Any Intelligent Life down there?

Here's a post I've adapted from mediaville, but which seems pretty appropriate for London Calling. It concerns a piece in Intelligent Life, The Economist’s summer 2005 lifestyles-for-the-global-rich-and-trendy crowd, which has a few harsh words for America’s television, whose vitality and inventiveness has driven media globalization for decades. Now contributor Caitlin Moran argues that this golden goose could be under threat, and the United States' traditional easy global dominance of scripted shows (dramas, sit-coms, etc.) - in place for more than half a century - is possibly coming to an end, the victim of the new conservative ascendancy in America's culture wars. She states: "Over the past year, a schism between America and the rest of the world has begun to open. Triggered by the amusingly inconsequential revelation of Janet Jackson’s nipple . . ., and fueled by America’s historical inhibitions about sex, a rising sense of moral and religious hysteria has swept through American TV."

Moran runs through the various pieces of evidence, many of which we've commented on previously: the $550,000 fine on CBS for showing the Jackson breast; a decision by Fox to “pixelate animated nudity in the cartoon Family Guy;” PBS’s cowardly decision to remove from an imported British docudrama (Dirty War), “scenes of a woman in a shower being decontaminated after a nuclear attack”; and PBS president Pat Mitchell’s decision to pull an episode of Postcards From Buster that featured a lesbian couple. Moran concludes: “For the first time since the 1960s, American television looks in danger of being created in a mode of what isn’t possible, rather than what is.” As a result, what she calls “the seemingly endless expansion of liberalism in the world of [US] television is suddenly going into reverse.” The consequences of this could be that US programming loses its cachet and attractiveness - and market opportunities - in other rich countries, most of which are less inhibited by such puritanical morality. And of course, as London Calling has noted repeatedly, the US has already ceded global dominance in the realm of reality TV/format programming to the UK and other countries - in fact, the US never even gained ascendancy in this genre, and is now effectively in a state of media dependency - to the UK especially.

Moran continues in her piece:

If [US] broadcasters accept the principle that non-sexual nudity—the actual human body, no less—is in itself obscene, then we are only a step away from homosexual characters being removed from scripts, morally ambiguous characters being censored, and similar edicts on there being subjects that art (even if only television) isn’t allowed to touch anymore.

And though Moran doesn’t explicitly make the next point, I will: It starts with children’s programs. Every conservative agenda item in America is, it seems, promoted by a plea to “consider/protect the children” - this in a society with one of the West’s highest infant mortality rates and where no-one considers, say, giving mothers a proper amount of paid maternal leave (6-12 months) to look after their children when they are most vulnerable! But I digress, if only slightly.

Moran also sees a clear link between this increasing Puritanism and the rising reluctance of US media producers to take on controversial political matters - witness what's happened to news and public affairs programming and the recent rapid rise in sci-fi dramas and “nostalgia dramas,” she notes.

Of course, while American television languishes, European TV powers ahead, tits and ass and all. Moran focuses on two fascinating examples of British cheeky inventiveness, neither of which I'd heard of but both of which would surely be unimaginable in the US mainstream: The Guantanamo Guidebook, produced for Channel 4, in which volunteers (contestants?) "are ‘mildly tortured’ in the manner of Camp X-Ray” (see The Guardian's take here); and Sky One’s Badly Dubbed Porn, “in which ‘classic’ porn movies are redubbed by comedians.” Though I haven't seen these shows, they are likely quite peripheral, though they have both been shown of mainstream channels. But the fact that they were made at all underlines the argument that British and European television is showing a degree of inventiveness and iconoclasm increasingly lacking in the US. And British TV also seems to tackle, much more readily and effectively, other controversial subjects in the political as well as the entertainment realm. Coincidence? I think not. The two seem to go hand in hand. (For the moment America has HBO, but how long can that diamond in the rough survive the turn to conservative morality?)