Parents' Group Warns Against 4 Fox Shows

[bossradio93]

Parents' Group Warns Against 4 Fox Shows

59 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Four Fox network programs, led by the comedies "The War at Home," "The Family Guy" and "American Dad," topped a parents group's annual listing of the worst prime-time shows for family viewing.

The Parents Television Council rated two aspirational reality shows, ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and NBC's new "Three Wishes," as the best programs for family viewing.

The group's president, L. Brent Bozell, said he was alarmed that the three Fox Sunday night comedies are being marketed as family friendly.

"Families should not be deceived," he said. "The top three worst shows all contain crude and raunchy dialogue with sex-themed jokes and foul language. Even worse is the fact that Hollywood is peddling its filth to families with cartoons."

A Fox spokesman said the network never comments on reports by the Parents Television Council.

But TV Watch, a lobbying organization started by the networks to oppose governmental regulation of television, objected to the list.

"It is far more constructive to encourage parents to decide what their children watch on TV by using ratings or screening shows than to hurl insults at shows enjoyed by millions of Americans," TV Watch spokeswoman Kathy Roeder said.

The Fox drama "The O.C." was fourth on the PTC's list of worst prime-time shows for families. Add in "That '70s Show" and "Arrested Development," and the network that tries to be hip for young viewers makes up 60 percent of the list.

Television's two most popular programs — CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and ABC's "Desperate Housewives — are also cited as bad family viewing. So were "Two and a Half Men" and "Cold Case" on CBS.

The group said it makes its determinations based on the amount of bad language and sexual and violent content, giving more weight to shows that appear earlier in the evening when children are likely to be awake, said Melissa Caldwell, its research director.

Fox's "American Idol," which returns in January, made the group's list of best family viewing experiences. Two new shows, CBS' "The Ghost Whisperer" and UPN's "Everybody Hates Chris," also made it.

Bozell said the group couldn't even come up with 10 prime-time shows it would recommend for family viewing. Its list stops at nine.

Yahoo! News/AP-October 19, 2005

[Joe F]

I'll have to give this show a try, then. Anything that bothers these idiots has to have some redeeming values.

[staypuftman2004]

All the show they don't like i'm going to watch

[RaisedOnSitcoms]

ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and NBC's new "Three Wishes,"?!?!?!?!?!



Why is it that the "moral majority" always has such bad taste?

[Lurker]

People should worry about raising thier own family. Stop trying to tell people how to raise thiers.

If they don't like a show, they can tell thier kid to read a book.

Oh, wait... They probably burned all of them.



Although I have to agree that nobody should watch this particular show.... It only encourages them to make more like it.

[Corizzle]

Who cares?

It's not like parents didn't watch bad shows when they were kids.

[Dale Key]

That is retarted to put Arrested Development on that list, it's by no means inappropriate, 7th Heaven is raunchier.

[Ojuice5001]

These "parents" groups don't come across as having anything to offer beyond mere moralistic preaching. But the bigger problem with them is that they take a shallow approach to judging what the show is about. They just count how many references to off-color topics appear in each episode, instead of looking at how these topics are actually treated, and the history of television in general.

For instance, take a show like Married with Children. Married with Children was dedicated to portraying characters who basically never make the right choice, and always suffer from it. Al, Peggy, Bud, and Kelly never show any signs of giving up their lazy, dissipated habits, and they never meet with any kind of success in life. That show really did have a bleakly pessimistic message.

Basically, the trend was that the traditional sitcom portraying a happy nuclear family had begun to seem unrealistic. In this age of no-fault divorces, you can't blame America for not being able to take that vision seriously. That's why the most popular sitcoms in the nineties were the "singles" sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends, which the public doesn't expect to uphold traditional morality.

But people still believe in holding together a stable family, no matter how difficult a goal it appears. So in this decade, a new kind of family sitcom began to take root. For instance, Malcolm in the Middle shows that if Lois works as hard as she can, she can still uphold a traditional ideal of disciplined parenting. (And she knows that this task is sometimes a thankless one.) And what's the point of shows Grounded for Life and The War at Home? The parents on those shows are very imperfect, but they always act very embarassed about their shortcomings, and we sympathize with their efforts to make it through life in a confusing world.

See, at one time people were shocked at movies that portrayed adultery, even though these movies took a clear stance that adultery is a bad idea. Because the cultural conservatives were up in arms about the fact that adultery was shown in movies, even within a moral framework, no one was paying attention to the question of whether there was a moral framework. And so we got to where we are today.

But for every revolution, there's a counterrevolution. And Yahweh is the master at making it happen. The normal state of society is that people fail to follow a virtuous way of life, but they feel guilty about said failure. And it's also normal to have art that reflects this.

This show, that the PTC looks down on, recently had an episode that was sponsored by some anti-teen-pregnancy group. Goes to show that humans and gods have an ambivalent attitude toward life that someone will miss if they just spend their time making lists of TV shows that offend them.

[lockdown06]

Originally Posted by Lurker

People should worry about raising thier own family. Stop trying to tell people how to raise thiers.

If they don't like a show, they can tell thier kid to read a book.

This is what is wrong with the world.......I was watching The Simpson and Married With Children growing up and I aint killed or raped anyone....

[comedyfreak]

Well, I was a little uncomfortable watching the episode where they discovered that the son was pleasuring himself and wore it out. LOL I'll have to watch another episode to see if I like this one.

[staypuftman2004]

still watching