Daily Archives: April 22, 2014

When Did HBO Become the Sex Channel?

Television, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
I've been in love with her since the first time we met in ancient England, but that doesn't mean I want to see her having sex with other people
I’ve been in love with her since the first time we met in ancient England, but that doesn’t mean I want to see her having sex with other people

One of the more popular shows in America right now is Game of Thrones, which airs specifically on HBO. It’s a pretty decent show, has great acting and writing, and can definitely tell a story. Well, I could probably say that about most HBO shows that I’ve watched over the years, and that includes The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome, True Blood and the Wire. These were all great shows.

One thing that distinguished most of these shows from regular network programming is that they were on HBO, and as a result, they could sometimes be a bit more risque than your usual show. This usually meant nudity, sexual situations, drug references and possibly violence (although violence is the one area that regular networks have little problem glorifying). But something changed over the years, and I think what has happened is that the programmers at HBO are now more interested in glorifying sex than in actually telling a story that involves sexual situations. I know that sounds like I’m saying the same thing, but I really think there’s something to this.

Let’s look at the time when this started to change. The show True Blood has always been a bit on the edge when it comes to sexual situations. However, a few seasons into its run, the story line, which used to be the center of the show (the underworld of the vampire universe) somehow turned into sex central, to where the main story seemed much more about who Sookie Stackhouse was going to fuck, or who amongst the rest of the cast was going to have sex with someone else. So they started introducing female on female sex, male on male sex, animal on human sex, animal on animal sex, hybrid animals on hybrid animals of different genders having sex, and don’t get me wrong but somewhere down the line I think they were experimenting with mermaids, fairies and werewolves. I’d say they kind of jumped the shark, but so far they haven’t tried to have sex with a shark yet. I imagine that’s in the next season.

Basically, what this has developed is a sense that HBO is on the edge when it comes to sex so that it’s treating it like the new violence variable that network programming used to do, and by that I mean that every season to television around the 1980s was designed to push the envelope on violence to see what they could get away with. HBO, having gone completely over the edge with violence in its shows, is now trying to push the very boundaries of sex with its series.

Last week, HBO crossed the line with Game of Thrones by going way overboard with rape. One of the main characters raped his sister near the dead body of her son in a very nonconsensual rape scene that the director Alex Graves, indicated was his favorite scene he’s ever done.  The problem I perceive is that he’s so enamored with how he’s overstepped the boundary of decency that he believes that he’s taken the show (and the network) in a positive direction, when in fact he’s actually done the entire genre a complete disservice. There was a story a few weeks ago of a woman who was sued by an affiliate of HBO for refusing to do a topless sex scene.  The commentary on that story from the readers is amazing, but I’ll let you read into that yourself. To sum up, basically people are upset at the actress because she signed a contract to appear naked and do sex for a television role.

My question is to ask why a sex scene is all that necessary to a particular story line. As a writer, I understand that sometimes sex is a necessary element to move a narrative along, but I can’t remember ever writing a sex scene because I started thinking “I really need to spice up this book”. And that’s the problem I think we’re running into because I believe a lot of the sex we’re seeing on the screen these days is just bad writing that takes the lazy way out of a plot device that they didn’t want to waste time trying to create. I remember once, in my earlier days of writing, where I actually found myself having to figure a way OUT of a sexual situation in one of my stories because I realized the sex would have been too easy to write for that scene, and I actually reached a far better place for the story by having the sexual situation avoided by the main characters (which brought a lot more drama to the moment than if they did the deed).

What I do know is that quite often when I’m watching a television show and it moves off into sex mode, I often find myself doing other things than watching the show because I find the “sex” in a television show to be very uninteresting. And it’s not because I’m a prude; I’m about as far away from that as possible. It’s because if I want to watch porn, I’ll watch porn. When I turn on the television set to watch drama, I want to watch drama, not ten minutes of young people trying to simulate copulation on the screen (or actually doing it, which is often even worse). I know there are some people who watch certain shows just in hopes of seeing some actress or actor naked, but I’m not one of them. Maybe when I was 13 and hadn’t seen all that many naked women in my time, but these days I need real narrative elements to get me going, and watching sex on the screen rarely does that for me.

The Ignorance of the American Public in an Age Where People Think an Opinion is Knowledge

Business, Technology, , , , , , ,
We're #1! Yep, we're proving ourselves stupid again.
We’re #1! Yep, we’re proving ourselves stupid again.

There’s an interesting article that’s making the news today from Gfk Public Affairs & Corporate Communications that states that 51 percent of Americans question the Big Bang Theory. Teaching political science at a community college, I have no problem adding that if you asked those same people surveyed if they even knew how to explain the Big Bang Theory, chances are pretty good that you’d get a bunch of clueless responses. You see, I think something much worse is happening than people are squeamish on current accepted scientific knowledge; I think the real problem is that not only do people not know what’s current in scientific knowledge, but they believe that because they have an opinion, that somehow that’s some kind of knowledge, too.

Let me explain. Some years ago, I was working for a hotel back when I got out of the service. A young woman who worked in human resources was engaging me in a conversation one day in the employee cafeteria, where she was explaining to me why she thought that I was incorrect for indicating that the time line was not 2000 years old until December 31, 2000, rather than on the day the world counted as January 1, 2000. In other words, my argument was that for a full 2000 years to pass, you have to actually finish the 2000th year. Anyway, regardless of who was right or wrong, she explained that I couldn’t be correct because “the majority of people think the way she thinks” as opposed to the “bizarre” interpretation that I was giving. I then explained that scientific knowledge is not survey based, and she made some really strange response of how most people wouldn’t think that (the irony of that response didn’t escape me then either).

This is how I see the current state of knowledge in the United States today. People no longer rely on evidence or even on scientific theory but think that if they can argue some kind of rudimentary logic, then it must be as good an explanation than if you were to offer formal proofs. I believe part of the problem stems from science’s mistaken usage of the word “theory”, which causes so many people to think that the “theory of evolution” is just a theory, which to them means it has as much ground as the “theory of imaginative fiction” because the word “theory” is involved.

I was watching this week’s COSMOS, and I would like to say that it brought up something brilliant that so few people will latch onto. And that was the struggle that geochemist Clair Patterson underwent when he was trying to prove lead poisoning was killing people in the 20th century. What the episode did a great job of exposing was how easy it was for one doctor, on the payroll of the lead industry, was able to convince so many people that lead wasn’t a problem, when today there’s not a scientist alive who wouldn’t claim it was killing people in the way it was being used in industry. If that episode did anything for the future, I hope that it got people to pay closer attention to what big business tries to “sell” as “safe” whenever there’s something that should be scrutinized a lot more before being made mainstream. But we’re stupid people, which means we’ll take “experts” at their word, conduct surveys of the rest of us who don’t know better, and continue to enrich people who don’t care if they kill us while they profit off our dead bodies.