This fall's TV season is rated X

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 sexier and more explicit. From the graphic grappling in HBO's new relationship drama, "Tell Me You Love Me," to the partner-swapping in CBS's "Swingtown," and the teen sex – including rape – of CW's "Gossip Girl," the sex is getting rawer and the camera ever closer.

This escalating emphasis on explicit scenes as well as themes is the result of seismic changes already rocking Hollywood and the larger society, say culture watchers: the competition for market share in a spiraling world of entertainment choices, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the explosive growth of an unregulated Internet.

Sexual mores are a good measure of social change, says Kevin Scott, coauthor of the upcoming Beacon Press book, "The Porning of America: Choosing Our Sexual Future." The combination of adult erotica moving onto Main Street America by the mid 1990s, along with the emergence of the Internet as a massive distribution network, has created what Mr. Scott calls a "perfect storm" of cultural 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 Mr. Tchong. Reality shows on television as well as the online social networking sites encourage increased engagement in the most intimate parts of other people's lives – many of them near-strangers. "It signals a huge shift," says Tchong, "a seismic change in the way we interact with others."

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 top TV leading men, including Dylan McDermott, kvetching about, and serially bedding, a stream of women. NBC debuts the Brooke Shields vehicle, "Lipstick Jungle," a gal-pal dramedy about New York City fashionistas.

Pay cable is making its mark, too. "Californication," a Showtime vehicle for David Duchovny, is about a sexually – and emotionally – itinerant novelist.

Multimedia era

The influx of adult material on television is no surprise, considering how blurred the boundaries are becoming between traditional and new media, say most 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. "All the various media are beginning to merge into a single screen," he says, adding that broadcast shows cannot compete with material on the Web. "The Internet offers extreme material. Audiences don't care where the programming comes from, so the networks have to adapt to keep up," says Mr. Levinson.

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