Just as I thought. Wasn't imagining it. The occasional urge to mutter, "eew, ick!" was anchored in something real.
There's been what they call in L.A. "an uptick" in sex-talk on network shows this fall season. Sometimes it's blatant raunch, sometimes it's sneaky, this tendency to use words or phrases that make you go "What's that?" before succumbing to the "eew, ick!" response.
In September I settled in to watch the season premiere of New Girl (tonight, Fox, CITY-TV, 9 p.m.), a show I liked for its whimsy, and it looked like a show demolished and rebuilt. Jess (Zooey Deschanel) kept going on about "sex-fisting." Another episode seemed entirely built around size-of-penis jokes. It was juvenile.
And it was deliberate. In a recent Hollywood Reporter story headlined, "Broadcast TV's Ratings Grab Gets Raunchy," one of New Girl's executive producers, Brett Baer, is quoted as saying, "We got away with murder. We've given broadcast standards a run for their money." Yeah, sure. A medal for bravery coming in the frat-boy universe. On tonight's episode: "Nick pretends to be gay around Jess's new beau; Winston works his 'long game' on his new neighbours; Cece considers a breast reduction."
This trend – and it's certainly a trend – is not an attempt at emancipation from traditional approaches to dialogue, themes and storytelling in prime-time, network TV. There is no laudable straining to escape tight boundaries. The key to understanding the fad is in the Hollywood Reporter headline – "ratings grab." And New Girl isn't the only show making the same grab.
The Mindy Project (airs tonight, Fox, CITY-TV, 9:30 p.m.), which began, too, as a show built around a delicate combination of whimsy and manic charm, also went weirdly raunchy. One episode this season was mostly about anal sex and whether said anal sex had been attempted. There was a lot of coy talk, using slang for various sex positions that involve anal sex.
Here's the thing – neither New Girl nor The Mindy Project have benefited from the sudden insertion of sex talk. Both shows dropped significantly in ratings compared with their last season highs. The premiere of New Girl dropped 45 per cent from last year, with 3.1 million viewers, and The Mindy Project premiere dropped 32 per cent to 2.8 million viewers. And the slide has continued. In late October, New Girl was down to 2.6 million and The Mindy Project was drawing 2.1 million.
So, it's not working. But don't expect this urge toward juvenile sex-talk to diminish. The impulse to break taboos in shows airing in the 9-10 p.m. slot is not going away. There is the context of competition with cable, where sex and violence is more easily woven into storytelling, even in sitcoms.
It is, mind you, a tactic unlikely to succeed. While network sitcoms can be coy, cable series can be brutally frank. An audience at ease with frank language and the depiction of sex knows where to find it. In fact, if U.S. network TV has a remaining strength, it is surely in its ability to draw a vast audience, of all ages, with cleverness and charm. Abandoning all that is abandoning all hope that mainstream, mass-appeal TV can continue to thrive. Me, I'm hardly a prude. When I see New Girl and The Mindy Project wander off into adolescent sex jokes and cheesy, frat-boy smut, I just see a failure to entertain.
To be clear, there's a difference between what's been happening on the two Fox sitcoms and what unfolds on, say, How to Get Away With Murder (Thursdays, ABC, CTV, 10 p.m.). The sheer verve of the show is admirable and the scenes of passionate love between two young men simply don't fall into the same category as the puerile prattling on the sitcoms. It's not just that the show airs at 10 p.m., and under more relaxed rules than the 9-10 p.m. slot. When the Viola Davis character snaps at her husband, "Why is your penis on this girl's phone?" that's a plot twist in a sordid murder mystery. It's not childishly gratuitous.
It's a cautionary tale, though, in the end. It's not that viewers are thrilled by the uptick in sex-talk. And it's not that some fogeys are offended. It's just that the intelligence of viewers is insulted. That brings a more emphatic "eew, ick!" than any sex-talk, which is why the tactic isn't working.
Also airing tonight
Don't forget Liberation: The Battle for the Netherlands (History, 8 p.m.), which I mentioned in Saturday's column. It's a must-see on Remembrance Day – enormously powerful. It chronicles the long, brutal slog by Canadian forces to dislodge the Germans from the Netherlands in 1944/45, and it is visceral – the stories are of exhausted soldiers going onward and onward, seeing death everywhere and finally liberating a nation. A veteran says at the start, "I wear my medals, not for myself but for them that couldn't wear their medals, never seen their medals." There were many of those.
All times ET. Check local listings.