If I tell you that &ldquo;The League&rdquo; is a reprehensible show, I&rsquo;m not really telling you that much. The new improvised-comedy series airing at 9:30 tonight on FX wears its reprehensibility with pride. </p><p>After all, it&rsquo;s about five guys in a fantasy football league who spend all their free time thinking about (a) how they&rsquo;re going to score the best draft picks, (b) how they&rsquo;re going to steal the other guys&rsquo; draft picks and (c) how they&rsquo;re going to insult the other guys in ways that mention their testicles. </p><p>On that last point, I&rsquo;m not exaggerating. There are so many references to male anatomy in tonight&rsquo;s episode that I felt like going to a Russian spa afterward &mdash; just to cool down. References to male-on-male sex abound, as well as male-on-trophy sex (yes, you read correctly).</p><p>So, is &ldquo;The League&rdquo; good reprehensible or bad reprehensible? Is it almost charming in its displays of loutish, self-centered, Peter Pan behavior, like the show it follows on FX, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Always Sunny in Philadelphia&rdquo; ... or is it simply despicable, like &ldquo;Gossip Girl&rdquo;?</p><p>I would say the latter, with one caveat: At least &ldquo;Gossip Girl&rdquo; is funny.</p><p>The men of &ldquo;The League&rdquo; include Pete (Mark Duplass), Ruxin (Nick Kroll) and Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi), who are all supposedly distinct comedic characters, except they all seem exactly the same to me: juvenile insult machines who would spend all day talking trash if not for the occasional interventions of their women, who otherwise are peripheral to their lives and to &ldquo;The League.&rdquo;</p><p>The only two characters of any note are Andre (Paul Scheer), the ringer, who is so desperate for male camaraderie that he accepts an invite to join the league, even though he can&rsquo;t even keep track of which NFL players are retired, a joke that doesn&rsquo;t get old at all.</p><p>I don&rsquo;t doubt that there is an audience for all the towel-snapping humor and NFL references on &ldquo;The League&rdquo; (&ldquo;Larry Johnson! That&rsquo;s a <em>great</em> pick ... in &rsquo;05!&rdquo;). But is it an NFL-sized audience or an MLS-sized audience?</p><p>The other character of note is Taco (Jon Lajoie), a pothead who&rsquo;s either continuously baked or has fried his brain to a crisp. He&rsquo;s always forgetting who his friends are, which doesn&rsquo;t get old at all, and pens children&rsquo;s songs with inappropriate lyrics about how Mommy and Daddy brought them into the world. The show&rsquo;s press kit says that Taco is &ldquo;the only person other than Pete to win the (league) trophy and he probably doesn&rsquo;t even remember that he did. He was actually in Thailand that year.&rdquo;</p><p>It&rsquo;s always a bad sign when the press kit is more quotable than the show.</p><p><strong><span class="subhead">Ratings!</span></strong></p><p>An early-season check of the Nielsen ratings finds that the big four networks are doing an OK job of hanging onto the viewers who watched them last year. Only ABC (down 7 percent) is showing any slippage in viewership. But that doesn&rsquo;t mean they&rsquo;re all doing well. In fact, other than &ldquo;Sunday Night Football,&rdquo; NBC didn&rsquo;t have a show in Nielsen&rsquo;s top 20 last week.</p><p> CBS had 11, including a repeat of &ldquo;The Mentalist.&rdquo; CBS has a new show that is an out-of-the-box hit in &ldquo;NCIS: Los Angeles&rdquo; (No. 3 last week) and &ldquo;The Good Wife&rdquo; is doing fine (No. 14). </p><p> Fox has baseball and &ldquo;House,&rdquo; and in January it will have &ldquo;American Idol&rdquo; and &ldquo;24.&rdquo;