Prime Time Continues Its Vulgar Drift : Television: Warning, this column contains coarse language that you can actually hear on network shows. (And it’s getting worse.)

By now, coarse language and leering suggestiveness are a given in network prime time, a nightly reminder of the cheapening impact that TV can have.

And, to some, the corrosive effect on public taste is every bit as much a danger to national standards as the TV violence that is currently the subject of major debate and concern.

The increasing debasement of prime time became inescapable in the ‘80s when low-rent producers and writers, given their head by networks fearful of losing viewers to cable and VCRs, used the new freedoms won by serious creators to pollute the airwaves with puerile crudity.

If “L.A. Law” helped open the door to adult themes and dialogue on TV, then “Married . . . With Children” showed how the hard-won freedoms could be translated into true lowest-common-denominator viewing.

Gratuitous verbal graffiti was everywhere to be found. One example that springs to mind came in 1990 when an innocuous ABC sitcom pilot, “Married People,” ended with a landlord telling her husband, “You’re a lying son of a bitch, but I love you.”

Each new season, vulgarity--as opposed to the legitimate strong language that acceptably grows out of valid situations--is more routinely employed. Words like bitch , bastard and the almost quaint hell raise hardly an eyebrow. It is not prudishness to suggest that they often have no purpose other than to grab attention or juice up unimaginative scripts.

The fall season will be no different, judging from a number of TV pilots now making the rounds. The word penis finds its way into NBC’s new series “The John Larroquette Show,” an interestingly textured sitcom--set during the graveyard shift of a St. Louis bus station--which does not need this particular verbal foreplay.

In CBS’ new sitcom “Family Album,” a male character, in bed with his wife, speaks of “toe-sucking love.” During the same episode, we hear the expression “piss me off,” which, while hardly being used for the first time on TV, indicates the growing commonness of the medium.

The republic will not fall because of such expressions. They are, admittedly, far more innocent than the language used in films, books, the theater, pop music--and pay TV. But the fact is that networks are still essentially family channels mostly viewed at home, and young children--a major part of the audience early in the evening--are not likely to be uplifted by such dialogue. “Family Album” is scheduled for Fridays at 8:30 p.m.

The most notorious pre-season series in terms of violence, sex and language is ABC’s new cop show from Steven Bochco, “NYPD Blue.” But, given the flood of unmotivated, off-color material employed elsewhere in prime time, “NYPD Blue,” by comparison, may strike some viewers as simply rough, yet fitting, in a tough police show at 10 p.m.

There is talk that the pilot may be changed a bit, and some affiliates are nervous about the show. Aside from a bit of nudity, a dollop of sex and some crushingly effective cop-bad guy violence, the focus is on an obscene gesture by an angry detective and dialogue that includes “You pissy little bitch.”

It is fair to consider just how far the interpretation has been stretched of the CBS network’s longtime program guidelines on language, to wit: “The language in a broadcast must be appropriate to a public medium and generally considered to be acceptable by a mass audience. Coarse or potentially offensive language is generally avoided. . . . Blasphemy and obscenity are not acceptable for broadcast.”

In the wake of last season’s most successful new series, CBS’ squeaky-clean Western drama “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” it may have dawned on the networks that there are TV viewers who still believe in such guidelines.

Nonetheless, the networks’ trend toward more blunt, racy and adult programming, even at the early prime-time hour of 8 p.m., is evident again in this fall’s schedule.

The most vivid case is NBC’s “Mad About You,” a situation comedy that in two episodes last season had its principal characters--a husband and wife--having sex on the kitchen table. Executive producer Danny Jacobson says he has no intention of changing the series despite its move from 9:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., when more children are watching.

Jacobson says that the half-hour show, which stars Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt, attempts to be “romantic. I don’t think it would be such a bad thing to see a couple with a normal monogamous relationship.”

Asked if he would do the kitchen table sequence in the new time period, he says: “Yes, if it made sense in the story, I absolutely would. We’re not going to shy away. We would not put sex in just to be sex, but if it seems to be part of the story, we would put it in.”

Jacobson says “my jaw dropped” when NBC assigned his show the 8 p.m. slot, but he adds that the network has told him to keep doing the kind of series he did last season.

Other 8 p.m. series this fall include Daniel J. Travanti’s new drama, “Missing Persons”; Faye Dunaway’s new romantic comedy, “It Had to Be You,” and Carroll O’Connor’s police show “In the Heat of the Night.” In addition, the 7 p.m. Sunday lineup will feature Robert Townsend’s free-swinging variety series on Fox and NBC’s sensation-minded reality show “I Witness Video.”

In the era of pay-cable, it is increasingly difficult to retain certain hours of prime time for children or even families. Networks, therefore, are spicing the language of their shows at all hours, often crudely. Tastelessness, in dialogue as well as in violence, has become the new gutter credo of prime time.

Throw in the slimy afternoon talk shows and the dumbing down of local news, and TV’s slide into tacky semi-literacy takes on an almost nightmarish tone--a creepy celebrity carnival heading ever downward and dragging along the innocent.

Bad company.