WHEN THE Federal Communications Commission fined CBS $3.6 million — by far the agency's biggest penalty ever — for an episode of "Without A Trace" that featured a teen sex orgy, I immediately became interested in seeing the show.
I had to see $3.6 million worth of offensiveness. Janet Jackson's Super Bowl nipple, after all, only rated $550,000 of obscenity. This was 6 1/2 nipples' worth of raunch.
Stein concludes, disappointingly, that the offending scene really was offending, though his primary problem with the televised teen orgy seem to be the suspension of disbelief. He complains that it's all "blue-lighted and threesome-filled and zit-free" and, to be fair, my first sex orgies weren't anything near zit-free, so he's got a point, but he's potentially unaware of how advanced acne medications have become.
Truth or dare stories aside, Stein's larger argument is interesting: the FCC doesn't really regulate cable, and by anodizing network television, they're ensuring that the broadcast networks will continue to cede ground to their edgier, basic cable brethren, leading to a world that the FCC will lack any serious control over. Which is great. Let's help the FCC murder the networks, increasing pressure for a la carte cable, and then we can all disappear into HBO, or Nickelodeon, or whatever it may be. It won't be a cleaner, more sanitized environment, but it'll certainly be more entertaining.
