Entertainment Guide (October 13, 1999)

Primetime lives on edge with nudity, sex (October 13, 1999)

<<< "Action" lead Jay Mohr, who got steamy with Sandra Bullock in an episode on Fox, says there's a deliberate attempt to push the limits on TV so there's room for compromise.

"Action" lead Jay Mohr, who got steamy with Sandra Bullock in an episode on Fox, says there's a deliberate attempt to push the limits on TV so there's room for compromise.
By Gary Levin / USA TODAY

TV was once so pure you couldn't show a roll of toilet paper in a commercial. Today, critics say, TV often resembles a toilet.
Never mind protecting the kids from the suggestive banter on Friends. Prime time is saturated with sex, and more explicitly so than ever. A look at the new TV season has to leave even jaded viewers stunned at what they see.
A scene in Fox's upcoming Manchester Prep shows a teen lustily eyeing her stepbrother's manhood in the shower. A lovesick suitor serenades a woman on NBC's new Cold Feet with a rose protruding from his naked rear. And the word "penis" is nearly as ubiquitous as the laugh track this fall.
Has TV reached new lows? Or has a comparatively tame medium simply caught up with a new cultural permissiveness, in which kids routinely access Internet pornography and R-rated movies that offer far more risque material?
Network executives point to increasingly shockproof viewers, who for months drank their morning coffee while watching Today's Katie Couric discuss the president's penchant for cigars and oral sex.
HBO's graphic Sex and the City and The Sopranos are winning record ratings -- and there's hardly been a stir over such racy fare as Comedy Central's South Park and MTV's Undressed.
"Cable has scared ... broadcasters, and rightfully so," says Tom Fontana, who has produced Homicide: Life on the Street for NBC and the brutal prison drama Oz for HBO. He credits an anti-violence movement fueled by the Columbine High tragedy in Colorado for turning attention-getting tactics elsewhere. "Once you move away from violence, you always move toward sex," he says.
Viewers don't seem to mind the growing permissiveness: A USA TODAY poll finds they're far more troubled by violence on TV than by sex or profanity. Slightly more than half report being shocked by anything they've seen on the networks.
That's a long way from TV's early days, when strict network standards required married couples to sleep in twin beds. But taboos have gradually eroded, despite the occasional uproar. In the 1970s, All in the Family offered jokes about impotence and abortion. Still, most sex talk amounted to double entendres of the Three's Company variety, and the closest thing to bare flesh was the cleavage of Charlie's Angels.
In the early '80s, networks pushed limits again, as dramas such as Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere offered frank sex talk, brief nudity and scatological humor.
"Groundbreaking shows, the ones that took language and sex furthest, have always been the classy programs," the Peabody Award winners and the Emmy nominees, says Syracuse University TV scholar Robert Thompson, who cites Sex and the City as a recent example.
"You can always get away with more outrageous content if it's clever and smart," NBC Entertainment chief Garth Ancier says. But it's nearly impossible to avoid offending anybody, at least with shows aimed at adult viewers: "Will & Grace is probably at the top of some people's hit list just because it portrays a gay lead as normal."
So CBS delivers its older audience a tamer, winking view of sex, although many of its shows glorify violence, from Walker, Texas Ranger to Martial Law. ABC offers flashes of nudity, from NYPD Blue to the new Once and Again.
And Fox has a long tradition of crude humor, from Married ... With Children to Action, the new Hollywood satire that has become the poster child for TV's latest wave of "edgy" content. In one Action episode its lead character, a venal Hollywood producer, surreptitiously videotapes himself having sex with actress Sandra Bullock, then sells it on the Internet as "While You Were Sleeping ... On My Face."
Series lead Jay Mohr says there's a deliberate attempt to push the limits on TV so that there's room for compromise: "You say 15 swear words because you really want to get away with two." It's just that programers say "no" far less often.
It's all a matter of context, and while gratuitous naughty content is frowned upon, some shows are more equal than others. "The line often moves based on the hit status of a show," says producer Tom Werner (3rd Rock From the Sun and That '70s Show). "Ally McBeal gets away with stuff because it's a hit."