Next week, a new season of the sitcom "Mom" will premiere on CBS and Allison Janney will proclaim to her daughter, Anna Faris: "I can't wait to bang your father. . . . All I can think of is driving to Chico and draining him like a dirty pool."
Yuck. "Mom" has its humorous moments, but this is one "family" sitcom you'd never watch with your family. And it's hardly alone. The premiere of "The Millers" last year included an extended conversation about masturbating in the shower. Last week on "Black-ish," which has been billed as the next "Cosby Show," the mom suggested that the dad "ride the underground railroad" while she pointed emphatically at her private parts. I have a hard time imagining Clair Huxtable saying that to Cliff.
We have gotten used to a new level of vulgarity in our TV shows and movies. And that has in turn made us less concerned about the sex and violence we are letting our kids watch, at least according to a new study in the Journal of Pediatrics.
Researchers led by a scholar at the Annenberg Public Policy Center showed 1,000 parents with children between the ages of 6 and 17 a series of video clips that included explicit sex or violence and then asked them how old kids should be before they see such scenes. The more scenes the parents watched, the lower the age was that the parents suggested.
Bonnie (Allison Janney) and Christy (Anna Faris) in "Mom."Photo: CBS
So you have had a at least two generations of kids who have grown up with declining standards of what's appropriate. And they are now raising kids with almost no standards at all when it comes to media consumption.
The Family Hour, already endangered, is now well and truly dead.
If you want to know where to place the blame for this, you could do a lot worse than Normal Lear. In his new memoir, "Even This I Get to Experience," Lear, who produced sitcoms like "All in the Family," "Sanford and Son" and "Maude," recounts many of the battles he had with network executives over the content of the programs.
"One of our biggest [confrontations] occurred over a story concerning Mike's temporary inability to make love to Gloria. . . . CBS wanted no part of anything to do with impotence."
One of the higher-ups flew out to intervene. "You're doing a show, a family show on television, about he can't get it up?"
After winning this particular battle, Lear concludes smugly, "Loud and clear came the message" from mainline clergy, mental-health groups and family counseling services: "The subjects you are touching on are extremely helpful."
Indeed, Lear says that "we heard that sentiment more and more over time from organizations and institutions dealing with everything from rape to drugs, from parenthood to cancer, religion, science, etc."
By pushing back against the network scolds, Lear wasn't just fighting for artistic freedom. He was performing a public service.
The Family Hour, already endangered, is now well and truly dead.
But it turned out that the suits in corner offices weren't the only ones objecting to some of Lear's efforts to be cutting edge. When Lear proposed a script for "Good Times" that revolved around the family's teenage daughter being pressured to have sex, Esther Rolle, who played the mother, told Lear, "No point in even reading it. The last thing we want this family to deal with on our show is teenage sex. There's enough that's morally wrong on TV. Not on my show."
While Lear says he was plenty willing to listen to Rolle on the matter of what black people would and wouldn't say, he had little interest in her concerns about "the way their race should be represented on TV" and so Lear went ahead with the episode. The problem, he concluded, was that Rolle "was not sufficiently flexible to open up to another point of view."
It's been 30 years since "Good Times" was on the air, but Lear and his legacy live on. There are no limits to the "flexibility" of the actors, not to mention the producers and even the network executives today. And we're all the worse for it.
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