Editorial

What’s Good on TV? Not Much, We’re Afraid

Posted

Longtime television viewers were saddened last week with news of the deaths of Richard Johnson, who played the nerdy Professor on “Gilligan’s Island,” and Dave Madden, who was the grumpy talent agent Reuben Kincaid on “The Partridge Family.”

Neither of them were the headliners of their respective television sitcoms—the 1964-67 “Gilligan’s Island,” which is still around in reruns, and 1970-74’s “The Partridge Family.” But both actors played familiar and important characters and, most importantly, were warmly regarded by their fans.

Their deaths, Johnson at age 89 and Madden at 82, brought back a lot of memories for many of us, memories of a time when prime-time television was loaded with smart, funny and entertaining fare that a family could look forward to and sit down together to watch and enjoy.

Is this a lead-in to a nostalgic yearning for a golden age that was (A) not so golden and (B) won’t return anyway? Not exactly.

Certainly, no one wants to return to the days when the word “pregnant” could not be mentioned on television and married couples were always shown in twin beds. Not to mention the near-total absence of minorities, persons with disabilities or anyone else outside of a sanitized vision of “mainstream.”

In fact, family-friendly television did not die out when Gilligan ended its first run. The excellent “Seventh Heaven,” 1996-2007, for instance, beat out both “Little House on the Prairie” and “The Waltons” to become the longest-running family drama series in TV history. Even today, a handful of shows, like “The Michael J. Fox Show” and “The Middle,” might fill that bill. But they, and a few others, are the exception.

The fact is that one has to look long and hard to find anything on network or basic cable TV that’s intelligent enough, tasteful enough and entertaining enough to engage a mixed-age group.

One would not have to look very far, on the other hand, to find graphic sex, even more graphic violence, unrestrained profanity and overall tastelessness offered on television today.

Instead of upbeat and witty sitcoms in the 8-9 p.m. family viewing time slot, we have CBS’s raunchy “2 Broke Girls,” which is drawing scores of F.C.C. complaints, with one complainer calling it “soft porn.”

Or the zombie hordes and graphic violence of “The Walking Dead,” a teenage favorite in the much-watched 9 p.m. Sunday slot.

Indeed, the Parents Television Council, a group advocating responsible entertainment, last month released a report timed to the one-year anniversary of the Newtown, Conn., school shootings, which examined 14 high-rated broadcast and cable shows and found that “The Walking Dead” averaged 136.5 acts of violence per hour of programming. In the four hours of programming studied for the report, viewers witnessed 202 dead bodies, 82 stabbings, 52 individuals injured or killed by gunfire, 90 guns, 80 bladed weapons, 33 decapitations and more.

After the Parents Council contacted it during the study, AMC changed the rating of “The Walking Dead” from TV-14 to TV-MA, for mature audiences.

But that doesn’t do anything to change the sickening and crude TV lineup that we have today, and we urge all who share our views to make them heard.

It may not be realistic to expect a high-rated, moneymaking show to be canceled, no matter how offensive. But it certainly is possible to support high-quality entertainment for a broad-based viewership.