Adjusting the Off-Color Contrast

Once upon a time, in the first TV season of the 1990s, a battle erupted over a CBS comedy named “Uncle Buck.” Based on an unassuming little movie about a slob who inherits a couple of kids, the show was thrust into the spotlight when television critics loudly objected to hearing a 6-year-old girl say “You suck!” to her brother in a program scheduled to air at 8 p.m.

Forces rallied to decry this breach of etiquette. Conservative columnist Cal Thomas vowed he would no longer watch network TV, saying it had “sunk to the sewer level.” Jeff Sagansky, then six months into his tenure as head of CBS Entertainment, stood firmly at the vanguard of creative freedom, stating, “Kids say that in homes all over America. We may not like it. . . . [But] I don’t think we can put on shows that have no relationship with reality.”

Flashing forward to the present day, a few things have changed and a few have not. Thomas is still a conservative. Sagansky has moved on to running Pax TV, a network that professes to air “family values” programming, “free of explicit sex, senseless violence and foul language.” And the debate about television content lives on, even if the expression that caused a furor in “Uncle Buck” sounds almost quaint by today’s broadcast standards.

For all the talk in recent months about violence on television and the effect that might be having on society, a quick survey of prime-time schedules for the new TV season that begins this week finds relatively few programs featuring substantial levels of “action,” as programmers like to euphemistically call it.

What has happened--in a manner that has surprised even some executives and producers who hardly consider themselves prudes--is an expansion of talk about sex and, perhaps most notably, the language that is used, often emanating from the mouths of babes and especially teenagers.

Consider a few random situations gleaned from this season’s new series. In “Manchester Prep,” a teenage girl talks of seducing a school administrator and speaks disparagingly of another girl because she is a virgin. Two more high school sophomores roll around together half-dressed in the WB’s “Popular.” And in CBS’ “Now and Again,” a man brought back from the dead in a new, improved body looks down wide-eyed and admires his “package.”

Then there’s Fox’s movie-industry spoof “Action,” this year’s poster child for what the networks like to call being “edgy” and what their critics tend to see as cultural Armageddon.

In this case, the show--starring Jay Mohr as a smarmy film producer--”pushes the envelope” (another favorite Hollywood term) by having the character use language normally associated with George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV” comedy routine and then bleeping it out. Beyond that, Thursday’s premiere included plenty of jokes about sex, drugs and, again, over-sized genitalia, here sported by a closeted gay studio executive who parades around nude--his crotch obscured only by the central character, who stares on awe-struck.

Tim O’Donnell, who produced “Uncle Buck” and more recently the UPN teen comedy “Clueless,” admits even he was a little taken aback as he began watching tapes of this season’s new prime-time offerings, such as UPN’s “Shasta McNasty,” about a young, sex-obsessed hip-hop group.

“I actually think the rudeness of some of these pilots was overshadowed by the diversity issue,” he says, referring to the discussion that took place throughout the summer regarding the dearth of minority characters in new prime-time programs. “If not, it would have been 1990 all over again.”

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Various factors have contributed to what are seen as sliding standards in what’s permissible. They include an inevitable shift in cultural mores as time goes by and a general relaxation in the media at large, where events such as President Clinton’s extramarital dalliances have found their way--often in surprising detail--from the tabloid press into the mainstream.

Pamela Munro, a professor of linguistics at UCLA, began publishing a collection of slang culled from her students a decade ago and has updated the survey every few years.

“I can absolutely assure you that UCLA students have become far more tolerant of bad language,” she says, adding that students cite television, rap music and stand-up comedy among their influences. Munro notes that the first class she polled, in 1988, found four-letter words objectionable, but in later classes, “The only words that they wanted to mark as offensive were words that were racially offensive.”

Mark Honig--executive director of the Parents Television Council, a group that has railed against the absence of a “family viewing hour” on network TV--cites a similar trend. After monitoring prime-time programs for the last several years, his group dropped such words as “butt,” “hell” and “damn” from the roster of those counted as foul language because they have become so common.

The networks have generally discovered such changes can occur without much of a hue and cry from the lion’s share of their viewers. In fact, the young-adult and teenage audience they are desperate to reach seems to have few qualms about the relaxed parameters and, if nothing else, is perceived as being less apt to object than many of the older people the networks, through their programming choices, have largely abandoned.

Michael Patrick King, who has written for CBS’ “Murphy Brown” and now serves as a writer-producer on the at-times raunchy HBO series “Sex and the City,” suggests the guidelines that existed were always false limits imposed by the concerns of advertisers, not the tastes of viewers.

“No one asked anybody” where the lines should be drawn, King says. “Nobody likes sleaze, but people like life. . . . People want to see stuff that’s arresting, and by arresting I mean shocking and truthful.”

Indeed, what people say in opinion surveys and what they actually watch often vary, if the low ratings for Pax TV and high-tone productions like “Masterpiece Theatre”--contrasted against wrestling, “Jerry Springer” and Monica Lewinsky interviews--are any indication.

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Yet other, more subtle influences have contributed to what many perceive as a loosening of broadcast content on the networks. Insiders say these include staff cutbacks, which in many instances have dramatically pared back the departments responsible for enforcing programming standards.

Moreover, network executives, many of them fearing for their own jobs, need to attract the most coveted writing talent--even if it means providing those A-list “show runners” with a longer creative leash, some suggest.

Programming may also feel racier because the language and sexual situations more frequently involve younger characters, driven in part by the popularity of teen-oriented shows such as “Dawson’s Creek” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which have given rise to a half-dozen spinoffs and imitators this season alone.

“I think the change in the sexual imagery in 8 o’clock shows is quite different than it was even two or three years ago,” says Ted Harbert, president of NBC Studios, who oversaw ABC Entertainment when the network broke creative ground by launching “NYPD Blue” in 1993.

“Now we have it taken for granted that in a lot of these teen dramas, sexuality is accepted and expected. . . . The behavior of the teenagers is the same as the adults. They talk about the same things.”

“Manchester Prep,” for example, is a “Dynasty”-style soap opera--only here, the scheming, status-hungry, sexually carnivorous predators are teenagers.

Often, however, the actors portraying these characters are not teenagers, which may make putting them in sexual situations easier for the audience and producers to swallow. In many of these shows the stars are actually in their 20s--such as Keri Russell and Sarah Michelle Gellar, the namesakes of “Felicity” and “Buffy,” respectively, both programs that featured episodes last season in which the title character lost her virginity.

Finally, writers--who have historically chafed against the creative shackles placed upon them--are pushing to paint with a wider palette, perhaps inspired in part by having seen what that has produced on such critically acclaimed, Emmy-nominated series as HBO’s “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City,” which operate under virtually no content restrictions because they air on a pay-TV channel.

“Producers and writers are saying, ‘I don’t want to hide any more just because I’m on network television,’ ” Harbert says.

Last spring, the writing staff on ABC’s popular sitcom “Dharma & Greg” started its regular Monday morning meeting each week with a detailed discussion of “The Sopranos” before facing the task of hammering out their own scripts, which aren’t free to use the nudity or more colorful four-, five- and 10-letter words regularly featured on that HBO drama.

“Dharma” co-creator Chuck Lorre calls the limitations governing prime-time network series “arbitrary, sometimes mind-numbingly so. They approach us as if we’re bad little children, looking to misbehave.”

Still, Lorre is quick to add that he understands the rules of the game--which, in the case of network television, is to deliver a large number of eyeballs to advertisers who, in turn, are seeking an environment conducive to selling their products.

“When Campbell’s Soup is comfortable spending hundreds of thousands of dollars [to buy time] on a show that has profanity and shocking violence, then the envelope that’s pushed against will disappear,” Lorre says. “Until then, this is the business we’ve chosen. Working under these constraints is like running with your feet tied together. You learn to hop.”

Lorre--who also wrote for “Roseanne” and created the hits “Cybill” and “Grace Under Fire”--adds one important disclaimer to that statement: “If you’re successful, the rules don’t apply. We did whatever we wanted on ‘Roseanne.’ ”

“Roseanne,” of course, also explored substantive issues, which may be one reason why the situations, at least in its better days, seldom felt forced or gratuitous. In similar fashion, the Norman Lear comedies of the 1970s, from “All in the Family” to “Maude,” delved into thorny areas such as abortion, religion and race relations--controversial topics from which networks have more recently shied away in their sitcoms, bowing in part to advertiser concerns.

So what’s left? In many instances, what Honig’s parents group characterizes as “cheap sexual humor” and words that were once forbidden, or at least seldom heard on network TV.

William Blinn, whose writing career has run the gamut from “Roots” to “Eight Is Enough,” maintains network interference with scripts has always tended to produce “a knee-jerk writer response: ‘Don’t tell me, don’t channel me, don’t walk into my office, don’t look over my shoulder.’ ”

Still, as he scans the TV landscape today Blinn sees an inordinate amount of humor that he doesn’t view as appropriate for an 8 p.m. time slot and language sometimes used merely to shock, which yields diminishing returns.

“It cheapens ‘son of a bitch’ to hear it all the time,” he says.

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Fox, for its part, has virtually acknowledged that this is a programming strategy, with officials boasting that the network is “more adventurous” than its broadcast counterparts.

Yet for Darren Star, not adventurous enough. The producer of such marquee Fox dramas as “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” says the desire to spread his wings by creating “Sex and the City” stemmed from a yen to do “something that was more reflective of the world as I saw it, which I don’t think network TV is.”

Having spent the past two years on his spicy pay-TV program, in fact, Star has concluded he would much rather switch than fight when it comes to dealing with broadcast standards.

“Whenever I hear anybody talk about breaking new ground on network television, I say, ‘Why bother? Why not go to HBO?’ ” Star notes, adding that his show is “not getting laughs from the shock effect of language. We get them from situations.”

King is also a convert to the latitude provided by HBO, which extends beyond content to form. The pay channel, for example, will let “Sex’s” upcoming season finale run more than 30 minutes because the program would have suffered had it been edited down further, something that almost never occurs in the world of network television.

That said, King admits that not having to struggle with euphemisms or be coy about terminology frees him to focus on more substantive matters. “It’s so great to be able to tell the story that wants to be told without trying to figure out how to say ‘balls’ without saying ‘balls,’ ” he says.

Time will indicate whether there is an invisible line the networks dare not cross, one that might produce a viewer backlash of more significance than the regular grumbling about the networks’ lack of taste.

O’Donnell, meanwhile, sees the brouhaha that surrounded “Uncle Buck” finally receding into the distance, suggesting to him that the ever-shifting rules governing what’s OK to say on television--like baseball records--are made to be broken.

“I thought ‘Uncle Buck’ was Roger Maris’ 61 home runs. It would last forever,” he says. “But then along came Mark McGwire and ‘Shasta McNasty.’ ”