TV Execs, Doing Lunch, Prefer Nielsen Ratings Over New Type

In the land where the season is called “pilot” instead of “winter,” the lunch crowd had a chip on its shoulder.

A “V-chip.”

Why, entertainment-industry types wanted to know, does the government think it can better monitor content beamed into homes than Mom and Dad?

And furthermore, they asked, why does the public demand that it try?

“This is just another excuse for parents not to spend time with their kids,” said Robert Taylor, a distribution executive at Universal Pictures. Taylor was sharing a table Friday at an Italian trattoria in Studio City, home to a cluster of production companies and sound stages.

“Parents don’t need a chip if they exercise ordinary guidance.”

In fact, added an NBC Entertainment executive who asked not to be named, a rating system probably won’t help the families that politicians seem to believe need it most.

“The parents whom ratings are aimed at won’t use them anyway,” she said after having lunch on busy, sunny Riverside Drive in Burbank. “If they’re not watching what their children see now, will they really take time to look at the ratings and block out programming?”

The occasion for this soul-searching was a media event in Washington this week, during which television and cable industry titans told President Clinton that they would voluntarily create a rating system to govern programming by year’s end.

Although the details are unclear, the ratings would probably be linked to a computer chip embedded in a new type of TV set that would enable parents to block shows deemed to contain too much sex or violence.

The buzz among the folks who create those shows suggests that mainstream, prime-time TV dramas do sometimes show too much mayhem. But few find fault with the often enigmatic references to sex that have Congress and industry executives blushing.

“I hate to see murder as entertainment,” said Richard Eustis, a sitcom writer and producer, sipping red wine. “But sexuality written with wit can be very entertaining. I’m much more concerned with getting kids off the couch to read a book than I am about the danger of exposing them to love.”

Indeed, several writers fretted that ratings would lump sex and violence together too broadly in a numerical rating system--and insisted that the best comedies deal with sex in ways that are more helpful than harmful.

Matt Goldman, creator and executive producer of the new CBS sitcom “Louie,” said shows get into trouble only when they stray from their characters’ normal story range to knock off a gratuitous punch line.

“You cross the line when, let’s say, you have an actress in spandex and artificial implants walk by two male characters for no good reason, and they make an off-color joke about her,” he said.

An example of legitimate sexual content, he said, appeared in a “Louie” episode two weeks ago in which a neurotic cop who is separated from his wife has an erotic dream about an attractive woman who lives with a friend. Just when he’s telling his buddy that he’s putting the woman out of his mind, she enters the room in a low-cut dress en route to an interview for a job as a restaurant hostess, and he’s thrown into an amusing fluster.

“Some guys in the audience went, ‘Whooo!’--and that embarrassed me,” said Goldman, who lunched in haste at the Walt Disney Studios commissary on Friday. “Sex wasn’t why we did that scene. We were doing it to torment a character. He was torn in two directions, and we get entertainment out of that.”

Now working as a consultant for the show “Ellen” at Touchstone Television, Goldman said colleagues haven’t much discussed the potential creative impediments of a rating system because they’re already accustomed to being inhibited by network executives’ perceptions of what is appropriate for each half-hour of the night.

“The marketplace is so big that there seems to be a time and place for anything you want to create,” Goldman said, speaking of the explosion in the number of cable channels, the Internet and direct-to-video movies.

“If I wanted to do shows with naked people running around, I just wouldn’t pitch it to ABC.”

Likewise puzzled but unfazed about the fuss in Washington were some of the people who pay the bills for all that entertainment: advertisers.

One ad exec said her firm already hires a company to screen and rate every show on which it might place commercials.

“They tell us what the episode is about and ask whether we want to air on it,” said the woman waiting to be seated in Studio City, who declined to be named. “It’s up to each advertiser to make that decision. It’s not like we’re blindly placing ads.”

Ultimately, lunchers insisted that show business should not take the heat for the moral decay of Western civilization--and that new standards might increase bureaucracy and costs without improving families.

“What does it say about the state of parenthood that people think we need the government in our homes?” asked Bari Halle, an MCA production executive. “I’m a single parent and a full-time working mom, and I pay attention to what my kid is watching. If I say she can’t watch something, she won’t watch it.”

With that, she slipped a chic, black, DKNY leather backpack over her shoulder and glided into her gleaming, white Mercedes-Benz.

“But honestly, this is the first time I’ve talked about this,” she said.

“We’ve been way too busy. Pilot season.”