Where Are the Censors?

By Richard Zoglin

Explicit sex! Full frontal nudity! Rampant blood and gore! No, network TV still does not allow such things into the American home. But ABC, CBS and NBC have grabbed viewers' attention this fall with a surprising amount of racy material and have prompted new questions about whether network standards of "good taste" are starting to crumble.

NBC's political thriller Favorite Son sparked a minor furor with suggestive scenes of bondage and other kinky sex. Geraldo Rivera put a few noses out of joint with his grisly NBC special on satanic cults. Male strippers flaunted their pecs and pelvises in the ABC movie Ladykillers, while NBC's The F.B.I. Murders culminated in perhaps the longest and bloodiest shoot-out in TV history. Even the classy ABC mini-series War and Remembrance turned off some viewers with its graphic scenes of Nazi atrocities.

This upsurge in openness has been linked by some critics to cutbacks in the network departments of standards and practices -- the censors who review shows and commercials for offensive (and potentially litigious) material. During the networks' recent wave of cost cutting, the ranks of these watchdogs were drastically reduced: from a peak of 75 to 80 per network during the 1970s to 35 to 40 today at ABC and fewer than 30 each at CBS and NBC.

Network executives deny any cause-and-effect relationship between the staff cutbacks and greater permissiveness. True, standards-and-practices people no longer read every script or attend every taping. But shows are still vetted by program executives, who alert the censors to potential problems. "We changed the mechanism, but we did not change the standards," says Alan Gerson, who heads the remnants of NBC's standards division. Indeed, most of this fall's bolder shows were written and reviewed before most of the recent cutbacks.

Yet some relaxation of standards appears to be taking place, partly in response to competition from cable, where explicit material is commonplace. "The networks have seen their share of the audience erode, and I think there is a tacit approval to go a little further," says Robert Singer, an executive producer of the new NBC series Midnight Caller. Network viewers today can see a sliver more nudity than they once could (though only from the rear), hear a few more dirty words (though usually later in the evening), and see bullets actually hitting bodies -- all scenes that once were forbidden.

Some of the changes seem laughably overdue. One daytime soap producer, observing that network censors no longer monitor his show regularly, says he is more likely to approve language that was once prohibited: "It used to be that you couldn't say, 'My God!' I let it go by now. You could say 'hell,' but you couldn't say, 'You go to hell.' I would allow that now."

Network standards remain far more conservative than those of some cable channels, not to mention feature films, and there is currently much skittishness about certain subjects, particularly drug use. But the networks' traditional hard-line approach appears to be easing. "We are no longer shackled by general prohibitions," says Matthew Margo, CBS vice president for program practices. "We look at the specific context of a show."

Of course, battles between producers and censors continue to rage. "We have discussions with them every week about various lines," says Marshall Herskovitz, co-executive producer of ABC's thirtysomething. "Network TV still has a terrible attitude toward sex." With regard to political controversy too, the networks seem as timid as ever. Shootdown, the recent NBC movie about the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, was altered at network insistence to soften its charges of a U.S. Government cover-up. Midnight Caller, already the target of protests from homosexual groups over a segment on AIDS airing next week, was forced to tone down the anti-capital punishment message in another upcoming episode. The network menu may be getting spicier, but bland still seems to be the flavor of choice.

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/Los Angeles and William Tynan/New York