A Siren’s Call

If your kids are watching a whole lot of MTV, it’s not their exposure to anti-authoritarianism turned into a marketing tactic that you should worry about.

It’s not the deluge of material suggesting that teenage sex is a foregone conclusion (though some kids just may not be ready for bondage).

It’s their bad taste.

For those who haven’t checked it out in the past decade or so, MTV is very different than in its 1980s youth, back when I was watching all the time and racy fare was Madonna in lingerie on a Venetian gondola in the “Like a Virgin” video.

MTV has transformed itself from a kind of video jukebox into a programming service pandering to teens and their legion of base instincts. The channel is now defined more by shows like the stunt-moron showcase “Jackass,” the shockingly kinky (and even more shockingly tedious) soap opera “Undressed” and the upcoming dull bacchanalian throb of its annual (and nearly perpetual) spring break programming.

Promulgated by inept actors mouthing inane dialogue, the behavior on “Undressed,” in which high schoolers get intimate at first meeting, makes Madonna’s coquette act seem a relic of an era when people said “coquette.” And the girls (and many of the boys) featured in spring break shows act as if the height of vocational attainment is a job as an exotic dancer.

Only by a definition written under the influence of hyperactive hormones is fare like this good entertainment. It might give you a momentary jolt, as you peer in to try to see the body parts that are being scrambled out or reel backward when an “Undressed” character says, “The tear-away dress is a Chi Delt specialty--for easy access.” But strip bars deliver a tawdry jolt too, except that they check for IDs first.

As bad as all the cynical lewdness is the MTV hypocrisy. In its programming choices and pitches to advertisers, MTV is obviously focusing on its profound influence in the youth market. But when a confused kid in Connecticut gives himself severe burns imitating a human-barbecue stunt on “Jackass,” MTV says it isn’t to blame.

In a sense, it is right. Any rational viewer looking at “Jackass” recognizes what it is: a pack of in-the-flesh “Beavis & Butt-head” acolytes doing meatheaded and sometimes hilarious things just to get on TV. They are a circus freak show playing in a giant tent. But teens and preteens, MTV should know as well as anyone, are not always rational.

Since that incident, the channel has made its don’t-try-this-at-home “Jackass” warning more stern and less jokey, but there is no other evidence of a bout of self-examination or acceptance of the fact that with the rewards of marketing to teens come special responsibilities.

The MTV ethic, which has brought about in the last few years a reinvigoration of the channel’s flagging ratings, challenges the natural order of things. Teens are supposed to want to do bad, even self-destructive things. Adults are supposed to try to stop them, or at least put pillows in the room to minimize the damage. But throw in the marketing imperative, and suddenly the adults who roam MTV’s hall are looking for new ways to feed those self-destructive tendencies.

To make way for stuff like “Jackass,” the 20-year-old basic-cable channel has all but shelved what used to be its bread and butter. On the channel that changed the music business by requiring pictures to go along with a song’s words and notes, you have to work to find a music video.

Videos are on in the early morning, but I doubt MTV is being watched then even by high schoolers on a snow day whose parents are out of town. Videos are also on a little bit in the afternoon, on the hit show “Total Request Live,” but there they are subject to a kind of tyranny of the preteen majority.

“Total Request Live” is one of the primary ways Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and other junior lounge acts, voted for in droves by kids who ought to be toiling at homework or playing violent video games or doing something else more constructive, came to dominate modern popular music. A lot of those songs, by the way, are celebrations of subtlety from the “do me baby one more time” school of courtship: more promotion of the copulate-first, think-later sexual ethic.

But even “TRL,” as it is called, doesn’t dare show a straight music video. When they play, they are larded up with fan comments, screen crawls and other distractions. In MTV’s world, even a three-minute pop song featuring viewers’ heroes in seductive poses requires too much attention span.

Whether this is a case of MTV not having faith in its audience or the audience having demonstrated that faith is unjustified is unclear. Either way, it’s scary.

Instead of music videos, MTV loads its schedule during the prime-time hours with series and specials, some 50 of them, according to a listing at mtv.com, although that listing is not exactly up to date. The randy sex-advice call-in show “Loveline,” still listed on the site, has been out of production for about two years, says a spokeswoman.

A few of the programs are very good, like the new “The Andy Dick Show,” in which the loose-brained comic brutally satirizes all the rest of MTV. He portrays the behind-the-scenes sexual realism coach for “Undressed” in one skit, instructing the actors on how to make their horizontal entanglements and pelvic gyrations look authentic; in another, he’s “Daphne Aguilera,” teen pop queen Christina’s “cousin,” who explains the concept for her new video (paraphrasing): “In this one, I’m really hot and everybody wants to have sex with me.”

“Daria” is a sometimes precious but mostly smart cartoon about teens. It focuses on girls who, like Beavis and Butt-head, don’t fit in at high school but have a lot more going for them in the cranial region--the kind of kids who would see through MTV by the end of the first day. The pioneering reality series “The Real World” and “Road Rules,” although long in the tooth, at least suggest a richness of human behavior and interaction. And there is an attempt at MTV, through the news and documentary department, to examine and be responsible about a number of the sex-and-drugs issues that MTV’s series treat so blithely.

But these are the exceptions. “TRL” is a temple in the cult of personality, teaching its impressionable viewers to become fawning subjects of prefab celebrities. There’s a World Wrestling Federation show, “WWF Heat,” that does little to promote the social contract.

For Spring Break, Mindless Debauchery

“Undressed,” in its fourth season of popularity, offers a constantly changing crop of high school, college and post-college stories, all focused on sex. Although it plays like it, this is not satire; it’s satyre.

Executive-produced by filmmaker Roland Joffe, “Undressed” makes daytime network soaps seem like Shakespeare. The actors work harder at looking good in their Victoria’s Secret-inspired wardrobes than they do at, uh, talking good. And the stories are not just single-minded in their focus on things carnal, but no-brained in their reliance on improbable behavior and dumb coincidence. MTV’s kid viewers, apparently, eat it up, this world of sexual possibility made to seem attainable through characters with little more personal appeal than the average push broom.

The channel’s spring break programming, meanwhile, which started a new cycle Friday, requires college students taking part to actually check their brains at the entrance to the MTV staging area. It’s true. There’s a big jar of brains there and sometimes, when the kids go to reclaim them after all the wet T-shirt showdowns and boy-girl outfit-change contests are over, they get the wrong ones.

The Web site may try to justify it all with a Princeton professor opining that spring break is essentially an update of old fertility rituals, but viewers know mindless debauchery exploited for commercial gain when they see it. There’s no mention that in real fertility rituals, there were elders around.