Prime time’s new age of crudeness

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 15:01:00 +0000

In a recent episode of ABC's "Modern Family," pear-shaped actor Eric Stonestreet, who plays histrionic gay dad Cameron Tucker, paces casually around the living room in form-revealing bike shorts. His groin is pixelated. It is bulging, we deduce, in revealing ways. At one point Stonestreet poses in front of family-member Claire Dunphy, played by Julie Bowen, indecisive about where to do his cycling, and says, "I’m leaning toward the park." With her gaze fixed on his genitals, Dunphy dryly replies, "I can see that."

That may seem like a crude joke, especially for a family-oriented show, but network television has increasingly been leaning toward just this sort of humor. In 2004, the Federal Communications Commission received more than 1.4 million indecency complaints pertaining to 314 programs. The next year, the number of complaints dropped to under 250,000. Whether this is due to a shift in taste or a learned helplessness is difficult to gauge, but either case, most TV watchers will likely agree, network television seems to be getting much naughtier. Dirty jokes are a force of nature, a celebration of life in all its fullness and squalor, as universal as comedy gets. They are the first line of attack in the battle for free speech -- but the rise of dirty TV isn't just a sign that we're overwhelming would-be censors, it's a sign that television is growing up.

Salon.com > Miles Klee

Prime time’s new age of crudeness