Finally, something for the guys.

Something beside football, that is.

Other than sports events, nearly all TV programming – sitcoms, dramas, made-for-TV movies, reality – is aimed primarily at the women in the audience. Not “Men of a Certain Age.” It’s a show of the guys, by the guys, for the guys. Speaking as a guy, it comes as a refreshing and welcome change. (“Men” airs its first episode at 10 p.m. Monday, Dec. 7, on TNT. In a moment we’ll check out another venture into the world of guys, “Sports Jobs,” with San Diego native Junior Seau.)

“Men” focuses on three of them in their late forties, each sensing mortality creeping up behind him, each dealing with the spectre in his own clumsy, reluctant, painful way, each keenly, increasingly aware it can’t be put off forever. You’ll see a few funny moments, but don’t let those or the presence of Ray Romano fool you. This is no comedy. It is, however, a rich, rewarding and demanding dramatic series, worth watching, worth thinking about. It will never attract the mass audience broadcast networks demand and require to survive, but on cable it could thrive on its own small scale.

For Romano, the standup comic most recently seen in “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Men” marks a radical departure. Then, he played a TV stereotype, the inept but lovable husband and dad. He played it as well as anyone ever has, but it was still a stereotype.

Not this time. Teamed as executive producer and pilot writer with Mike Royce (also of “Raymond”), Romano this time is playing Joe, whose gambling addiction has recently separated him from his wife and children. Joe lives in a hotel room, eats in diners, owns and runs a party supply shop, dreams of other women, tries in vain to quit his gambling habit.

Joe begins each day with a hike up a hill and back down again with his two best friends. Those are scenes fraught too obviously with symbolism, especially when the guys start remembering the Greek myth of Sisyphus, doomed to spend eternity pushing a rock up a hill, only to have it roll to the bottom again.

One of the three amigos is Owen, played by Andre Braugher (as fine an actor as ever, but sadly ballooned since his whippet-thin days in “Homicide: Life on the Street”), a salesman in his father’s Chevy dealership. Plagued with diabetes, hobbled with debt after remodeling his house, saddled with private school tuition for his kids, worn down by his father’s insults and condescension, Owen is a walking picture of stress and frustration. (Oddly, though Owen is selling Chevys, there’s nary a mention that the prolonged troubles of General Motors might have something to do with the dealership’s woes.)

The third member of the trio is Terry (Scott Bakula), at 49 still playing Peter Pan. A sometime actor and most-of-the-time temp office worker, Terry flirts with women decades younger than himself, pursues picaresque adventures for no particular reason, avoids auditions out of a fear of failure.

They boost each other when needed, pull each other back from the precipices they constantly find. Together, Joe, Owen and Terry are a diverting, entertaining bunch of guys, each racked with doubts, all three helping each other navigate a particularly rocky phase in their lives. It should be an interesting trip.

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Junior Seau turned 40 last January, but he seems to have slipped through those rocky patches with hardly a psychic scratch. After his years with the Chargers, a successful second career with the New England Patriots, and several years as a restaurateur, he’s turned with little apparent effort to reality TV.

“Sports Jobs” (10 p.m. Wednesdays on Versus, but at 11 p.m. Dec. 9), successfully casts Seau as an Everyman with an edge. He's a jock hanging out with jocks. For the camera, he spends a day as a bat boy for the Los Angeles Dodgers, installs toilets at the new Meadowlands Stadium, wrangles equipment for the Washington Capitals hockey team.

He’s working the grut jobs for a day, but he is, after all, Junior Seau, no slouch as a jock himself, a celebrity in the eyes of the baseball players whose uniforms he’s washing. Seau, accompanying the Dodgers' regular clubhouse crew, washed Matt Kemp’s Bentley, shopped for groceries for the players (oatmeal for Manny Ramirez, green tea for Joe Torres).

But unlike the regular crew guys, Junior gets to wear a uniform with his name and familiar No. 55 on the back, and play catch with the players. They even ask him for his autograph.

He hangs out, and works out. It’s Junior’s world – for a guy, the best of all possible worlds.