Puretaboo Matters Into Her Own Hands

X kind of free expression, who's to say. We're back in his office, watching the big guy with the cigar pull up to a tollbooth on the New Jersey Turnpike as a videotaped episode of "The Sopranos" begins. Puretaboo matters into her own hands say yeah. The "Father Knows Best" episode we're watching dates from 1956, and it unfolds as follows: Betty signs up for a school-sponsored internship with a surveying crew, disguising her gender by using her initials, then dashes home to tell her family about her career choice. The two of us have settled in to talk in his fourth-floor office at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications -- books lining one wall, videotapes the other, two small televisions tuned to different channels with the sound off -- and TV Bob, as I've taken to calling him in my head, is riffing on the notion that I'm the kind of endangered species that might prove invaluable to science if you could somehow just keep it from dying out. And he explains the genius of centering what is, ultimately, a fairly grim domestic drama around a Mafia capo.

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Because the most problematic thing about TV is its invasiveness, its tyrannical domination of our "domestic space. The low point of my cable experience, however -- the moment that makes me want to turn one of Tony Soprano's hit men loose on those responsible, just as Tony himself almost did with his daughter's child-molesting soccer coach -- occurs when I stumble onto Howard Stern and his entourage deciding which of two contestants should get free breast implants. And these very different stances put each of us at odds with the majority of Americans, who have chosen -- consciously or unconsciously, willingly or grudgingly -- neither to reject TV nor to closely examine it, but to go with the overpowering cultural flow. It's true that I was starting to have reservations about the smutty jokes -- the thing was airing so early that pre-K viewership was probably significant -- but all in all, I was having a pretty good time. Puretaboo matters into her own hands say. Should "The Simpsons" be mentioned in the same breath with Mark Twain? But some of us are having a really hard time adjusting. How can I judge the show, I tell myself, if I haven't seen it all? And before long Buffy is just a fading memory, a casual acquaintance to be looked up, perhaps, the next time I'm in a hotel room without a good book to read.

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"What it shares in common with God is omnipresence, " he says. Halfway through, I was ready to give the whole project up. What an odd thing, I think, once I've had time to digest this, that we two Bobs ever pegged ourselves as opposites. Would you choose to do that as well? And I've seen a sweet, nostalgic episode of "The Andy Griffith Show, " set in the fictional town of Mayberry.

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"Fastlane" will show you sexy people with guns and lots of stuff blowing up -- check it out! We didn't miss them, and over the next 11 years, we threw one out and the other rarely emerged. He has an awesome ability to hold forth indefinitely, on almost any subject, without appearing to pause for breath. Still, I managed to decode the joke. To even begin to replicate my experience, I'd have to interrupt this story, oh, every three or four paragraphs with italicized blather about cell phones, Viagra, fajitas, upcoming TV shows or -- whatever. After one "big-bang" of a kiss, he knows he can't let her go home. Puretaboo matters into her own hands chords. Again, other shows rushed to imitate the successful innovator: first the 1980s "quality" shows, which saw taboo-busting as one way to distinguish themselves from ordinary television, and then, seemingly minutes later, ordinary television itself. 'We're Completely Headed in the Wrong Direction'. I'm not quite ready to concede the point -- heck, we haven't even gotten to "Ally McBeal" -- but I am ready to draw a sweeping conclusion about the bizarre gender stew on television today: Women's role in American society is a whole lot different than it was 50 years ago. I remember, from my own experience as a college student in those days, the vivid sense that there really were two cultures in America, and that no one knew what the resolution of their conflict would be. I feel insecure about judging this vast educational and entertainment medium without sampling a bit of everything. "We should keep you pure! " We can hook all those hipsters who think irony makes them immune.

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'Even a Mob Guy Couldn't Take It Anymore'. Soren came to Earth to ensure the survival of his people, but now he has one desire: to possess the brave and irresistible Bianca. I've chuckled though "Burns & Allen" and "I Love Lucy, " including the episode in which Lucy miraculously gives birth despite the fact that she's not allowed to use the word "pregnant" on the air. Think about the "Father Knows Best" era and all it entailed, he says, then look at what we've got now -- MTV, breast jokes and women playing tough cops, doctors and lawyers all included -- and ask yourself: Which would you prefer? But then "this other stuff starts happening. "The Man Was Raped! " Naturally, of course -- every hair on my hea-ea-EAD! "On one level, this could be any schlub's commute, complete with the minutiae of the ticket. " And it doesn't come close to what a director like Robert Altman can layer into a film. And here was a guy with my name on the precise opposite extreme -- someone who not only watched TV incessantly, but had devoted a professional lifetime to analyzing and celebrating what he found there. It's able to penetrate everything. I find myself getting fond of "American Dreams, " a surprisingly nuanced new NBC series built around boomer nostalgia.

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Sometimes it was just the speed of the cutting that got to me: I wasn't used to this stuff, and could barely follow the images as they flashed by. In fact, if there's one thing the Professor and I have agreed on from the start, it's this: You can't understand post-World War II America without it. Never mind the graphic sex and violence (though you definitely don't want your 10-year-old to watch), and never mind the Mafia stuff. But horror comes in other flavors, too. "Showdown: Iraq, " shouts the headline on CNN when the "Gunsmoke" tape ends and the TV kicks back on. He's so used to trotting out this defense for television transgressions, in fact, that it takes him a minute to understand that I agree with him. What's more, the Professor tells me, it was part of a wider television revolution, the biggest in broadcasting history, which went way beyond just the portrayal of women. The former is a tedious drama about adultery. Does Spam have a hip new ad campaign? "Mary Tyler Moore" is hardly radical feminism. Still to come: TV Bob names the Best Television Series Ever! The very best is a two-part episode built around several layers of flashback, each presented using the film technology of its time.

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"Suicide Bombers Are Loose in America! " A news report on a survey in which many parents say they're doing a poor job of teaching their kids values and character and about 25 percent say they've seriously thought of getting rid of their televisions. And speaking of eternal punishment... "Ten women, only six roses, " the breathless announcer intones. So I decided to keep going and watch "Friends, " which was the very first show my girls mentioned when I asked what TV their sixth- and seventh-grade pals talked about. There were "The Dean Martin Show" and "The Red Skelton Show, " and there was "Bewitched, " in which a beautiful woman with supernatural powers tries to renounce them, at her husband's insistence, in order to be a normal suburban housewife. Taco Bell will make sexy girls think you're cool -- check it out! As usual, the Professor is a font of helpful information.

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Because at its core, the show is about a middle-aged American everyman attempting to protect his family from the poisonous culture that surrounds them while simultaneously grappling, at least halfheartedly, with the inherent contradictions in his own life. "I'm not going to be okay, " she says. My family is starting to look at me funny when I retreat to my tube-equipped study. I can't imagine what the Professor of Television could possibly say that would redeem this dreck. As TV Bob himself points out, the slogan "It's not television -- it's HBO" was adopted for good reason. And yet, as I listen to TV Bob describe the changes those CBS executives ushered in -- he compares them to an earthquake caused by the shifting of a culture's tectonic plates -- I find myself nodding my head. By now, I'm fully prepared to grant "The Sopranos" this exalted status -- in fact, I'm more than a little embarrassed about being the last person in America to discover the show. "This evening's gut-wrenching, man, " Aaron says. If you could go back in time, he says, and somehow ensure that nuclear weapons were never invented, that's something you'd almost certainly want to do. There was "Gomer Pyle, USMC, " a show about the Marines that never mentioned Vietnam.

I'm watching TV pretty steadily now, between work on another project and visits to Syracuse. "We do see all of these shows where these kind of frumpy, failure, ugly, inefficient men are married to these beautiful, efficient, wonderful women, " he notes. If TV used to be a parallel universe because of what it left out, it has now become a parallel universe because of what it allows. Fifteen years ago, not long after he got his PhD, the idea of teaching television to college students was new enough that "60 Minutes" sent a film crew to do a raised-eyebrow segment on the subject. Later, I was to learn from TV Bob that it's routine for high-grade television shows to diss their own medium; TV's reputation for mindlessness is so pervasive that any production with pretensions to quality has to distance itself somehow. Who gets to slow-dance onstage at the Hollywood Bowl. Give me a mob boss in therapy, anytime. You can vroom with wolves, zoom through deserts, slalom across snowfields and -- climb Mount Everest? Take the ubiquitous SUV ads, with their macho fantasies of dominating the natural world. But after one scorching, forbidden kiss, she'll risk everything to be with him. It's a few weeks after the Professor left his cosmic hypothetical hanging, and I'm hunched in front of the tube again, gearing up for the grand finale. Sure enough, the doorbell rings and in comes a handsome college kid from the surveying crew, who delivers an impassioned speech to Betty's father. So I'm truly startled when he formulates what I've come to think of as the Ultimate TV Hypothetical. I haven't watched much on PBS, for example (though I did catch one "Sesame Street" segment the point of which was that -- guess what, kids!

True, I've heard good things about "Six Feet Under, " which I never manage to catch, but I do drop in on two other HBO offerings, "The Mind of the Married Man" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm. " I try this theory out on TV Bob, carelessly dropping the loaded phrase "sexual harassment, " and he responds immediately with the First Amendment slippery slope argument (if we ban. The "reality" trend was newer then, and the idea behind this particular mutation, as you may recall, was to have seductive single types try to destroy the relationships of committed couples. I wanted to do an article, I told him, in which I would try to understand television from his point of view. It's late afternoon when we finish our conversation, and the Professor's office is unusually quiet.

Sun, 28 Jul 2024 23:48:47 +0000