I will start with the argument that all that is offered on television today is garbage designed to rot the minds and souls of the viewers and enrich the pockets and bank accounts of Mr. Businessman. There are many of today's programs that are pointed to as examples of this. The show Temptation Island is one that usually leads the pack here. The entire premise of this show is that they take some engaged couples and put them on some sort of an island with people that are planted there to try and break them up or some such shit. These are not actors on this show, they are real people. The PTC freaks out massively about all of this, saying that this teaches horrible examples of how people should treat one another and al that. This point is hard to argue when you talk about this particular show. It is obviously garbage of the highest magnitude. But since when has TV been some shining jewel of an example of good taste? Garbage and TV go together like flowers and bees. That medium has ben foisting garbage on the public ever since it started. You hear the PTC going on about shit like Boston Public and Dawson's Creek, flipping out because these shows deal with topics like sex and sexuality amongst the young. It is indeed very true that these type of shows today deal with those sort of subjects in far more explicit and open manners than shows of the past did. You didn't hear that sort of explicit shit on shows like Room 222 or the Brady Bunch, to be sure. A big part of the reason for that is the fact that there are so many more TV channels available today than there were back then. There wasn't as much choice as to what to watch, so shit could only do so much. The proliferation of cabl;e and satellite TV and the expanded channel rosters that they afford the consumer has made competition much stiffer than it was back in the day. To be able to survive, the various programs have had to break the traditional TV mode and go into other things in order to get any kind of an audience at all. After all, when cable and satellite TV came around, thery were touted as something that gave you more choice as to what to watch. Nobody would have gone for it if it turned out to be the same sort of shit that was always on the existing TV Stations so many more times over. Many older people resisted cable at first because they thought that it was just that. So the cable industry had to prove to these folks that it wasn't that at all. As a result, the types of shows that were produced had to adapt to this new environment. They have done that, and the likes of the PTC cannot stop freaking about it. They insist that this is a bad thing that has hurt society. There is no concrete proof of that. It was kind of obvious that America as a land and a society was also changing just like the face of TV was. America is many things, but it is not a stagnant society. Since television had become such an integral part of American society, it had to change as well, and these PTC people never say that. They insist that the changes that they don't like in America are directly attributable to the changes in TV, when it almost certainly is the other way around.
The other part of the argument of the likes of the PTC is that I Love Lucy and its contemporaries were just harmless entertainment, that they hurt no one. Bullshit. That show was not harmless at all. Things like wife beating and gunplay were used as comedic things in episodes of that show. There are many instances where Ricky Ricardo make references to smacking Lucy to shut her up or whatever. Hell, there's even an episode where he takes her over his knee and spanks her, and another where he ties her up. What is this showing the public? Another "classic" show from that same era. The Honeymooners, uses that sort of "humor" way more in its episodes regularly. In those days, domestic abuse was something that no one talked about, so the perpetrators almost always got away with whatever they wanted to, and the victims had virtually no recourse against it. You didn't see TV helping alleviate that problem , you saw them make a fuckin' joke about it. Same with the "War Of The Sexes". I Love Lucy used that theme over and over again during its run. You constantly see Lucy and Ethel competing against Ricky and Fred over some shit or another. Rarely do you see the sexes working together on something on that show, and when you do, its always one family pitted against another. Cooperation between human beings, let alone between husbands and wives, was non existent on that show. During this time, the gulf between the sexes increased in every way possible in America. Men and women became less of partners and more of adversaries while this was issue being tittered over on TV. Stereotyping was way fuckin' rampant on that show too. Whether it was racial or gender oriented, it was alive and well on that show. Where do you see a black person on there where they're not a Pullman porter or some other servile type? Lucy and Ricky had no black neighbors or friends on that show. The fact that they were an interracial couple was just used as a reason to make jokes and stereotype. Lucy is always making fun of Ricky's English on that show, and they purposely have the dude talking with this dumb fuckin accent that he really didn't have on every episode. There are all sorts of stereotypical references to Hispanics on there. There's even the one where Lucy wants to make him feel more at home, so she goes and gets shit like fuckin' donkeys and chickens and statues of dudes taking siestas and salsa music playing, for that was TV's stereotype impression of Cuba. The gender stereotypes are even more prevalent on that show. You have episodes where the big joke is Lucy and Ethel going out and getting a job, because as women, they can do nothing more than putter around the apartment and cook and clean and all that shit. They don't know how to "really" work, or the value of a dollar either. Or you have ones where Fred and Ricky try to stay at home and cook and clean and shit, and they always end up making a disaster out of everything that they try, because as men, they have no idea how to cook anything or clean anything or any of that shit. This on a show that featured real life working women that did indeed know the value of a dollar. This type of stereotyping is rampant all throughout every episode of I Love Lucy. These are the "good old days and values" that the likes of the PTC are so gung-ho to bring back. How is all that type of shit something that had no deleterious effect on America, while today's fare is purely destructive? These same people say that Lucy and her show sold all sorts of TV sets and made TV the popular thing that it became because she and her show became something that everyone had to see, and you needed a TV to do that. They freely admit that she did that by making herself and her show an integral part of Americana by being such a great influence upon the culture. If that was so, these stereotypes and shit that I have just enumerated also became an intregral part of Americana. The culture at the time certainly reflected that.
So the4 PTC and their ilk ignore these type of facts and the fact that there are things that are no longer on TV now that were back In "the good old days." The tobacco industry made that medium successful by being its principal sponsor at first. Lucy and her friend are always smoking on their show, and you see lots of ads for smokes integrated into the show as well. That was when lung cancer was soaring in America. Nowadays, you haven't seen a cigarette ad on TV in over 30 years, and you don't see too many characters smoking on their shows. When cigarettes are mentioned on TV these days, it's usually in a negative light, just like everywhere else nowadays. Usage of tobacco is down in America, especially amongst the young. So are the rates for smoking related diseases. You never see the fuckin' PTC talking about this though. Or about the way that language has changed on TV in terms of what is not said in shows anymore. The racial stereotype terms like "boy" or "nigger" or "spic" or "chink" are only heard in reruns from TV's past these days. The ,PTC goes apeshit because words like "masturbate" , vagina", and "penis" are used on TV instead of those other ones. Are they really that much worse of words than those others? I think not. Those racial terms are hateful, hurtful words directed towards a group of people without any regard to anything else about them. The others are just terms describing either body parts or an activity. They seem far less harmful to me than the others do. It seems that the likes of the PTC Would rather have the stereotype words used in programs rather than the other ones. It is an attitude like this that has been the problem behind TV and its cultural influence in America, not the actual programs or content themselves. The PTC just conveniently overlooks the fact that since TV is such a powerful thing to so many Americans, that it has always been a contributor to whatever happens in America ever since the days of I Love Lucy. The current state of affairs bears that out. It has always been the same with TV. It's juts that at first, they didn't seem to realize this, and by the time that they did, it was too late, and all these horrible things that the PTC decries were well underway. So their high horse bullshit is particularly weak because many of the founders of that organization had the chance to do something about all of this way back like 50 years ago, and they didn't, and now they don't like how it's all turned out. I don't think that it's all that bad. Yes, TV is mostly shit and always has been, but I do feel that it has not contributed greatly to the decline of America, but that it just traveled along with the rest of the society and the way that it went. There are far more important things to worry about in today's world that Boston Public or WWF Smackdown, and that's what these PTC fuckheads need to be doing.