and Tru - to take action.

"I think at its core, the series is all about the journey to grow up and where ... do your influences come from," said co-executive producer Todd Holland. "Joseph Campbell was right. [For] each and every one of us, in our daily life, there are great quests and great opportunities that arise before us, and what we have to do is see them and answer the call or not."

Dawn Parouse, co-executive producer of "Tru Calling," calls characters like these "grounded" superheroes - or heroines, as the case may be. They have unique abilities but remain fallibly human. She attributes their seemingly sudden multiplication in part to the huge success of the "Spider-Man" theatrical film, which is also an inspiration of two of this season’s male action-fantasies, UPN’s "Jake 2.0" and the WB’s "Tarzan."

"For us, it was sort of doing a twist on the grounded superhero," Parouse said. "Even when you see the sort of ordinary person like [Spider-Man’s alter ego] Peter Parker, it’s still Peter, not Paula."

She acknowledged that "Tru’s" other inspiration is "Run Lola Run," a 1999 German film that found a young-adult audience in this country. The heroine kept repeating breathless attempts to save her boyfriend until she got it right.

"We were really inspired by the idea how, in ’Run Lola Run,’ how she dealt with the ’what if’ question," Parouse said. "If someone called you, would you respond ? Would you respond in a way that you forgo everything else in life ?"

Before we get too carried away with the seriousness of the questions these shows raise about young American women’s sense of purpose - and perhaps our nation’s as a whole - let’s remember that we are dealing with a medium that, as ad man Rash observed, "always has an element of fantasy." It’s also interested in empowerment only in so much as it attracts an audience for commercial messages.

The TV network leading this charge is Fox. And the president of its entertainment division, the mightily empowered Gail Berman, had a slightly less exalted explanation for her choice of shows focused on extraordinary, yet ordinary, young women.

"Because of ’American Idol’ and ’Joe Millionaire’ last year, we saw a return of women to our network," Berman said. "The same kinds of numbers of women we had in the days of ’90210’ and ’Melrose Place’ and ’Ally [McBeal].’ Those shows have been off the air for several years, and we had a need to return women to our air. We developed very much with that in mind - shows like ’The O.C.,’ shows like ’Wonderfalls’ and ’Still Life’ [also due midseason]. ’Tru Calling’ is another. We hope men will watch, too, but we wanted to appeal to women."