Posted on: Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Why can't the networks be honest with us for a change?
By Terry Lawson
Knight-Ridder News Service
Try not to worry: This column, coming a week after the earth-shaking event, a lifetime in today's news cycle, is really not about the offensive and bejeweled sight of Janet Jackson's unimpressive breast, or the corporate complicity of godless MTV and disingenuous CBS, and it doesn't decry or defend someone's definition of good taste or the erosion of morality.
No, this is about trying to figure out what we really want.
Here's one thing that should be apparent, with extremely little room for argument. The casual viewer of the Super Bowl — the same person, we can safely presume, who feels compelled to watch the ball drop on New Year's and stays up to see the best picture winner at the Academy Awards even when they haven't seen any of the nominated movies — does not want to see, or does not want his or her children to see, the breast of a pretty-much-over-the-hill pop star who made a calculated — and successful — stab at attention.
At the same time, we do not want to return to the "I Love Lucy" era of married people who have babies without sex. We like our sex-drenched "reality" shows, our profanity-laced "Law & Order," our frank talks with "Oprah," our occasional visits to "Taxicab Confessions" or "Real Sex" when the kids are tucked away.
There has been much wringing of hands about the unlikelihood of stuffing the genie back in the bottle; the Grammys were on an "enhanced tape delay," lest someone attempted to outdo Janet or Bono forgot where he was. Some network affiliates even balked at running this week's episode of "ER," which featured a glimpse of the breast of an elderly cancer patient.
Does this mean we want vigilance and overreaction? No. What we want is for network TV, meaning the people who are paid highly to run it and perform on it, to come clean. Not that I expect the truth out of Justin Timberlake: This guy has been so marketed he wouldn't know a sincere thought if it was on his cue cards. Nor do I expect the politicians and talk-show hosts whose camera time is usually equal to their outrage to admit the obvious, which is that they thrive on events like these, since it allows them to take a stand on a floating concept like common decency.
That means one thing to you and another to Christina Aguilera — not to mention your 13-year-old daughter, who, by the way, gets all the oral-sex jokes on "Friends."
No, it's as simple as the scrolls before some shows that inform you when you may be subjected to nudity, raw language and decomposing corpses. To that, we might add casual drug use, gratuitous sex, glamorization of violence, and all the other things network TV routinely serves up.
All we want is for them to be honest with us. Then maybe the millions of people who ran to their TiVos and the Internet to see what they had missed when they flipped over to the Lingerie Bowl can start being honest right back.
