ARTICLES

Worse Than 'Nothing Sacred'

WHAT POPULAR CULTURE REALLY MEANS

by June D. Anderson

Once upon a time, prime time meant I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, and Father Knows Best. Parents could rely on the hours from 7 to 11 for wholesome, family fare.

We all know prime times have changed. Catholic parents these days have to monitor Disney shows, as well as R-rated movies. But we still tend to rely on situation comedies for evening "baby sitting." Bad idea. It's not that the sitcoms aren't funny: Some are, especially to juveniles. But they poke fun at values Catholics should hold dear.

I contend that a week full of TV sitcoms is worse for society's spiritual health than the bad-Catholic show called Nothing Sacred, which portrays a modernist priest in a doo-dah church, questioning Catholic values. A semi-literate Catholic can watch Nothing Sacred and see the gaping loopholes; he can read the furor caused by the show and realize there is a problem. But ordinary sitcoms just wear him down: They present sins as fun, sinners as heroes, and values as nerdy.

I watched these television shows for one week to catalog their objectionable plot lines. By the time you read this article, some or all of these shows may have disappeared from prime time. But others like them will have taken their places, and the shows reviewed here will be in syndication. Here is what I saw:

MONDAY:

Seinfeld. This is the most popular show in television history. Its star, Jerry Seinfeld, is a stand-up comic. The February 9, 1998 show featured George, Jerry's friend, who is having a sex problem. "I can't have sex [with girlfriend Louise]," he explains. "She has mono. How can I hold out for SIX WEEKS!" Meanwhile, Jerry's other friend, Elaine, is not having sex with her boyfriend because he is studying for a medical exam. As the plot unravels, we see George developing unknown intellectual powers as a result of his chastity, while Elaine noisily goes to pieces. In the finale, George has sex with the waitress and resumes his normal stupidity. Elaine gets dumped by the medical student "because med students always ditch their help mates."

Mad About You. This show was having a good night.

Fired Up. This show, which is probably already gone as you read this, starts with a penis joke. The plot involves Gwen's "No. 5 date rule": No sex on the first five dates. "I used to have a six-date rule," she shrugs, "but I found it tended to thin the herd a little too much." (Sound track laughter.) "Five dates?" her friend comments, "You don't have to wait that long to get a handgun!" Anyway, Gwen explains the five-date rule to her fireman friend, and he goes along. On the sixth date, Gwen is raring to go -- but he can't get it up. Real funny.

Caroline in the City. Another new show that starts off with some scatological jokes. The situation involves two cartoonists, a man and a woman who work together but are not boyfriend and girlfriend -- yet. Caroline buys a double desk -- with a history. It seems the desk originally was the trysting place of two actors, one of whose letters is still inside the desk. Well, everyone meets and in the end, the old codgers (who are now married after many hits and misses) show up unexpectedly "to use the desk, if you know what I mean."

The Naked Truth. This show is about an oversexed 50-something boss -- Camilla -- who reeks of licentiousness (much sound-track laughter) and says things like: "Sex with me is like touching the face of God." After the characters cavort for a silly half hour, the finale takes place in an ambulance, where Camilla pays the ambulance attendants to turn out the lights so she can make love to the victim. Hilarious.

TUESDAY:

Mad About You. This popular show, starring Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt, scores some good ones, but on this night, the entire episode was about resuming sex after childbirth. The Paul character says, "Sex is like Canada . . . it's right there, but we never go." The couple is seeing a marriage counselor, and they discuss the wife's "faking it" and the husband's feeling "ho hum." Finale: the two are back in bed. Ho hum, indeed.

Soul Man. This is the more respectful, Protestant version of Nothing Sacred. Dan Aykroyd plays a widowed minister with young children. Here is a man of God we can all love: He's single (so he can date), he loves his children and he jives on the altar. This episode was pretty clean. Even the visit from the wild uncle was handled tamely, except for some gamy statements like: "I got a balloon [condom] in my wallet."

Home Improvement. This comedy show is usually quite good -- and that's the problem! On this night, the writers took the opportunity to lay some modern philosophy on their viewers. While baby-sitting his niece, Tim discovers he would like to have a daughter (he has three sons on the show), so he suggests to his wife they adopt or try to reverse his vasectomy. Jill says no; she has her career going. Tim finally realizes she's right. This is the way the show usually handles family arguments: The wife wins because Tim is insensitive. On the show involving his vasectomy, for example, Tim doesn't want to have the operation, but he finally succumbs because his wife convinces him he's being selfish. Definitely not a Catholic view of life being presented here!

Just Shoot Me. This is a stupid show about employees at a women's magazine. It just tries to titillate, as in: "Who do I have to sleep with to get this apartment? Seriously. I want to know."

WEDNESDAY:

Spin City. This show with popular Family Ties star Michael J. Fox gives viewers one more chance to see Fox run his fingers through his hair and wander about with his hands in his pockets. Otherwise, it's the usual pointless, sex-obsessed stuff revolving around a young man who is the P.R. flak for a New York City mayor. In this episode, Fox's mother, a divorcee, breezes in and winds up in bed with her old friend, the mayor. Who else?

Dharma and Greg. This show presents a young married couple drunk on sex -- naturally. In this episode, mate-swapping between the in-laws is the theme, a confusion that has the old folks wondering "why not"? This was the Valentine's Day show, no less, so Dharma and Greg were shown trying to spend a weekend in the snow -- translate that "sack." Question: why do people care?

The Drew Carey Show. This show features some great dialog: "Kate and I are moving in together tomorrow -- what's the big deal? We've been dating for months." "You just hopped in bed together." The camera zeroes in on a magazine cover: "How to Slow Down Your Man in the Sack." The humor is the quickie sex joke type, for example: "You're the one who wanted to do it in the airplane bathroom."

Ellen. So here we are with "Ellen," the character who caused all that hubbub with the admission she was a lesbian, both on and off screen. In this episode, the dialogue tends to support the gay rights theme. The story line involves a script written for a short cop, and Ellen has to argue the merits of presenting a short hero. She asks, "What is normal?" "Twenty years from now our kids won't think it's weird to be different." "This show can make being short [a hidden reference to being gay] more acceptable." Exactly.

THURSDAY: Friends.

Lamaze class is the setting for much of this episode. Only in this class, the dad (one of the "friends") is the sperm donor. The "real" parents are two women. In a bit of hilarity, the pregnant mother can't attend, and the lesbian lover and the donor have to "labor" together. The lesbian refuses to play the part of the woman, so the guy offers it up. The instructor is saying, "Now imagine your vagina is opening like a flower." Our male friend gets a quizzical look on his face. There is more scintillating dialogue: "I'm going to play my sperm card one more time." "Nina, you're fired, but how 'bout a quickie before I go to work?" "He's being going out with her only a week; they haven't even slept together yet."

FRIDAY: Break day.

The catalogue of prime-time humor may make some readers of this newspaper wince. It should. I put it all down because I don't think some people, especially if they're busy, are aware of what "popular culture" really means. It's such a benign term, but the malignancy of sex without responsibility, sex without love, and sex without spirituality is growing. Even Catholic kids accept the notion that two people are going to go to bed together whether or not they're married, whether or not they even like each other and whether or not they are opposite sexes.

Case in point: I served as a science lab aide for eighth graders in a Catholic school. The teacher was a young Catholic and a swell guy. But he didn't know his religion. One of the projects he asked his students to complete involved a three-year, imaginary space trip to Mars. Students were to pick their crews out of a hat; part of the exercise involved selecting the right people and rejecting the wrong ones. The right people included an older, divorced woman; a sterilized woman; several older or sterile males, etc.

After the selection process, I asked the teacher where he got the project, He said it was one of the enrichment projects worked out at a summer retreat attended by both public and private schoolteachers. I mentioned that the values expressed were certainly not Catholic. He said he had a fleeting thought about that. I suggested that perhaps he could come back in the following lab and set the record straight. He could tell the kids that some people may select their space crews according to the dynamics outlined in the project, but Catholics use a higher standard. He might even suggest that sending unmarried or unrelated men and women on a three-year trip in a small spaceship is asking for spiritual disaster. Maybe Catholics have to recognize that diversity doesn't always have a place.

The correction didn't happen. At the next lab, the students instead took the lead and suggested the sick bay should include a doctor "in case one of the women gets pregnant." No one batted an eye.

These are kids -- and teachers -- who watch the shows I have been detailing. After four days, I was hooked on some of the characters myself (you can usually find the same shows in syndication on alternate nights). Of course, I knew the situations were immoral, but it ceased to matter. I was laughing and feeling neighborly and tolerant, ready to cut corners for that jolly, good feeling.

Television entertainment -- and I haven't even discussed the smarmy soap operas or the violent and sex-filled dramatic shows -- is shaping the way we see reality. It's as if we lived in two worlds: the real world and that small world (one hour a week) when we go to church and consider the "first things."