The Lure of the Horrible

In the Showtime program Weeds, 16-year-old Silas Botwin pokes holes in his condoms in order to get his girlfriend pregnant and prevent her from going away to college. In the fourth season of The Sopranos, Ralph Cifaretto’s character is beaten to death on his kitchen floor by Tony Soprano, and in the same season Adriana’s character is strangled by her fiancé Christopher Moltisanti and then dragged out of a car and shot by a fellow goomba. The horrible behaviour doesn’t end there. In the first season of Deadwood, brothel and bar owner Al Swearengen attempts to have a child witness killed, and in the final episode of the acclaimed TV show, he slits the throat of one prostitute in order to save the life of another.

As far as anti-heroes go, the behaviour of these men are a far cry from Hannibal Smith, the leader of The A-Team, a popular 1980’s “modern-day outlaw” TV program where in every episode the damsel was rescued, the stolen money was returned, and justice was meted out on the bad guys who would crawl out of flaming car-wrecks unscathed. In the reality of The A-Team you could spray a crowded room with bullets and never hit a target. And at the end of every episode, following the downfall of the local villain, Hannibal would flash a smile, light a cigar and say, “I love it when a plan comes together.” The idea of this man even striking a woman, let alone cutting her throat, is utterly unfathomable.

It does seem odd then that the underlying values evoked in the today’s graphically violent, anti-hero TV shows like The Sopranos, remain closer to our own. But by watching even an episode of The A-Team, The Dukes of Hazard, and Knight Rider today, it becomes evident how the average viewer could be offended by its portrayal of women and minorities.

Daisy Duke contributes little more than her breasts, buttocks and legs to the scene. Bonnie Barstow and April Curtis of Knight Rider and Amy Amanda Allen of The A-Team do nothing more than smile and blush and give the rundown for each episodic crisis. When any of these women actually participate in the plot of an episode it is to either be rescued or to use their feminine wiles to get the keys from a jailor. Other than that, you’ve got Dynasty!’s affluent meddling trophy dolls Alexis and Krystle slapping each other around the pool. Today’s Carmela Soprano or Weeds’ Nancy Botwin, or Deadwood‘s Trixie, not only take a dominating role in the plot of their prospective shows, but like their male counterparts, they do not shrink from getting their hands dirty.

As for minorities, when it comes to stereotyping, not much has changed since the old days. African- and Latin-Americans on HBO and Showtime are still predominantly drug dealers and housekeepers, but their positions of power, as portrayed in Heylia James and U-turn’s characters in Weeds is equivalent to or rivals that of their white counterparts. The stereotypes evoked the shy, pasty-faced serial killer Dexter or the canoli-eating, drug-dealing Mafiosos in The Sopranos are no less colourful. It seems that someone, somewhere along the line discovered that according to viewers, portraying every stereotype is just as acceptable as portraying none.

Stereotyping, graphic sex and violence which rivals that of the programs of yesterday? Where did all this come from? Hasn’t TV become more civilized? A little too civilized it seems.

It is important to remember that the shows of today which I mentioned above are all on select/pay channels like HBO and Showtime. Though critically acclaimed and popular, they are not the mainstream. Examples of such programs would be Two and a Half Men, Grey’s Anatomy, House, and the now-kaput Friends. The characters on these shows are for the most part polished and wholesome people. Even Gregory House, who always pushes the politically correct envelope, always reveals his good heartedness at the last second, and pushes the envelope no further than his working class predecessor Archie Bunker did twenty-five years before. It is highly unlikely that any of these characters will end up in a maximum security prison, in carefully packaged pieces, or as a late night snack for farm pigs. No one will be graphically raped or set on fire. In this sanitized mainstream world, especially during prime-time, the worst that will happen is someone will lose their job, a grandparent, or a pair of nice shoes.

We can then look at recent events on Sesame Street, where the latest DVD release of the original episodes has been deemed not suitable for today’s children. As reported by Virginia Heffernan in her article for The New York Times:

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

From pre-school to prime time, TV reality, despite the acid tongue of Simon Cowell, has been polished up and made to look presentable. But the dirt and grime has got to end up somewhere. In 1974, Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz, created a list of uses and gratifications with which media texts provide the audience. The list can be readily applied to today’s TV.

1. Escapism — A bar where everyone knows your name, or a cosy little cafe by Central Park.

2. Personal relationships — Got teary-eyed when Tony Soprano came out of his coma? Well, there you go.

3. Personal identity — For any woman who’s had the “Jennifer Anniston” haircut, and for any man who’s worn a “Joey Shirt”.

4. Surveillance — CNN, The Discovery Channel and Fox News.

As television approaches the second decade of the new millennium, I believe that a new gratification should be recognized, called “Lurid Fascination”. In the past the need was meagrely satiated by the graphic nature and often horrible behaviour on TV shows like COPS, NYPD Blue, and even earlier ones like Miami Vice. But since mainstream television has cleaned up its act, the filth has gathered on the pay channels, and our need for the lurid has found an almost inexhaustible supply in characters like Tony Soprano and Al Swearingen and the worlds they inhabit. Who would have known that our need to slow down and look at a traffic accident would not only find a home on TV but have a hand in the inspiration behind ground-breaking, award-winning programs? It seems that the more we try to shield ourselves from horrible realities, the more we search them out and cherish them.