Smut TV: Hollywood Doubles Down On Their Crusade to Sexualize Your Children

A USA Today story informs us “Viewers are about to see full-frontal male nudity, heterosexual, homosexual and group sex, and graphic scenes rarely — if ever — seen on mainstream TV.”

A few years back, I got a real taste for how silly Hollywood’s obsession with force feeding America a steady diet of filth had become. I sat across from a Fox Family exec, pitching programs for kids. I’d been in this chair many times and the result was always the same: “Thanks. Love ’em. Won’t work. Let’s have you back soon.”

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Why’d the guy keep calling me back in? And why did I keep returning? I’m not sure which of us was most guilty of wasting time.

Finally, one day, I blurted out what should have been asked long before: “What do you want from me?”

“Something like Action” I was told.

Action was a Fox sitcom created by Chris Thompson originally intended for HBO. In it, Jay Mohr played a troubled character patterned after producer Joel Silver. Thompson insisted they leave the foul language in the program, and just bleep it out for prime time.

So you can imagine my shock at the idea of this being the model as I pitched shows for kids. I leaned in and told the Fox exec something he most surely had to know already.

“No parent would let their kid watch a show like that.”

“I don’t care if they watch it” he said without missing a beat. “I just want them to know about it.”

Hide the women and children.

I now realized he’d been calling be back in repeatedly because he knew I worked with Chris Thompson on another sitcom and he likely assumed I had similar sensibilities. Little did he know he was probably sitting across from the most conservative writer in the sitcom hemisphere. I fit in better with the Duggars than I do the Osbournes. I’d rather go to a church potluck than a hip nightclub.

So I’m not surprised to now read the next wave of smut is on the way, and it’s worse than ever. A USA Today story informs us “Viewers are about to see full-frontal male nudity, heterosexual, homosexual and group sex, and graphic scenes rarely — if ever — seen on mainstream TV.”

Mainstream TV is becoming the slums of Amsterdam.

One TV exec called it an “arms race.” Later in the story, Parents Television Council president Tim Winter said “Families are under siege, teenage girls are under siege. You don’t know what the cultural impact will be down the road.”

And they don’t care. They simply don’t care.

Then University media observer Paul Levinson coughs up two moronic clichés in what appears to be back to back sentences. One: TV mirrors society. Two: “If people are offended, there’s a simple remedy: Don’t watch.”

Why is it sleazy sex is the only area where defenders of television say it mirrors life? Why not show more Republicans? Or non idiotic Christians?

And these days, you can’t get television without cable. Telling me I can just turn it off is like me putting acid in half your food and saying you don’t have to eat it.

Continuing the trend toward grade school logic, Doug Herzog, president of MTV Networks entertainment group, said “The line moves every day, so you got to move with it. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

Yes you can, Doug. And you have before. The cigarette smoking genie has been shoved back in. So has the conservative genie. Oh, and remember the genie that actually was on the side of corporate America? Crammed back in the bottle with a pitch fork.

What’s interesting about all this is that, in television, writers are king. They make the rules. Many times, their power exceeds the network brass. And, let’s face it, a lot of writers were geeks in school. Not all, of course, but indulge me here a bit.

I’ve met the kid who went years without a date and, if not for Hollywood, was destined to live in his parent’s basement.

So now he’s writing the people he wants to be. The life he dreamed of in between chess matches and dermatological appointments.

Today he giggles and twitters his friend “Did you see what I got away with in prime time last night?”

No. But I heard about it.

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