[This feature appeared in our much-loved former home Nerve last week; you can still read the official version here. But because it was by Phil Nugent, whose writing always needs a haircut, considerable acreage had to be sliced back to fit it into the confines of Nerve's electronic pages. For the benefit of anyone who might find it interesting to see what Frankenstein's monster looked like before they ran a comb through his hair and squeezed him into that corset, we now present a Screengrab in Exile exclusive: "Ten Sexual Controversies That Changed TV: The Director's Cut!"]
The new TV season is breaking into full swing, and with everything from remakes of Melrose Place to knockoffs of Twilight on tap, there’s no shortage of programs hoping to lure in viewers with the promise of steamy visions to keep us warm through the fall and winter. The medium has come a long way since the days when Ricky Ricardo somehow got Lucy knocked up from his separate twin bed, only to discover that the network censors wouldn’t let him say the word “pregnant” to describe her condition. But those working on new shows–and such returning hits as Grey’s Anatomy–should remember that presenting the sex lives of regular characters on a network TV series has always been a tricky field to navigate, and has remained so, even though the goal posts are moving all the time.
1. BRIDGET LOVES BERNIE (1972-1973) This romantic sitcom, starring David Birney and Meredith Baxter (who would marry her co-star in 1974 and become Meredith Baxter-Birney, at least until they split in 1990) as, respectively, a puppyish Jewish New York cab driver and an urban princess of an Irish Catholic schoolteacher, was one of the big hits of its TV season. Yet it was canceled after its initial 24-episode run: an early casualty of protest group hate-mail campaigns, forced off the air by religious groups who objected to its mixed-religion romance angle. Seen today, the opening sequence from the pilot, in which Bridget and Bernie meet cute, fall in love instantly, then find out that each other’s last names are Steinberg and Fitzgerald and wryly concede that they “have a problem”, plays like a broadcast from some distant solar system.
So does the scene towards the end where both kids’ entire families, including the Catholic girl’s inevitable brother-who’s-a-priest, barge into Bernie’s apartment and gather at the foot of the bed, gazing in wonder and dismay at the sight of the couple asleep in each other’s arms. “All right,” says Pops Fitzgerald to the priest, “marry them!” It turns out, of course, that they sneaked off together and are already married; presumably, both the family members and the folks at home are meant to be so relieved that Bridget and Bernie didn’t permanently blacken their souls by having dirty extramarital sex that marrying outside their faith will seem forgivable by comparison. The pressure groups didn’t see it that way, and Bridget Loves Bernie remains the only network show ever unceremoniously canceled at the end of a season where it ended up at number five in the Nielson ratings.
2. D-I-V-O-R-C-E: Hard to figure now, but even after Watergate and the fall of Saigon, network TV executives still came unglued at the prospect of showing a divorced woman on TV. Divorced men seem to have been a non-issue; writers looking for a way to give a male lead an instant backstory could always drop the information that he’d been in Vietnam or Korea. But writers who were eager to explore the dramatic possibilities of showing a woman who was no longer as young as she used to be starting her life over after kicking some ill-chosen life partner to the curb had to contend with network suits who were afraid that audiences would be repulsed by a heroine who had a sexual history and a lawyer’s name in her address book. One of the first shows to try to break this taboo was The Mary Tyler Moore Show: in the original concept, Mary Richards was supposed to have moved to Minneapolis to start afresh after the breakup of her marriage. As Laurie Petrie on the classic Dick Van Dyke Show, Moore had brought a new level of sexiness to domestic sitcoms, and she was so fresh and likable that she had made it possible for the show to even get away with the revelation that she had secretly been underage when she married her husband, which meant that their marriage might not be legitimate, which meant that their kid might…uh oh. But CBS nixed the idea, reportedly expressing concern that viewers would get the wrong idea and think that she’d divorced Dick Van Dyke. It was thought preferable to leave viewers free to speculate that the thirtyish Mary was only now leaving the nest to begin a career because she was, well, maybe a little slow.
In 1975, NBC premiered Fay, starring Lee Grant, fresh from her successful supporting role in the movie Shampoo, as a divorced woman in her forties who was starting to date again. Publicly, the network boasted of its daring, but there were nervous jitters behind the scenes, and NBC quietly canceled the program after eight episodes. Grant herself learned the news while she was preparing to make an appearance on The Tonight Show to promote the series. No doubt NBC just assumed that she would go quietly into that good night; instead, Grant, a survivor of the McCarthy-era blacklist, went on the talk show and talked shit about the craven bunglers who’d strangled her baby in its crib, reminding everyone who tuned in what hell hath no fury like. A couple of months later, CBS began airing another sitcom that centered on a middle-aged divorcee, One Day at a Time; this one was lavishly promoted and ended up sticking around for nine years. Was CBS deliberately cashing in on the bad publicity that NBC had earned itself? Maybe, but there are also instructive differences between the two shows: One Day‘s star, Bonnie Franklin, was more than fifteen years younger than Lee Grant and came across as a good deal less smart, sophisticated, and steamy, and was so weighed down from the effort of having two kids to raise that she could barely think about having a sex life, despite all the clownish male co-stars who kept trying to kick in her door, assuring the audience that, divorce or no divorce, she was still quite a catch.
3. JAMES AT 15 (1977-1978): This NBC series was created by the writer Dan Wakefield, a TV novice whose novels included Starting Over and Going All the Way (later made into a movie starring Ben Affleck and Jeremy Davies). It was that book that persuaded the network that Wakefield might have enough of a feel for horny American youth that he was the right man to develop a “quality” series about contemporary teen life. James starred 16-year-old Lance Kerwin as the title character, a transplanted Okie trying to adjust to high school life in Boston. The show got fine reviews and good ratings, but then Wakefield got it in his head that part of the common experience of contemporary American teenagers was getting laid. He duly turned in a script in which James lost his cherry to–get this–a Swedish exchange student, as if American kids would be squeaky clean their whole lives if only flaxen-haired visitors from the land of Abba didn’t come over here smuggling impure thoughts in their panties. (Take it away, Lou Dobbs!)
The network approved the idea, but only after throwing the hero a strategically timed birthday party and changing the title of the show itself to James at 16. (They probably would have changed it to James at 27 if such a leap were not genetically implausible.) In one of those moves that really underscore the alternate-universe logic of the censorious mind, they also insisted that Wakefield “clean up” the dirty script by removing all references to birth control. (They compromised by having James vow to be “responsible”, not the first word that comes to mind when Swedish exchange students are on the menu.) Annoyed by the network meddling, Wakefield left the show; NBC kissed him on both cheeks and wished him a successful future, then fired the producers he’d left behind to safeguard his vision. It wasn’t much longer before the show itself was canceled. Wakefield showed that he’d learned something about how easy it is to deal seriously with adolescent sexuality in American popular culture when, for his next TV project, he wrote and produced the 1980 TV movie The Seduction of Miss Leona, a love story starring those two Tiger Beat favorites, Lynn Redgrave and Brian Dennehy. As for James himself, Lance Kerwin kept his acting career sputtering into the ’90s before switching jobs and becoming a pastor–or, as his website puts it, “With a daughter in his life now and God knocking on the door of his heart, Lance began to see that there was more to life than fame, drugs and money. Lance gave his life to the Lord and is now sold out for God.” Talk about your mysterious ways…
4. SOAP (1977-1981): ABC’s serial comedy was a rare instance of a network actually trying to attract an audience by courting controversy, or at least by being seen as keeping pace with changing mores. The show had its roots in the success of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Norman Lear’s soap opera parody, which had been turned down by all three networks but went on to be a short-lived phenomenon in syndication. MH2 attracted attention for its frank sexual content, so ABC contracted its own show to producer-writer Susan Harris, who would later create The Golden Girls but was best known at the time for stirring up noise as the writer of the notorious episode of Maude in which the middle-aged heroine had an abortion.
Even before Soap hit the airwaves, it was the subject of intense media attention, with speculation that its plot lines involving adultery, impotence, frigidity, and an openly gay character and candidate for a sex change operation–Jodie, played by a twinkly young Billy Crystal–would, to borrow a phrase from George Carlin, curve the spine, grow hair on one’s hands, and keep the country from winning the war. Condemned from pulpits, Soap inspired one of the first preemptive-strike letter-writing campaigns organized by what would later be called the religious right, which scared eight network affiliates into deciding not to carry the show. It was also attacked by gay rights organizations, including the National Gay Task Force, who had understandable qualms about what it might do to their campaign for greater acceptance to be associated, in people’s minds, with Billy Crystal. In the end, the network had it both ways, collecting their big ratings when everyone tuned in at the start to see what the fuss was about, then ordering that Harris downplay the sexy stuff and reshaping the central storyline into a murder mystery after somebody whacked Robert Urich in the shower. The worst damage was done to Crystal’s character, who attempted suicide in the hospital after being dumped by his boyfriend on the eve of his gender-reassignment surgery. He survived, but though the character continued to be identified as gay, he never hooked up with another guy in the course of the series; instead, he had a quick fling with a woman, got her pregnant, and spent much of his remaining time on the show fighting for custody of his daughter. In the end, a character whose very existence inspired protests by homophobic religious groups became a symbol of the outdated notion that gay men are tragic figures who can only be redeemed by rejecting their orientation long enough to breed.
5. LOVE, SIDNEY (1981-1983) As Felix Unger on The Odd Couple, Tony Randall was the lost Crane brother, using stereotypically “gay” mannerisms while playing a supposedly straight character to a degree that anticipated Kelsey Grammar and David Hyde Pierce on Frasier. This series, which originated with a feature-length pilot titled Sidney Schorr, gave Randall the chance to play an explicitly gay character, the first one ever to be the central, let alone title character, of a network show. Sidney was a commercial illustrator who, in the pilot, befriended a young actress (played by Lorna Patterson in the pilot movie, and by Swoozie Kurtz in the series) who he talked out of an abortion when she became pregnant. Sidney, the actress, and her adorable moppet wound up crammed together in his sweet Manhattan apartment. But religious groups, rather than being impressed with Sidney’s anti-abortion bona fides, made such a stink about the idea of a gay man on TV that NBC first delayed airing the pilot for a year and then insisted that Sidney be gelded. Apparently Sidney was so crushed by the death of his one male lover (whose photo on the mantelpiece watched over the action like a baleful ghost) that he could never date again; when, towards the end of the second season, he did screw up his courage and dip one toe back into the dating pool, it was with a woman, as if he’d been on the shelf so long that he’d forgotten what his orientation was. Love, Sidney ended with its pathetic hero still flying solo and, like Jodie on Soap, fighting off thoughts of suicide.
6. CAGNEY & LACEY (1982-1988): This “quality” cop series about two women who work together as New York City police detectives began with a 1981 TV movie in which the leads were played by Loretta Swit and Tyne Daly. When CBS decided to go ahead with it as a series, Swit, who was still tied down playing Major Houlihan on M*A*S*H, was replaced by Meg Foster. Early ratings were shaky, and the CBS brass decided that it must have something to do with viewers being put off by threatening lesbian vibes. Though both characters were supposed to be straight, it was felt that when the two dark-haired, hard-edged actresses were seen in close proximity to each other, they looked like, in the words of an unidentified CBS executive, “a couple of dykes.” It was decided that the best way to solve the problem was to fire Foster and replace her with the blonde Sharon Gless, who according to some mysterious executive calculation was judged to seem more Malibu Beach than Isle of Lesbos. The readjusted version of the show would go on to run for fucking ever; a dozen years after it ended, Gless, God love her, would be prominently (albeit heterosexually) featured on the American version of Queer as Folk.
7. L.A. LAW (1986-1994) AND THE LESBIAN KISS The ensemble legal drama was midway through its fifth season and running out of possible combinations for its bed-hopping characters when it brought British actress Amanda Donohoe–a saucy vixen best known for her sexually adventurous performances in such movies as Nicolas Roeg’s Castaway and Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm–on board to plant one on the lips of the show’s resident sexy-mouse character, played by Michele Greene. Coming at the end of an episode, the kiss was tantamount to a cliffhanger; it all but guaranteed that slack-jawed viewers, especially those who happened to share the common (male) feeling that, while there may or may not be anything wrong with same-sex love, there really nothing wrong with it if it involves too hot-looking women, would tune in next week. Those who did got to see Donohoe deliver a back-pedaling speech about how she liked both men and women equally and would be happy just to be friends if that’s what her new friend preferred, while Greene “considered” exploring a new side of herself before deciding that, nope, she wouldn’t be going there. Many years later, Greene would tell an interviewer that she regarded the move as “a positive step, especially at that time,” but also claimed that the shows’ producers “never intended to explore the issue of a relationship between two women; it was about ratings during sweeps so I always found it a bit cynical.”
It may be in the cynical-ratings-ploy department that the episode had its most lasting impact, leading to so many similar moments on so many different shows that it inspired critics to coin the phrase “lesbian kiss moment” to sum them all up. There have been L.S.M.s–broadly defined as same-sex kisses, involving one well-established series regular and a new arrival, usually a guest star who’s just passing through, which will have no lasting consequences–on Roseanne, Picket Fences, Party of Five, Ally McBeal, and Friends, among others; Mischa Barton, who dropped in on Once and Again long enough to tempt Evan Rachel Wood, would later be tempted herself, on The O.C., by Olivia Wilde. In a category all its own is the love affair of Alyson Hannigan’s Willow and Amber Benson’s Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the characters were deeply and believably committed to each other long before they were first seen to kiss on-screen. Even if it’s true that their first kiss was delayed because the network had cold feet, the effect may have been to make the relationship seem like less of a stunt. (Which didn’t keep some from bitterly complaining about characters being punished for their sexual orientation when, after two and a half years, the show killed Tara off.)
8. MELROSE PLACE (1992-1999) AND THE CASE OF THE KISSLESS GROOM As the campy neon circus of ’90s prime time soap operas, Melrose Place meant to box the compass in terms of bad and licentious behavior, but it hit a wall when it tried to slip the merest suggestion of gay male love past the network. The show did have a resident good-looking gay gay–Matt Fielding, played by Doug Savant–who, in contrast to the juicy goings-on by the hormonally deranged straight people all around him, seemed almost pathologically stable. When Matt was permitted to enjoy an on-screen kiss with a man, the network had it edited out of the program before allowing the episode to be broadcast, though they had no problem with having him gay-bashed on camera, twice. (Matt was eventually killed in an off-screen car crash after Savant quit the show, claiming terminal boredom.) In contrast to the phenomenon of the lesbian kiss, network TV has all but declared itself blind to any commercial advantages to showing two men kissing, even during the ’90s outbreak of pre-legal gay marriage ceremonies that led to kissless same-sex weddings on episodes of Roseanne and Northern Exposure.
9. INSIDE THE ACTOR’S PANTS: Sometimes, plans to stretch the sexual boundaries of a series character are thwarted not by network interference, but by queasiness on the part of the member of the creative team who’s being asked to do the stretching. Kyle MacLachlan, who hid in a closet watching depraved mommy-and-daddy figures going at in Blue Velvet, and who donned a kilt for his wedding scene on Sex and the City, drew the line at having his upright FBI-agent character on Twin Peaks jump into bed with a high school-age girl: Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey Horne, despite the fact that the age difference between the two performers was actually only six years. MacLachlan’s reticence derailed plans for a serious romance between the two that the writers had put considerable planning and preparation into, and in retrospect may be seen as contributing mightily to the series losing its way during its second season; Agent Cooper’s last big scene with Audrey, in which he insists that he had refused her seductive charms out of concern for her safety, faintly smells of the writers composing a lament for thwarted dreams and what might have been.
The most conspicuous example of an actor rebooting the sexual direction of his own show might be M*A*S*H, which in its first few seasons actually served up a pretty fair PG-rated version of the movie’s anarchistic hedonism, with the same implicit message: that hanging onto conventional morality is no way to stay sane when you’re trapped in an insane and obscene situation, such as war. With that in mind, the show embraced a relaxed attitude towards casual one-night stands and marital infidelity. That started to change as the star, Alan Alda, began to develop more power on the set than the show’ creator, Larry Gelbart. Suddenly, Gary Burghoff’s Radar had his virginity magically restored to him and Hawkeye Pierce’s married roommate was weeping in shame because he’d slept with Susan Saint James, despite the fact that, in 1980, resisting the charms of Susan Saint James could have gotten a man court-martialed on the grounds of severe idiocy and maybe even gotten his wife to wondering just what kind of special-ed case she’d married. Then there’s the matter of D.J., i.e. Dan Connor, Jr., played by Michael Fishman on Rosenanne. As the show neared its seventh season, there was a persistent and widespread rumor that the youngest Connor child, D.J. was going to announce that he was gay. It never happened–the big shocking surprise of the season premiere turned out to be that Roseanne herself was pregnant again–and it’s been suggested that the real reason it didn’t is that Fishman refused to play along. If Roseanne herself really did have her heart set on having Deej come out of the closet, maybe the thwarting of her plans helps explain the spiraling, out-of-control last few seasons of Roseanne, during which gayness broke out all over Lanford, Illinois, culminating in the fantasy outing of Roseanne’s mother. As for Fishman, if he has any regrets about not having ever kissed a guy onscreen, maybe he can take it up with the writers of the new Melrose Place, where he has a recurring role.
10. GREY’S ANATOMY: Nowadays, with the commercial networks competing with cable and everyone much more invested in targeting niche markets than in playing the old game of winning time slots by putting up the “least objectionable” program choices available, you don’t see a big show flailing in terror and confusion over its characters’ sexual behavior very often. Luckily, ABC and the makers of Grey’s Anatomy have stepped up to reach for the brass ring. Last year, Grey’s brought Brooke Smith aboard as a love match for Sara Ramirez’s Callie Torres. Smith, who’s arguably the best actor ever to join the Grey’s Anatomy cast, was under the impression she was signing on as a series regular, and was surprised to be informed that the next episode she had to shoot would be her last appearance on the show. After E! Online reported that this and other changes in announced plans for the show were the result of an order from upstairs to “de-gay” the show, Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes put out a bizarre statement insisting that it was ridiculous to suggest that the show had a problem with lesbian characters since Callie Torres herself would be sticking around, and then added: “The impact of the Callie/Erica relationship will be felt and played out in a story for Callie. I believe it belittles the relationship to simply replace Erica with ‘another lesbian’.” In other words, there’s nothing wrong with a character who’s a lesbian, though you don’t want to risk spoiling it by having her do anything that’s just too, too, lesbian, like having a love affair with a woman.
Part of what makes the behind-the-scenes activity at Grey’s Anatomy so fascinating is that it seems to have been triggered in part by how the show has been impacted by its own appearances in the gossip columns. In 2006, original cast member Isaiah Washington was reported to have called his co-star T. R. Knight a “faggot” during a backstage argument. Ugly enough on its face, the incident took on deeper significance when Knight felt compelled to come out because of it. The whole thing might still have blown over, but Washington, who seems to have more issues than Publishers Clearing House, wouldn’t let it die, bringing it up again and again, alternately apologizing or whining about how he was being treated. (In doing so, he chose to ignore the counsel of his co-star, Katherine Heigl, who told reporters that Washington “needs to just not speak in public, period,” the best piece of unsolicited advice I’ve heard in many a moon.) Washington was fired and left the show at the end of 2006-2007 season; a year later, T. K. Knight would announce that he was quitting, partly because he felt that, since publicly identifying himself as gay, he had been all but written out of the show and left with nothing to do. Where earlier shows such as Soap and Love, Sidney were subjected to a “de-gaying” process as a result to their creators’ efforts to bring positive portrayals of gays to TV, Grey’s Anatomy seems to have felt the need to defiantly assert its straightness to keep potential viewers from getting the wrong idea after open warfare broke out between the gays and the homophobes on its creative team. I’m not sure I’d call that progress, but it is a change.
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