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Wednesday, February 16, 2005Ankle-biting pundit (linked at Instapundit) is right to question the idea of going further with the Indecency Act. This is, in fact, a case for "a pox on both their houses," with conservatives acting like a bare nipple will bring an end to Western Civilization and Hollywood liberals acting like limitations on a bared nipple will bring an end to art.More likely, it will bring an end to network television. Face it folks. What the nets need is not less "indecency" on television, but better indecency. Consider HBO's Sex in the City, now running in edited form on TBS. TBS isn't network television, but it's basic cable so they watch content carefully. The result is that an artful but sometimes raunchy show is running at inappropriate times for inappropriate audiences with, worst of all, inappropriate levels of indecency for the ebb and flow of the show. At an appropriate hour, I'd see no problem with running Sex in the City as is. Say, for example, 10 o'clock. And if your kids are watching television at ten and you're not their monitoring the content, please don't complain. You've already abdicated your parental authority. Right now, the nets have an awful problem. The decency freaks are hunting them with ever-increasing vigor while the rest of the population watches whatever it damn well pleases on cable. The result is that the nets are attempting to equally "compelling" programming but within the confines of the censors. The result is schlock. Better to loosen things up at nine and let the nets run free after ten. We'll see if the result is television as awful as we have today, only with more dirty words and naked people (which would still be an improvement), or if a little art slips in. I imagine the reality shows would be worse than ever (impossible). But maybe the numerous Law and Order type dramas could do even better if freed to think about what they're trying to convey instead of what the censors will let them convey. In any case, the last thing we need is to expand the Indecency Law and raise the fines. In an age of internet, blockbuster, tivo and video-on-demand, we don't need Congress protecting the children from the four lone signals they can fully control, we need parents getting off their butts to find out what their kids are up to and broadcasters left to compete on a fairer footing with cable so they can either prove their worth or give us conclusive evidence of why cable, not air, is the place to watch. (BTW: I know that Ms. Jackson's nipple made its awful appearance during the Superball, a most inappropriate place. But it's not as though the television stations fined knew it was going to happen or caused it to happen. The appropriate curative came into play without the least bit of government intervention when the vast viewership asked itself, collectively, "What the hell were they thinking?" and consigned Jackson and Timberlake to the freak category.) 
posted by gbarto at 12:29 PM |
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