TV is the New Reading

Scripted dramas

get a little graphic

Big musical production numbers featuring ancient rockers. Hookers with chlamydia all down their cleavage. Androids with gaping holes in their flesh and patients with similar complaints stopping in for plastic surgery. Oh, and let’s not forget the recent depiction of a woman falling from a balcony in flagrante delicto.

It seems that as the writers strike progresses, reality television and terrible game shows are not the only signs that the networks are running out of fresh ideas.

The networks used to have a department called “Standards and Practices” to keep a leash on the more disturbing graphic imagery viewers might be confronted with. But some sort of shift must have taken place to allow for, oh, say, the eating of disturbing things on “Fear Factor,” or for people to be chemically disincorporated by hydrofluoric acid in a residential bathroom on “Breaking Bad.”

Even when very nearly the same thing had happened on an episode of “Bones,” it was on an industrial worksite and we as viewers never had to deal with bits of ... um ... chemically disincorporated people ... splattering about in someone’s hallway.

But “Breaking Bad” is a cautionary example of Murphy’s Law set loose on a Walter Mitty-type turned producer of crystal methamphetamine. At a time when the plastic surgeons of America are running a major scare campaign to get people to engage the services of domestic doctors rather than seek such care abroad, plastic surgery drama “Nip/Tuck” is demonstrating that people should absolutely book such surgeries as far from American borders as they can manage.

While not itself so awful as depicting surgeons with river blindness wielding scalpels and “being each other’s eyes” (as explored in one storyline in the show’s hit show-within-a-show “Hearts & Scalpels”), the equally fictitious practice of McNamara/Troy recently featured a patient suffering grand mal toxic shock from body hair transplants and other patients actively engaging in cannibalism.

And the surgical practice isn’t even the worst of the psychoses they encounter. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say one patient has a hobby that recently expanded into a most disturbing form of taxidermy.

In short, it seems like as a smaller pool of scripted shows compete for a more easily distracted viewership, more and more outrageous storylines make it onto the air. And sure, some of it transcends outrage to become actually engaging. But one suspects that a good portion of it is just gross, disturbing and ugly for the sake of being gross, disturbing and ugly.

I’m not saying that the worst thing we should encounter on television is a terrible duet by a couple of geeks in “Ugly Betty” — although that was pretty awful. But there ought to be some sort of indication that there’s still a limit, and that someone is aware of it.

We’ll get a fresh peek at where things are going with the midseason additions of “LOST” and “Eli Stone” this week. But when the networks imagine that even Allison Dubois must encounter a little boy’s bloodied ghost in a toy box, it may be time to let the S&P folks back into the decision-making process.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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