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This fall's TV season is rated X

Shows are diving beneath bedroom sheets as porn goes mainstream and programs try to compete for attention.

from the September 7, 2007 edition

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At the same time, the boundary-blurring has led filmmakers to embrace the small screen, bringing with them the more mature themes and adult concerns of the feature-film world. Network television now routinely features well-known people such as Ridley Scott, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Michael Apted – all filmmakers who expect much more creative freedom, says Bryan Greenberg, a former television-development executive. "It's become much cooler, much hipper to work in TV in the past few years," he adds.

Edgy show

Cynthia Mort, the creator and producer of "Tell Me You Love Me," says she is surprised by the dust-up over the program's sex scenes. The sexuality has never been gratuitous or exploitative, she says. "When I wrote the pilot," says Ms. Mort, "the sex was always in service of intimacy and in service of love." At the same time, she says she understands why people have pulled it out of context as the show hasn't aired yet. But this is precisely the kind of pre-show buzz that advertisers can't buy, points out Greenberg – something that HBO, a pay-cable channel, desperately needs as it navigates life after the end of its signature series, "The Sopranos." "Buzz is what it takes to set yourself apart in this crowded market," he adds.

Question of taste

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. The failure rate of new shows is extremely high, he points out. 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, extreme material that is alienating many viewers.

"The 150 million Americans who go to church don't want to see this kind of material," says the critic. Mr. Baehr says TV writers need to stop writing to impress their peers and pay more attention to normal, real people whose lives are not dominated by "kinky, sexual behavior."

In recent years, there have been calls to broaden the reach of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to monitor both the Internet and cable material. Sen. John (Jay) Rockefeller (D) of West Virginia, for example, promises to introduce a bill that would allow the FCC to curb violence on cable and satellite TV. But Congress has historically had limited ability to regulate cable programs because, unlike network shows, they aren't broadcast on publicly owned airwaves. Most observers say that such calls are just political saber-rattling as it would be difficult to craft regulations that wouldn't violate free-speech protections.

Ironically, says Greenberg, such posturing may actually be producing the opposite effect. "Threats of censorship may be emboldening cable programmers to flex their muscles a bit, to push the envelope to show how far they can go," he says.

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