When A Put-Down Becomes A Promo

William Bennett and Sen. Joseph Lieberman have just illustrated the perils of trying to discredit raunchy TV shows by bestowing mock awards. They gave Rupert Murdoch their latest Silver Sewer award for achievement in the field of cultural pollution, citing Murdoch’s new, over-thetop Fox TV programs “Get Real” and “Action.”

This put a large halo of publicity around the little-known shows and heavily implied that young people would be foolish not to watch, since two older cultural conservatives were so obviously alarmed. Writing in The Washington Post, TV columnist Lisa de Moraes began her report on Bennett and Lieberman by writing that “Two new Fox series … just hit pay dirt.” We will be lucky if the Silver Sewer award doesn’t wind up in an ad for both shows.

As it happens, the sitcom “Get Real” is unsually moronic, even by contemporary standards, and will be gone soon. “Action,” however, is a very funny show, a send-up of the type of anything-goes, no-morals Hollywood producer that Bennett and Lieberman so often complain about.

Alas, the Silver Sewer award breaks the top two rules in the field of confronting cultural pollution: 1, Never become part of the publicity apparatus for offensive shows nobody knows about; and 2, “Never, never try to attack a funny show with a not-so-funny satirical award.

Bennett and Lieberman are correct, however, about how gross these two shows are. The first “Get Real” episode begins with a mother’s fantasy orgasm and moves on to a long series of smarmy jokes and carefully obscured nude scenes. “Action” starts with a burst of barely bleeped-out F-words and a loud suggestion that a kitchen worker urinate into one of his salads. We get a lot of in-your-face sex talk, a scene where a prostitute puts her hand down an actor’s pants and another scene where an unusually well-endowed Hollywood mogul intimidates the producer and wins an argument by displaying his private parts (also carefully obscured).

“Action” owes something to “The Larry Sanders Show,” a sharp, literate satire about a late-night TV talk show host. “Sanders” had routinely off-color dialogue and situations but it was on HBO. “Action” is on network prime time and the crudeness dial has been turned way up, perhaps to get extra laughs by raising the question, “Can they really say that on network TV?” Apparently, they can.

This TV schedule seems to be pushing the sex and vulgarity envelope very hard, maybe harder than it has ever been pushed in one season. In one teen-oriented show, a girl tries to seduce her new stepbrother, confronting him in a shower and commenting on his genitals. Later she vows to turn a nerdy girl into “the premier slut” of the school, and offers some important slut lessons. A few years ago, nobody would have dared to put this stuff on the tube. Now, it’s becoming standard fare.

Bennett is right to call this a “race to the bottom.” We can thank HBO, Showtime, WB and Fox for most of this, plus the current wave of teen and vulgarity movies that started with the unexpected success of the 1998 gross-out movie “There’s Something About Mary.” With no big stars and not much of a plot line, “Mary” showed that amazingly vulgar sex comedies could make a ton of money. Since then, producers have been trying to clone Mary on big screen and small.

The bawdy bodily-function comedies are relatively harmless compared with the wall-to-wall sex of current sitcoms and “teen angst” prime-time soap operas. The dominant plot line of these shows, as columnist Robert Samuelson wrote last week, is that being a grownup means thinking exclusively about sex. In the old days, the Brady Bunch never thought about sex, as far as we knew. Their modern counterparts on TV never think about anything else. This is often presented with a self-congratulatory sense of candor, as if the unvarnished truth about the American family is at last being put on screen (hence the title, “Get Real”).

These shows are also carriers of heavy cultural messages, the most obvious being that parents are fools. In the teen soap operas, parents are absent, stupid, irrelevant, zanily adulterous, on the lam or in jail. The unmissable message is that kids are on their own, with no need to listen to parents, who know little or nothing anyway. This helps the TV industry certify teenagers as an autonomous culture with its own set of ethics and consumption patterns.

Let’s recognize that there’s a great deal that’s right about TV these days. Programs like “The Practice,” “Law and Order,” “NYPD Blue,” “ER” and the recently departed “Homicide” are (or were) brilliant and entertaining shows grounded in a moral universe. They are as good as anything ever seen on the tube. Some shows that include nudity and coarse language, like HBO’s “The Sopranos,” are very good, too.

The raunchy, envelope-pushing, sex-obsessed shows, on the other hand, come under the heading of cultural pollution. Bennett and Lieberman are right to begin raising pressure against them.