When TV Attacks!
Let 2010 be remembered as the first time the $-word was used in the title of a broadcast network sitcom.
No, not the s-word. Not technically, anyway. We're talking about the $-word, as in CBS' upcoming $#*! My Dad Says. The comedy, starring William Shatner, is based on Justin Halpern's more explicitly titled Twitter feed that boasts 1.3 million followers—slightly more people than watched ABC's Wife Swap a couple of weeks ago.
With that sort of online following, it's little wonder CBS convinced itself that Halpern's 140-character tweets could somehow be fleshed out into a full-blown, 30-minute sitcom. Hey, if Halpern can milk a book out them, then why not a TV show, too? Besides, these are desperate days for broadcast television, and network suits are trying to capitalize on every shiny Internet bauble that catches their eye. I half expect Greyson Chance to be hosting his own NBC talk show by October.
But that desperation also may have encouraged CBS to retain, as nearly as it could, Halpern's vulgar title. Sure, to be fair, the symbol-laden title connects the show more solidly with the Twitter stream. But it also generates something else: controversy. And, in today's messy media landscape, controversy has become a precious commodity indeed.
Make It Go Boom!
We're suckers for sensationalism. We love the different, the unusual, the extravagantly out-of-the-norm. Blame it on natural instinct, the sin nature or a bad upbringing, but almost all of us are more likely to take notice when a car's on fire than when it just sits there. After all, you see cars "sit" all the time. It's a rare day you see one go boom.
The entertainment industry knows all about humankind's fascination for exploding cars. That's why movie directors like Michael Bay spend more on pyrotechnics than many European countries spend on defense.
But entertainment moguls have also learned that you can't literally blow up a car every time you want some attention. And frankly, it'd seem downright silly to torch a Civic in every episode of The Office.
Enter the concept of controversy-as-sales-tool—the marketing department's version of an exploding car. It's no coincidence that big controversies, filled with lots of messy confrontations, are sometimes compared to fireworks: They're bright, they're noisy and they invariably grab our attention by the scruff of the neck.
Of course it's not just the "bad guys" who trot out controversy to sell sleazy stuff. Controversies, both large and small, were used to market The Passion of the Christ ("Is it anti-Semitic?" "Is it too violent?") and Facing the Giants ("It's rated PG for spiritual elements!"). Even Focus on the Family (of which Plugged In is a part) embraced the controversy surrounding its 2010 Super Bowl ad featuring Tim Tebow. The spot became the most talked-about ad leading up to the big game, which multiplied its impact exponentially.
But perhaps there's a difference between capitalizing on controversy and creating controversy for its own sake—the difference, really, between Jenny making a provocative speech in her college class and Jimmy standing up and mooning everyone. And lately, television has been doing a whole lot of mooning.
Pay Attention to Me!
Again, I understand the impulse here: If your livelihood depended on attracting attention, you might be tempted to moon, too. I'd hope better inclinations would prevail, of course—but the temptation would be there.
Thirty years ago, television didn't need much controversy to sell itself. Most Americans only had three channels they could watch, which gave the major networks a sense of security. Now there are hundreds of cable channels out there, not to mention the oodles of content available online—and much of the most successful content is pretty edgy. To compete, networks sometimes feel the need to get edgier, too—even if it's just for the sake of being edgy.
And so, programs such as CW's Gossip Girl and Comedy Central's South Park have learned to leverage controversy so well that they've turned it into a near art form. Gossip Girl has been pushing salacious content since its 2007 inception—from gay smooches to sexual threesomes—and has sold itself not as a quality show that happens to be filled with sex, but as a sex-filled show that sometimes manages to color in some quality around the edges. While discerning families could, of course, choose not to watch, its ads are harder to avoid. One year, print ads for the show featured the anagram "OMFG," with F standing for exactly what you'd assume it would. The following season, spreads featured a "WTF" tagline. Again with the F standing for exactly what you'd assume it would. When the Parents Television Council called the show "mind-blowingly inappropriate," the creators of Gossip Girl turned the tables and used the PTC's condemnation in subsequent advertising.
South Park's controversies have been, arguably, more germaine to its satirical core. When its creators place Muhammad in a bear suit, as they did in April, they're trying to say something about the nature of organized religion. But they're also desperately trying to be controversial, even shocking—a mindset that fell firmly into place during the show's very first season when the "joke" started about Kenny getting killed every episode. Eventually, South Park stopped killing him off—not because it was too controversial, but because it wasn't any longer. "Shock value, it turns out, ages like a banana," wrote Culture 11's Kyle Smith at the time.
But Gossip Girl and South Park are far from the only shows to try to create controversy, then capitalize on it. The PTC says that profanity on broadcast television nearly doubled between 1998 and 2007. "Broadcast standards have become so permissive that the term is now an oxymoron," PTC president Tim Winter said.
Which, in light of $#*! My Dad Says, feels almost prophetic.
Fire! Return Fire! Fire Again!
"How does the V-chip block this one?" asked Winter after CBS announced their new series. "Where does this figure into the absurd defense of 'fleeting' profanity? The title of this show is the opposite of fleeting—it is bold, shameless and in-your-face. … The PTC will not stand silent and allow this program title to become the new accepted norm."
The PTC's concern, of course, is exactly what CBS is counting on. And so is this article, for that matter. After all, I'm not writing about The Defenders or Blue Bloods or Mike & Molly or any of the other new shows CBS is introducing this fall. I'm writing about the one with the swear word in the title. The one that's standing in for the big car explosion. The one that's guaranteed to be among the most talked-about shows in 2010.
Does that mean it'll be a huge hit? That tens of millions of folks will tune in each week? You'd think the logic would hold and the answer would always be yes. But it doesn't. And it's not.
Consider: A new episode of Gossip Girl earned, on May 17, a 1.3 rating, according to Nielsen. That placed it in a tie for the 94th-most popular broadcast program of the week—below such Spanish-language programs as Univision's Hasta Dinero Separe and Don Francisco Presenta. For all its cultural traction, South Park doesn't fair much better. About a month earlier, when that show aired its most recent new episode (and right after the Muhammad controversy peaked), it came in at No. 33 on the cable chart—behind eight airings of SpongeBob SquarePants. In its press release, PTC said it had waged similar wars against such shows as Dexter and Swingtown. The former doesn't thrive, it survives on Showtime. The latter died an ungraceful death after just a few episodes. Did PTC's opposition help CBS' Swingtown along to its premature demise? Perhaps—but it might've also been hurt by the fact that it was pretty lame.
Sure, we may be suckers for sensationalism. Sure, we may be attracted to controversy. But, as Smith says, shock has a short shelf life.
Sadly, networks—those on broadcast television and cable—seem to truly grasp this salient fact. We continually hear how shows must continually push the envelope to attract an audience—how we must be shocked again and again, because the previous shocks we've been dealt have so desensitized us. Which means that, even if $#*! My Dad Says fails miserably, I doubt this is the last we'll seen of titles full of symbols. And then titles not full of symbols. Perhaps the day is soon coming in which broadcast networks will no longer be compelled to control bad language at all.
Why? Because television is desperate. Networks will do almost anything to draw a little attention to themselves. And they're ready and willing to blow up a million cars to try to get the job done.