Sex, drugs and cable TV

Under pressure from the FCC, cable companies will offer a "family-choice" package. But will anyone pay for TV without "South Park" and "Sex and the City"?

By Michael Scherer

Kevin Martin took the helm of the Federal Communications Commission this March with a clear mission: to crack down on basic cable’s most violent, vulgar and scantily clad programs. Time and again, he warned the industry that the status quo would not stand. Americans should not have to pay for ribald skits on Comedy Central or MTV, he argued, if all they wanted was to watch the Iraq war on CNN or penguins on the Discovery Channel. The cable industry, for its part, fought back against his threats, warning of protracted lawsuits and spiraling cable costs. Until Monday, no one knew who would blink first.

At a morning hearing, some of the nation’s biggest cable providers caved to Martin’s demands. Starting next year, they will offer a “family-choice” plan of basic cable programming to consumers. No longer will households be forced to pay for Jon Stewart and “South Park” in order to get access to Anderson Cooper and SpongeBob SquarePants. Cable companies have volunteered to make the changes, removing from the table a possible legal challenge on First Amendment grounds. But industry observers say the new pricing system is the direct result of government pressure. “There is an element of regulatory extortion at work here,” says Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation. “Everybody in town knows that.”

Specifically, FCC chairman Martin is rumored to have pushed for the new family tier as he mulled his approval of the sale of Adelphia Communications to Time Warner Cable and Comcast, the nation’s two largest cable operators. Coincidentally, Time Warner and Comcast led the charge for the new family-choice pricing system. Four smaller cable providers, Advance/Newhouse, Insight, Midcontinent and Bresnan, will also offer family plans. Approval of the Adelphia deal is expected in a matter of months.

At the same time, Senate Commerce Committee chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has been applying his own pressure on the industry, even threatening new regulations at a roundtable discussion on the issue last month. On Monday, he appeared to take pleasure in the fact that the industry was finally coming around to a compromise. At the beginning of the hearing, Sen. Stevens squared off with Kyle McSlarrow, the tough-talking president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. “Have you got anything you would like to tell us?” Stevens asked.

McSlarrow dutifully explained the changes. But he made it clear that the industry still strongly opposes any direct government regulation of cable content. “These individual decisions made by cable operators were not easy decisions,” McSlarrow explained. In the past, the industry has argued that the economic model of basic cable, which provides dozens of channels at one price, depended on giving some households channels they would not watch. From his downtown office, FCC chairman Martin quickly offered his blessing for the deal. “I am pleased,” he said in a statement. “Offering a family-friendly package has always been one of the options I supported.”

For most of the industry, the family-friendly cable package is the least onerous of Martin’s three proposals to change cable television. Martin had also suggested extending broadcast television indecency rules to cover basic cable and requiring cable operators to offer “à la carte” channels, a system in which households could purchase each cable station separately. Those other options are likely to be tabled for the time being. “It looks like the cable has dodged a digital TV bullet,” said Jeff Chester, of the Center for Digital Democracy. “And meanwhile, lawmakers are assured that they have funds coming from the television industry for the 2006 races.”

However, Dan Isett, director of government affairs for the Parents Television Council, a conservative watchdog group with ties to the religious right, said PTC is still not satisfied with the cable industry’s peace offering. “It’s a good step, but it doesn’t do anything about the fundamental problem,” said Isett, noting that there are still many shows filled with mature content. He also worries about how family-friendly programming will be defined. For instance, Isett said cable providers’ family plans should not include channels like ABC Family, which shows PG-13 movies, Cartoon Network, which has late-night adult-themed cartoons, and TBS, which shows edited reruns of the HBO hit “Sex and the City.”

If the new family plans catch on, the biggest loser in the new deal is likely to be Viacom, which operates several of the cable stations with the raciest content, including MTV, BET, Comedy Central, VH1 and Logo, a nascent channel that targets the gay and lesbian market. Family groups have also assailed original shows like “Nip/Tuck” and “The Shield” on F/X, which is owned by News Corp., as well as weekly WWE wrestling programs, which are shown on several different basic cable networks. The new family plans could pressure those cable channels into censoring some of their shows, or risk the loss of cable fees and viewers.

But it remains unclear how popular the new family option will be. Though violence and sex on television has long been a hot topic in Congress, consumers have shown little interest in taking advantage of available channel-blocking technology, like the V-chip. A few years ago, satellite provider DirecTV offered a family-choice tier of about 10 channels for just $5 each month. The program was folded after a short time because there was little consumer interest. “We didn’t hear anything from our subscribers that they missed in any way the stand-alone tier,” a DirecTV spokesman told the trade publication Satellite Business News. In fact, no one seemed to notice the change.

: Michael Scherer is Salon's Washington correspondent. Read his other articles here. More Michael Scherer

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Few will miss the North Korean despot -- except perhaps writers on "30 Rock," "The Daily Show" and "Team America

VIDEO

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Kim Jong Il in "Team America"

Topics:South Park, Kim Jong-il, The Daily Show, 30 Rock

Kim Jong Il was one of the most chilling figures of the modern era, with a harrowing human rights record. But of the tyrannical madmen who have died this year, he was also the one who made the oddest pop culture splash. Moammar Gadhafi’s ability to rock a golden muumuu will never be paralleled. But from “30 Rock” to “The Daily Show,” the departed North Korean leader will be missed. Was it those rock star shades? His fondness for olive green? The way he really knew how to throw a tank-rolling, goose-stepping military parade? In a word, yes.

Sure, Saddam Hussein got to play a role in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 1999 opus “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.” But it was Mr. Jong Il who really stole the show in Parker and Stone’s subsequent puppet masterpiece “Team America: World Police.” Kim’s not just a homicidal maniac in a big house — he’s a guy who really, really loves to put on a big show. He’s also a man who can’t quite pronounce “inevitable,” who struggles with the isolation of success, and who, it turns out, is actually a bug from outer space. Now that’s a villain!

What makes the puppet Kim Jong Il such a classic comedic character is that he’s not all that far from the Western perception of the real guy. This, after all, was a man who loved the movies so much he wrote a book on “The Art of Cinema.” He loved them so much he owned thousands of DVDs – “Rambo” and Elizabeth Taylor were allegedly among his faves. He loved them so much that early in his career, he had South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok and his South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress ex-wife Choi Eun-hee kidnapped to forge the North Korean film industry. The results included the somewhat less subtle than “Triumph of the Will”-rampaging monster masterpiece “Pulgasari.”

Jong Il not only forcibly created entertainment, he inspired it. He became part of a pivotal plotline on “30 Rock” last season, when Jack Donaghy’s wife, Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks), wound up abducted by the internationally fearsome “convenience store owner.” It was a crazy sitcom twist – based on the very real imprisonment (and subsequent release) of Current TV’s Euna Lee and Laura Ling in 2009.

Even as he retreated from the spotlight throughout his later years, Kim Jong Il became all the more dominant a force on the Internet. Is there a more elegantly straightforward, satisfyingly amusing Tumblr than Kim Jong-il Looking at Things? There is not. Have you ever seen photos of Stalin smiling merrily at great wheels of cheese? I rest my case.

He was a complicated man. A man who apparently had a penchant for water slides and could golf a 38-under-par round. Would you tell him he couldn’t take that mulligan? What can you say of a person who has been played by both Margaret Cho and Gilbert Gottfried? A man who’s provided more material for “The Daily Show” than anyone not named Jim Cramer? A guy like that doesn’t come along in too many lifetimes. Now that the leader is dead, his legacy on the evening news will no doubt be harrowing. But as Elizabeth Banks tweeted Monday, we are indeed at a pivotal moment in history” — one that leaves joke writers and Tumblr bloggers just a little “sad and ronery.”

: Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams

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Trey Parker and Matt Stone's potty-mouthed genius has made them into our country's greatest living humorists

By Matt Zoller Seitz

Uh, you guyyyyyssss....It's Cartman, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of "South Park."

Topics:South Park, Television

As I watched Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of Comedy Central’s “South Park,” collect armloads of Tony awards for their satirical musical “The Book of Mormon” Sunday night, a disquieting and thrilling realization popped into my head: These potty-mouthed clowns might very well be America’s greatest and most consistently inventive humorists.

Of course they have competition. There’s “The Daily Show,” for sure, though I’d argue that Jon Stewart’s version is as much a news program as a comedy series. But for audacity, visual flair, musical chops, verbal invention and gut-busting silliness, not to mention consistency of vision over time, I think the “South Park” boys trump all comers — including the creators of “The Simpsons,” a landmark show that started to flag halfway into its endless run, and Seth MacFarlane of “Family Guy,” whose show has its moments but has never quite risen to the heights of conceptually driven insanity that Parker and Stone reach so often. At their best, I’d put Parker and Stone up there with “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “SCTV,” Ernie Kovacs, the Marx Brothers, George Carlin and W.C. Fields, all of whom skated along the edge of the surreal and willfully outrageous, doing pirouettes and blowing raspberries at anyone who tried, like yours truly, to call them great and significant.

Their success is all the more remarkable when you consider what true outsiders they were, and to some extent still are. Back in 1992 they were just a couple of students at the University of Colorado who’d produced a goofy little short film titled “The Spirit of Christmas.” Within five years — thanks to help from Fox executive Brian Graden, who gave them $2,000 to turn the short into a “video Christmas card” that he could send to friends and birthed the very first viral video sensation — they’d landed a Comedy Central show, “South Park.”

Their rise was so sudden that there was no reason to think they’d last. Most overnight successes freeze up in the spotlight or reveal themselves as one-trick wonders. Not Parker and Stone. They’re safely ensconced in mainstream culture — almost everything they do is connected to Viacom, the gigantic parent company of “South Park” network Comedy Central — yet they still seem mysteriously and delightfully outside of it. What other American humorists have been so successful within the mainstream over such a long period while routinely landing on news pages (most recently for Comedy Central’s censoring of their jokes about Mohammed) and maintaining an almost punk rock edge?

Sure, some episodes have been sharper and more coherent than others; like a lot of the aforementioned iconic clowns, Parker and Stone practice a type of humor that is by nature hit-and-miss. But over the past few days, I’ve rummaged through prior seasons of “South Park” looking for duds and have found surprisingly few. The stuff that seemed astonishingly vital at the time still does, and the stuff that felt subpar — such as the Season 1 episode with the Ethiopian – has proved better than I remembered, sometimes much better. Even a weak episode is likely to contain a scene or subplot so terrifically unhinged that it makes you dizzy. A “C” effort from these guys is better than a latter-day “A+” effort from “Family Guy” or “The Simpsons.”

And an A+ — such as Season 10′s “Hell on Earth 2006,” wherein Satan decides to rent out the W Hotel in downtown South Park and throw himself a Sweet 16 party — is one for the ages. The Satan stuff (a continuation of the great hell sequences in their 1999 animated feature “Bigger, Longer and Uncut”) is a barbed skewering of skeezy reality show participants’ narcissism, and the audience’s rubbernecking smugness; that by itself might have been enough to sustain a half-hour episode. But Parker and Stone aren’t content to do just enough. They always want to give us more than we expected, to go further, to overwhelm with sheer imaginative excess. So they add a subplot with the boys summoning the spirit of murdered rapper Biggie Smalls by repeating his name into a mirror à la “Candyman,” and yet another subplot that finds mass murderers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy being dispatched from the underworld to pick up a giant cake shaped like a Ferrari and deliver it to Satan’s bash. The “Three Murderers” become the supernatural version of the Three Stooges, squabbling among themselves, getting into wacky high jinks, and beating, stabbing and disemboweling themselves and various innocent bystanders. These bits are breathtaking for all sorts of reasons, one of which is that they explore the connection between comedy and cruelty incisively, but without becoming dry or self-regarding.

Hell on Earth 2006
Tags: SOUTH
PARK more…

Another of Parker and Stone’s admirable qualities is their resistance to political pigeonholing. At some point, representatives of every American party or movement have tried to claim them as standard-bearers, only to get a thumb in the eye soon after. Are the “South Park” guys liberal? Conservative? Republican? Democrat? Libertarian? Pro-choice? Pro-life? Pro-capitalism? Pro-socialism? I suspect they’re mainly anti-complacency, and anti-bullshit.

I’ll never forget watching their 2004 political satire/puppet epic “Team America: World Police” with two different theatrical audiences — one in lower Manhattan, the other in suburban Dallas — and hearing both crowds chortle as Parker and Stone beat up on people or ideals they thought worthless, then squirm when the humorists started butchering their sacred cows.

Parker and Stone fire on targets and settle scores. But their work almost always has a structural integrity that makes it feel more substantial than a rant-of-the-week. For instance, the epic, three-part, 2007 “South Park” episode “Imaginationland” is one of the definitive statements on American pop culture in the age of terrorism and endless foreign war. But it’s not just a finger-wagging editorial about how to behave or not behave, or how to think about the relationship between the American imagination and the media that feeds it. It’s self-contained and self-supporting, a stand-alone piece that has internal logic as rigorous as that of any big budget fantasy film that takes itself seriously.

Imaginationland
Tags: SOUTH
PARK more…

Parker and Stone have done some of their sharpest and craziest work in the last couple of seasons — for the record, that’s seasons 14 and 15, at which point most TV series are either long-canceled or coasting on the memory of past triumphs. This season’s send-up of the royal wedding — a 12-tiered wedding cake of riffing — was one of the single greatest episodes the show has produced. The goof on the ceremony itself (substituting the “Canadian royal family” for the Brits, with Parker-as-cable-newscaster ending every other observation with a variation of the phrase, “as is tradition”) belongs on a short list of great self-contained surreal set pieces, alongside the “Hail, Freedonia” number from the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and the duel with the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” (You can watch it below at the 1:30 mark.) “People in attendance now gently tossing Captain Crunch as the prince passes by, as is tradition … [The] Canadian prince now dipping his arms into the pudding, as is tradition … The princess will, of course, scrape the pudding off the prince’s arms, symbolizing their union … This is a glorious day for our country, and indeed the world.”

Last week’s half-season finale, “You’re Getting Old” — in which Stan’s 10th birthday afflicts him with cynicism, and prompts arguments between his parents about how one’s taste in pop culture almost inevitably hardens over time — might have made a great series closer if Parker and Stone had decided to hang it up now. But why would they when they’re producing work like this, which makes an unpretentious but true statement on generational tension, aging and nostalgia without turning self-important?

Parker and Stone have managed to seem as though they’re still a couple of wiseacres sitting in the back row of the classroom, goofing off and making trouble, when in fact they’ve spent the past decade-and-a-half winning Tonys and Emmy and Oscar nominations, and diligently assembling a body of work that should be the envy of any animator, stand-up comic or editorial cartoonist. It’s been a remarkable run. And as long as the show stays interesting — and it has; much more so than any of its long-running animated competitors — there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue.

Since I’ve managed to go a whole column without running a clip from “Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” let’s close with one, shall we? All hail Satan. He can dream, too.

: More Matt Zoller Seitz

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Thursday, May 5, 2011 1:24 PM UTC

“South Park” eviscerates Tyler Perry and his fans

The Comedy Central cartoon takes on Madea and her self-loathing audience members

By Drew Grant

Tyler Perry drops by "South Park."

Topics:South Park, Rachel Maddow, Tyler Perry, Television

Tyler Perry is something of a divisive figure. We’ve already seen Spike Lee decimate Perry in the pair’s ongoing feud, and it’s a well-documented fact that audiences of Tyler’s extremely popular Madea series don’t give a crap what Spike Lee thinks of the “coonery buffoonery.”

Last night, “South Park” gave Perry a long-awaited noogie when he showed up to accept at the school’s comedy awards show. (Called “The Kathy Griffin Awards” – how I wish those really existed.)

: Drew Grant is a staff writer for Salon. Follow her on Twitter at @videodrew. More Drew Grant

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Tuesday, May 3, 2011 1:04 PM UTC

“The Book of Mormon” leads Tony Award nominations

"South Park" creators lead the field for Broadway's biggest prize

By Mark Kennedy, Associated Press

In this theater publicity image released by Boneau/Bryan-Brown, Andrew Rannells, center, performs with an ensemble cast in "The Book of Mormon" at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York. (AP Photo/Boneau/Bryan-Brown, Joan Marcus) (Credit: AP)

Topics:Tony Awards, South Park, Theater

When the Broadway season began last year, a big brash musical about Spider-Man was supposed to muscle its way to multiple Tony Award nominations. Instead, a pair of goofy Mormons may be the ones to beat.

“The Book of Mormon” nabbed a leading 14 Tony Award nominations Tuesday morning, earning the profane musical nods for best musical, best book of a musical, best original score, two leading actor spots and two featured actor nominations.

The musical, about two Mormon missionaries who find more than they bargained for in Africa, was written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of “South Park,” and Robert Lopez, co-creator of the Tony Award-winning musical “Avenue Q.” The trio teamed up with Casey Nicholaw, who co-directed with Parker and choreographed.

: More Mark Kennedy

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Monday, May 2, 2011 12:01 PM UTC

Five instances of Osama bin Laden hiding out in pop culture

How the terrorist invaded our TV and film, from "Family Guy" to Morgan Spurlock

By Drew Grant

Osama woos a camel on "South Park."

Topics:Osama Bin Laden, Family Guy, South Park, Television

In the past decade, Osama bin Laden invaded our sense of safety, but also our pop culture. Here’s a look at the top five most memorable appearances by the slain al-Qaeda terrorist in TV and film, from the irreverent to the bizarre.

1. “Family Guy”: While American audiences found dread in bin Laden’s cryptic video messages, Seth MacFarlane found gag reel opportunity. The show’s famous FCC-baiting episode “PTV” depicted the terrorist in Afghanistan cracking up during a taping of his own terrifying video message. Botching the pronunciation of “Ramadan,” the cartoon bin Laden breaks character to say, “Did I just say Radaman? What is that? Yeah, maybe Dennis Radaman is going to punish you with his crazy hair.” Bin Laden made several appearances on “Family Guy” throughout the years, though many never made it to the screen.