Feeling empty because with the Super Bowl and the NCAA tournament over, there are no more office pools?
Here’s a suggestion: Guess which “NYPD Blue” character will say the S-word this week.
It’s a lock to happen. Every new episode of the long-running ABC series, you can absolutely count on it, usually right around 10:30 p.m. EDT. The S-word is such a regular character, you half-expect to see it get a screen credit.
The only suspense is which character will say it, because so far the writers have passed it around.
Dennis Franz’s Andy Sipowicz was one of the first, of course, but Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s John Clark Jr. got it one week and so did Jacqueline Obradors’ Rita Ortiz. And Henry Simmons’ Baldwin Jones.
Say, is that Bill Brochtrup’s Upstairs John warming up his vocal cords backstage?
For “NYPD Blue” viewers, of course, the S-word isn’t a big leap. Ten years ago, “a-h-” was unheard on prime-time TV. Now, thanks largely to Sipowicz, it’s as common as lottery ads.
The S-word also fits the “NYPD Blue” characters – unlike the show’s other big standards-and-practices breakthrough, nude scenes so gratuitous that the only big one this year was used to set up a PG joke about a 6-year-old.
The S-word’s arrival raises a deeper and far touchier issue: the general coarsening of language in broadcast media.
As sexual banter has become more graphic on radio and TV, from talk shows to prime-time sitcoms, the S- and F-words have made up one of the unspoken walls, a line that wasn’t crossed.
Between “NYPD Blue” and radio stations that are becoming less vigilant about the language of deejays and songs – check your local hip-hop outlet – those lines have at least been blurred, if not wholly breached.
This has happened for a couple of reasons, one of which is that today’s target audience for these shows is neither shocked nor bothered. Another is that standards shift a word at a time. It’s not as if TV and radio were “Ozzie and Harriet” one day and Screw magazine the next.
Even gradual change, however, does not go unnoticed. Decency groups have a way of springing up in these situations, and when the next ones arrive, they will hear encouraging words from the Federal Communications Commission, the body that deals with on-air standards.
At least two of the five FCC commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, have warned broadcasters about an increasingly lenient attitude toward crude content.
After the FCC recently fined Detroit radio station WKRK for a graphic on-air bit, Copps said he wants the commission to consider actions as strong as license revocation – a phrase that gets broadcasters’ attention.
“Every day I hear from Americans who are fed up with the patently offensive programming diet they are being fed,” Copps recently told the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “I’d prefer an industry-led effort (to clean things up), but letting the current dive to the bottom continue unabated is unacceptable.”
Copps is probably not talking here about Gordon Clapp’s Detective Medavoy using the S-word. But if a critical mass of Americans at some point cries “Enough!,” his mouth could also get washed out with soap.
—
(c) 2003, New York Daily News.
Visit the Daily News online at http://www.nydailynews.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
AP-NY-05-02-03 0924EDT
Send questions/comments to the editors.
