IT MAY HAVE BEEN THE FIRST TIME the words “Starsky and Hutch” have been uttered in the White House State Dining Room. The moment came during President Clinton’s meeting last week with 31 top television executives. They had been summoned to discuss children’s programming and an overall ratings system for sex and violence on TV. One of the assembled honchos expressed the opinion that sophisticated shows like “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “ER” demonstrate how far TV has come since the the gratuitously violent days of “Starsky and Hutch.” Clinton, seated at the head of the table under a portrait of Lincoln, came to the defense of that famously cheesy ’70s cop show. “I’m someone who has a deep emotional attachment to “Starsky and Hutch’,” the president said.
Not that deep. His summit with Hollywood’s power elite was the payoff of Clinton’s Jan. 23 State of the Union call for a V-chip that would let viewers block out “Starsky”-style violence (interview, page 62). After years of resisting government regulation of the content of its programming, the TV industry has now been pressured by new FCC legislation to regulate itself. “We’re voluntarily having to comply,” the always candid cable magnate Ted Turner drawled.
Comply with what, exactly, is still not clear. In a statement as sanitized as any government document, industry leaders vowed to implement by next January some form of ratings along the lines of the G, PG-13, R code used by the Motion Picture Association of America. Each broadcast network, cable service or syndicator would police itself. The system will be devised by a group headed by MPAA president Jack Valenti, who did it for the movies 27 years ago. (News and sports would probably be exempt.) People who’ve lost the power or will to monitor their kids’ viewing habits will now have a technological surrogate. Such is parenting in the digital age. As one high-ranking White House official joked at the meeting, “My father’s idea of a V-chip was a kick in the ass.”
The political war on pop culture has taken many forms over the last decade. Tipper Gore’s PARENTAL ADVISORY sticker campaign. Dan Quayle attacking “Murphy Brown.” Bill Bennett crusading against trash talk shows and Bob Dole lambasting Hollywood’s “nightmares of depravity.” Now this. Newt Gingrich, who had previously gone to bat for the TV industry against government intervention, wasn’t about to let the White House claim the moral high ground. He invited execs to schmooze congressmen with expertise in the field (Sonny Bono) at a summit of his own the morning of the Clinton meeting. But political capital isn’t the only kind at stake here; by generating good will with the Feds, TV types hope it’ll cost them less when the new digital channel spectrum opens up.
Our relationship to TV has always been complex. Now it will get even more so. Polls have demonstrated the public’s increasing dissatisfaction with the levels of sex and violence on TV, but somebody’s watching Chuck Norris kick bad guys in the head on “Walker, Texas Ranger.” And can a nation that still doesn’t know how to program its VCR figure out a V-chip? A test group of Canadian viewers did. Betty Hulleman, an Edmonton, Alta., nurse in her 40s, swears by the remote-control TV “lock” that fits on her key chain. Because her six grandchildren spend a lot of time at her house, she volunteered for a trial run of a gizmo that blocks out programs she doesn’t want them to watch. “I think it’s great,” Hulleman says. “The V-chip has made the whole family more aware of what the kids should watch.” The cable companies hope to make their V-chip widely available in Canada by July. The American version will be built into every new set by 1997. But the current chip hysteria may be premature: it’ll take at least 10 years before everyone’s traded up to a V-set.
Besides, Canadians have always been less violent than Americans (certain hockey players notwithstanding). Would it work here? University of Wisconsin professor Joanne Cantor says she “would strongly advise against a system based on MPAA ratings.” Her research for the recently released National Television Violence Study (funded by a U.S. cable group) discovered that for kids making decisions without their parents’ supervision, labeling can be a “magnet,” not a deterrent. “We found that “Parental Discretion Advised’ and PG-13 and R ratings significantly increased boys’ interest.” Some girls, too. One of them quoted in the study said, “The cooler the movie, the higher the rating.” Sounds like a line from “Beavis and Butt-head,” the relentlessly naughty MTV cartoon that might well be slapped with an R.
A bigger problem may be how to rate 2,000 hours of TV programming a day. That’s twice as much as the movies produce in an entire year. “Series television doesn’t lend itself to a graduated ratings process,” says media mogul Barry Diller. “The most you can say is: “All comedies have some sex; be advised. All dramas have some violence; be advised’.” The study Cantor took part in found violence in 57 percent of all TV programs, but stressed what many studies do not: context. “We should be distinguishing between “Schindler’s List’ and “Terminator 2’,” she says. And what about cartoon violence? Steven Spielberg, who produces the popular “Animaniacs” cartoon series, says, “We put dynamite in a character’s pants. I don’t want to lose the right to blow up someone’s butt.” Spielberg believes in the V-chip but worries that a ratings system could cause an “overreaction where we all go back to a kind of provincial morality.”
Ted Turner agrees. He predicts we’re in for “more “Brady Bunch’-type programming.” Or more G-rated pap like ABC’s new series “Second Noah,” a sanitized family drama cluttered with cute kids and cuter animals. Some think ratings might give programmers license to air shows with more sex and violence, now that it would be labeled as such. But advertisers have shown their reluctance to attach their products to racy shows like “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” which already has an advisory warning. So it seems unlikely they’d jump at the chance to sponsor an NC-17-rated “Howard Stern Nude Lesbian Hour.”
While most of the rhetoric last week was about TV violence, what’s freaked many viewers out in the past year has been the increasingly raunchy sitcoms on at 8 o’clock. This was a time slot once reserved for innocuous kid stuff. But on “Friends” there’ve been jokes about “threesomes”–a menage a Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston and Jean-Claude Van Damme–and a plot revolving around premature ejaculation. Helen Hunt, the costar of “Mad About You” (another 8 o’clock show), was recently shown abusing a washing machine for sexual pleasure. Sen. Ernest Hollings has been pushing for a “safe harbor” family period of clean programming in prime time, but Clinton didn’t push such a plan during his meeting with the TV executives. Ratings and V-chips probably won’t banish all the bad stuff from your TV screen. But they might prevent that awkward moment when your 7-year-old asks, “Daddy, what’s a threesome?”
