Last Sunday, the people who make television decided to show us how far television has evolved.
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They did this during the broadcast of the Emmy Awards. This was supposed to be an historic moment, because the outfit that runs the Emmy Awards is 50 years old.
So, to give us a sense of their history, they presented a retrospective of how television shows have dealt with sex over the years. They had a lot of recent material because television shows today don’t deal with much else, except for the occasional murder.
As I remember, this film started with “Father Knows Best.” Betty Anderson, better known as Princess, told understanding dad Jim that she was leaving on a date, and Jim told her and the boy that they had to be home by 9:30. Princess said, “Daddy, I’m not a little girl anymore.” Jim looked chagrined.
This progressed to Marlo Thomas blushing at a mention of her sex life in a bit from “That Girl.” Then Bea Arthur of “Maude,” who caused a stir in 1972 when her character had an abortion. Then two young women from the show “Friends” played the children’s game “Rock, paper, scissors” to settle a dispute over which one of them would get to use the last condom left in their apartment.
I guess this was supposed to tell us that television has come of age, eschewing its 1950s naivete to deal frankly and forthrightly with society’s most vexing 1990s issues.
What it said, though, is that television has evolved from a brainless but sometimes funny and largely inoffensive medium to a brainless, degrading, often offensive medium that can’t be left alone in a room with children. It is incapable of being funny unless it is dealing with sex, which is the easiest laugh to get.
Shortly after the retrospective finished, ABC aired a commercial for the season premier of “Roseanne.” This consisted of the star storming around without a blouse, wearing a bra that probably would work in a pinch as a parachute.
Give me the vast wasteland.
It has been 35 years since Newton Minow tagged TV with that description. “You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons,” he said.
Sounds great. Bring it on. It wasn’t intellectually nourishing, but you didn’t have to protect your kids from it.
When my 9- and 11-year-old children watch television, it’s almost always Nickelodeon’s Nick at Night, where “I Love Lucy” reruns are the second highest rated show on cable TV. “I Love Lucy” isn’t going to steer them into careers in medicine. Neither will “Bewitched” or “I Dream of Jeannie,” which they also watch. But when I hear them laughing out loud, I know it’s not because Lucy won the last condom and Ethel’s out of luck.
I don’t expect television to educate them. Their parents and their teachers and the books they read will take care of that. I just expect television to give them a little break without an unexpected lesson in foreplay right after dinner, which is what they got courtesy of the Emmy Awards.
The day after the Emmys, the American Medical Association released guidelines for parents on how to handle TV. These guidelines said you shouldn’t put the TV in the most prominent place in your house, you shouldn’t put one in your kid’s room, you should be careful about letting kids watch shows just before bedtime, you shouldn’t use the TV as a babysitter. All good ideas. But that’s not just advice, that’s a warning that you have a predator in your house.
It’s too bad that politicians discovered that TV and movies are morally empty and intellectually vapid, because so many people become suspicious when they’re told anything by politicians. Dan Quayle had a point when he took on “Murphy Brown.” Bob Dole’s criticism of Hollywood violence hit home.
In both cases, though, their remarks were presented by my business in the context of political campaigns. They are Republicans, most of Hollywood backs Democrats, therefore this must have been a crass attempt by the Republicans to cash in on the cultural values debate. And maybe it was. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t right, nor that Republicans own the values debate.
You don’t have to inject politics here. What’s going on is simple. Television’s preoccupation with sex and violence reflects lazy screenwriting and an intrusion on parents and children.
I love Lucy. I really do.