Tonight on TV Land "Taboo TV"

[Pavan]

Sorry I forgot to remind you guys about this earlier, hopefully you read this by 9pm e/p on Sunday Nov 17, that's when TV Land airs it tonight:

History of broken taboos blurs in TV Land special

11/17/02


TV Land's "Taboo TV," which premieres at 9 tonight, is a quick trip through more than 50 years of television history. And while certainly entertaining, it's a little too quick, tripping in its haste to cover so much territory.

Granted, the leap from "Ozzie and Harriet" to Ozzy Osbourne is vast, but the cable channel's "Inside TV Land" special hardly spans the distance in graceful fashion.

It awkwardly lurches from one groundbreaking TV moment to another.

There's NBC taking heat in 1968 for putting on "Julia," a situation comedy starring a black woman, Diahann Carroll, as a nurse whose husband was killed in Vietnam.

There's CBS taking heat in 1971 for putting on "All in the Family," a show packed with bigoted Archie Bunker's racial and ethnic slurs.

There's Fox taking heat in 1987 for the bawdy humor of "Married . . . With Children." There's ABC taking heat in 1993 for the raw language and content of "NYPD Blue."

And there's TV Land, trying to cram it into a mere hour. The predictable result is a special that's miles wide and less than an inch deep.


Simplistic conclusions

By taking the scattershot approach to TV's record of pushing past boundaries, this "Inside TV Land" special must rely on a series of simplistic conclusions, wrongheaded observations and cliched arguments. In other words, it cheats.

Behind each of these taboo-breaking moments is a series of challenging and complex questions. When does television cross the line? When should it cross the line? What are the benefits of pushing an envelope or two? What are the dangers?

Yet there's nothing challenging or complex about "Taboo TV," which reduces these difficult questions to a game of prattling platitudes. And much gets sacrificed in this rush to judgment.

Originality and genuine insight are obvious casualties, but so is truth. When "Taboo TV" starts stumbling, which is pretty much right out of the gate, the misleading and inaccurate statements come fast and furious.

The special, for instance, would have us believe that prime-time television didn't develop a social conscience until "All in the Family" premiered in 1971.

It's worth pointing out, of course, that TV Land and its sister channel, Nickelodeon, have been the cable homes for "All in the Family" reruns.

Television started breaking through boundaries, we are told, "thanks to one man": producer Norman Lear, described as "a one-man taboo wrecking crew." Before "All in the Family," the special says, television "largely ignored the social and political revolution that was changing America" during the 1960s.


Something forgotten

Huh?

Have these guys never heard of two brothers named Smothers?

How can you even begin a discussion of TV censorship without mentioning "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"?

Is it just coincidence that TV Land doesn't own any Smothers material?

Does the brothers' absence seem all the more suspicious because another cable channel, Bravo, will air "Smothered," a two-hour documentary about them, on Dec. 4?

Tom and Dick Smothers hardly ignored the social and political revolution that was changing America. They embraced it.

While it's true that most taboo battles of the '60s, such as NBC decreeing that Barbara Eden's navel couldn't be exposed on "I Dream of Jeannie," seem quaint and tame by today's standards, the Smothers' censorship struggles were hardly tame, and they still seem relevant today.

Just one oversight? All right, then where is "East Side/West Side," the gritty 1963-64 drama that teamed a white actor (George C. Scott) with a black actress (Cicely Tyson)? Where is "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In," which gleefully busted one taboo after another (and you could look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls)? Where is "That Was the Week That Was" or any number of other '60s shows that bent rules and tackled topical material? Where is television's first interracial kiss on "Star Trek"?


Clearing the way

"Taboo TV" would have you believe that the topic can be confined in the '60s to Eden's navel, "Julia" and Rob and Laura Petrie sleeping in separate beds on "The Dick Van Dyke Show." The record shows that, as revolutionary as Lear was, the way was cleared for him in the '60s. It does not diminish his accomplishments to recognize this.

From here, the special touches on the familiar taboo touchstones: "Maude" tackling the subject of abortion; "The Jeffersons" featuring an interracial couple; the "jiggle TV" era launched by "Three's Company"; Candace Bergen's feud with Dan Quayle over Murphy Brown's pregnancy; a gay couple shown in bed on "thirtysomething"; the "coming out" episode of "Ellen"; and the pay-cable freedom of "Sex and the City," "Queer as Folk" and "The Sopranos."

Missing in action are "M"A"S"H" and such miniseries as "Roots" and "Holocaust."

Opinions are given by actors (Carroll, Eden, Bergen, Van Dyke, Suzanne Somers, John Ritter, Bea Arthur, Eric McCormack, Sharon Gless), producers (Steven Bochco, Aaron Spelling, Lear, Debbie Allen, Diane English, Darren Star), network executives, costumers, directors, writers, censors, academics and critics who believe television contributes to the corruption of children.

English talks about wanting to "blur the line between fact and fiction" with "Murphy Brown." With mistakes and misstatements waiting around every pop-culture corner, this documentary does that extraordinarily well.