Sex on the small screen
TV shows have never shied away from trading on the sex appeal of their stars, but a quick look at the new fall season reveals that the overall TV landscape is about to get a whole lot more explicit.
From the graphic grappling in HBO's new drama, "Tell Me You Love Me," to the partner-swapping in CBS' "Swingtown," and the teen sex of CW's "Gossip Girl," the sex is getting rawer and the camera ever closer.
This escalating emphasis on explicit scenes and themes is the result of seismic changes already rocking Hollywood and society, say culture watchers: the competition in a spiraling world of entertainment choices, the mainstreaming of pornography and the growth of the Internet.
Sexual mores are a good measure of social change, says Kevin Scott, co-author of the upcoming book, "The Porning of America: Choosing Our Sexual Future." The combination of erotica moving onto Main Street America by the mid 1990s, along with the emergence of the Internet, has created what Scott calls a "perfect storm" of change. "Our general view of sexuality today is so much broader than what it was just 15 years ago," he adds.
At the same time, the nation has grown more prurient, says trend tracker Michael Tchong, founder of Ubercool.com. We are becoming obsessive peepers, enamored of other people's privacy, says Tchong. Reality TV shows as well as online social networking sites encourage increased engagement in the most intimate parts of other people's lives.
Hollywood has responded with such recent cult hits as "Sex and the City," a show which has spawned a slew of copycats this season. ABC's "Cashmere Mafia," about four ambitious Manhattan women comes from former "City" producer Darren Star. "Big Shots" puts a male spin on the formula, starring a quartet of men kvetching about, and serially bedding, a stream of women.
The influx of adult material on television is no surprise, considering how blurred the boundaries are becoming between traditional and new media, say observers. "Viewers don't care anymore where the material comes from," says Paul Levinson, an author and media studies professor at Fordham University in New York, adding that broadcast shows cannot compete with material on the Web.
At the same time, filmmakers are embracing the small screen, bringing with them more mature themes. Network television now routinely features well-known people such as Ridley Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer -- filmmakers who expect much more creative freedom, says Bryan Greenberg, a former television-development executive.
Cynthia Mort, the creator and producer of "Tell Me You Love Me," says she is surprised by the dust-up over the sex scenes. The sexuality has never been gratuitous, she says. "When I wrote the pilot," says Mort, "the sex was always in service of intimacy and in service of love."
This is precisely the kind of buzz that advertisers can't buy, points out Greenberg. But it is precisely this sort of artistic and marketing myopia that leads Hollywood into the missteps that seem to dog each development season, says Ted Baehr, critic and Chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission. At a time when the film industry is discovering the power of family fare at the box office and forming new faith-based and family divisions, he says TV is heading into more graphic material that is alienating viewers.
"The 150 million Americans who go to church don't want to see this kind of material," Baehr says.