#TV TROPES BLASPHEMOUS CODE#
This Telegenic can only hint at what such a study might contain.Īs film historian Ed Sikov explains, the code was like the sonnet form, a strict blueprint which actually inspired the work of creative geniuses like Sturges and Billy Wilder to become all the richer. Someone should do a book on the ingenious ways television writers have found to say (and show) really x-rated and sometimes blasphemous things in ways that would find their ways past the censors. On a special feature on the DVD of Preston Sturges’ 1944 screwball comedy Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, we learn that the ingenious writer/director likewise worked the refs, in his case not NBC’s Standards and Practices but the disapproving Hays Production Code Office, in the process (according to Sturges’ widow Sandy) honoring the letter of the code while entirely violating its spirit (“Censorship: Morgan’s Creek vs. Such manipulation is, of course, not unique to American television. Seinfeld’s showrunners discovered that if they fed the NBC censors smutty ideas they never intended to use and which were swiftly rejected, they were often able to slip past the softened-up gatekeepers equally naughty, or even naughtier, story ideas later. On episodes like the notorious “The Contest” (4.11), for example, in which Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer engage in a bet to see who can go the longest without masturbating, they “worked the refs.” In American sports, especially basketball, it is possible, according to the received wisdom, to get the desired call from a referee late in a game by contesting meaningless decisions early on. On one of the extras on the Seinfeld DVDs, co-creator Larry David, now working free from all restraint on HBO’s beyond-the-pale Curb Your Enthusiasm, explains how he and Jerry Seinfeld nevertheless managed to get away with the infamous and unacceptable on one of American prime-time television’s greatest sitcoms.
#TV TROPES BLASPHEMOUS TV#
From the start the creative individuals making TV have done battle with The Suits, Standards and Practices, public taste, and the inherent Puritanism of American culture. What can be got away with on the public airways has been a significant question from the beginnings of American television. Back in January America was all abuzz with the largely-media-created controversy over whether or not the quintessentially British Ricky Gervais had gone too far with his humor as host of the 2011 Golden Globe Awards.
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