Every day American TV executives awake to this toughening challenge: What can we do to take TV and America a little bit lower? What hasn’t yet been done? What kind of new low can we shove into American homes, even if we wouldn’t want it in our own?
It’s tough because there’s not much lower left.
We’re already on the top of the bottom, scooping up ooze and sifting through sludge for inspiration to mold into “entertainment” designed to bypass all the better senses and shoot directly for the crotch.
We noted here in this space, a few weeks back, that HBO, stuck for anything better, has a new comedy based on the size of a high-school basketball coach’s penis. The show is entitled “Hung” — clever, eh? — and it’s filled with crude genitalia references that reasonably right-headed folks left behind in junior high school.
Marginally, however, the show, because it’s presented at 10 p.m. on Sundays, is aimed at marginal adults.
But now MTV, which is aimed at kids and teens and used to specialize in music but is now fully devoted to programming that desensitizes young Americans, has added its own penis-based show. It’s brilliantly named, “Hard Times,” and it’s about a 15-year-old whose social existence is predicated on his abnormally large penis. No, I’m not kidding.
“Hard Times” and MTV’s many other sex, sex and more sex programming, all of it primarily aimed at teens, should not be confused with “16 & Pregnant.” That’s an MTV documentary produced in conjunction with The National Campaign To Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
Such hideously mixed messages are nothing new for MTV. A few years back, sandwiched between videos of gangsta rappers chanting odes to their Glocks and assault rifles, MTV aired a public service documentary that encouraged young Americans to stop the violence.
What else is there to write? It speaks for itself. We’ve hit the sludge and ooze layer. There’s not much left after that. Soon, nothing will be beneath us.
The only hope can be found in the words of Homer Simpson (or was it Chief Wiggum?) who, after he and friends had dug a hole too deep from which to escape, hollered, “Dig up!”
* * *
Watching that Michael Jackson memorial service — what else was on? — got me to thinking:
For starters, if powerful and influential folks including Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson made it clear — especially to cameramen — that they were always there for Michael, how is it that he died wasted away and loaded with drugs at 50? Where were they 25, 30 pounds and several prescription drugs ago?
Did they serve Michael Jackson or did Michael Jackson serve them?
Sharpton brought widespread approval from his audience when he declared to Jackson’s children, “There wasn’t anything strange about your Daddy. What was strange was what he had to deal with.”
Really? And so Sharpton and his approving audience, in recognition of Jackson’s great affection for children, would now be happy to kick in to fund “The Michael Jackson Memorial Day Care Center and Sleep-Away Camp”? Really?
Or, if that wouldn’t be a wise investment, why not?
And it was interesting to hear Magic Johnson’s tribute, during which he credited Jackson with helping to make him a superior basketball player: “I truly believe that Michael Jackson made me a better point guard and basketball player as I watched him be so great.”
As reader Dick Syriac of Lenox, Ma. wrote, then how come during Johnson’s 2002 Basketball Hall of Fame induction speech he didn’t mention Jackson? Johnson that day thanked God, but not a word about Michael Jackson.
Oh, well, it’s like the gag heard in our household when the uneasy topic of death is broached.
Kids: Dad, what kind of funeral would you like?
Dad: Surprise me.