On one recent night I made a command decision regarding my TV remote: It won’t click over to G4 Tech TV if my young son is anywhere within earshot of the TV. I made that decision after watching about 30 seconds of Xplay, ostensibly a show that reviews video games. And the hosts do review games. But while handing down their verdicts, they also manage to curse like sailors for no apparent reason. I watched them for 30 seconds while they reviewed what must have been the millionth first person shooter released this month (a genre that seems to get bloodier by the hour, and the scenes from which constitute yet another reason not to watch Xplay if your children or anyone with a heart condition is in the room). In those 30 seconds that I watched, I heard half a dozen curses. They weren’t too spectacular, but they were juicy enough and numerous enough to make me click away.
So I landed over on Fox TV, and Sweet Home Alabama was on. I hadn’t seen it, and I thought Reese Witherspoon’s undeniable cuteness could make even a shopping channel watchable, so I stuck around. For about a minute. Then Witherspoon drove up to her estranged husband’s Alabama shack, perkily popped out of her car, greeted said estranged husband, and proceeded to spew a string of obscenities at him. No wonder they don’t get along. Take away the four- and five-letter insults and they would have no vocabulary at all, and therefore nothing to say.
TV swearing has gotten so thick that in Britain, even ex-Sex Pistols bassist Glenn Matlock objects. Thirty years ago, his own band pioneered the use of the mighty f-bomb live on the BBC, ending the career of a journalist in the process. Today the 48-year-old father thinks swearing just for the sake of it is “pathetic,” adding that “something ought to be done about it.”
Content-wise, I think it’s fair to say that television is coarsening and swearing is on the rise, and not just because columnist Robert Novak recently let slip a swear of war on CNN. The networks themselves are getting ahead of the swearing game.
DISH Network, the satellite-broadcasting giant, has a new ad campaign out with the catchy and descriptive slogan, “Suck Free TV.” That’s also its web address. On DISH’s main campaign site, you will find out that all TV other than DISH “sucks.” You will see a dog, its ears mutilated. You will see a man, his face pressure-crushed. You will see an entire region of the American northwest deforested. These are all, DISH wants you to believe, the consequences of “TV that sucks.” That’s their choice of words, not mine, and while this usage of “suck” isn’t a swear word per se, it’s just shy of being one. In its original form in the late Eighties, it was a verb and was usually followed by another four-letter word for the male organ. Think of the nickname for the senior senator from Illinois.
If you click on over to the “TV That Sucks Simulator” on DISH’s marketing website, you can click on a cat and watch its skin get slurped off its body and into the nearby TV. Click on it again and its muscle, tendons and organs all slip past the electronic-event horizon, leaving only a skeleton. Click once more and you at least get the satisfaction of finishing the mess off. You can click on the plant, the sofa (from which loose change flies toward the TV), even the bird, the mouse, and the man and lady of the house. No, it doesn’t go there. Quite. But don’t click on the man of the house more than once unless you really want to see how he would answer the old Clinton question–boxers or briefs?
On the site DISH helpfully explains that you can get rid of TV that sucks, with high bills that suck, service that sucks, picture quality that sucks, and other stuff that sucks, by switching over to DISH. Which, presumably, sucks not.
But why does DISH think it’s acceptable to offer up, as a reason for customers to subscribe to it, the opinion that it doesn’t “suck?” The entire campaign is infantile. It captures the language of 13-year-old boys in an attempt to persuade parents to buy a somewhat expensive luxury product. It seems to have sought the lowest common usage with which to describe the lack of quality, and it has built its entire public image around this usage. Which, if you think about it, is very bad marketing. DISH Network has associated itself with a word that is counterproductive to its goal.
In my own mind, as much as I might fight it, I now associate DISH Network with its campaign buzzword. Play word association with me for a second. I say “Dish” and you say…? Thought so.
–Bryan Preston is a writer and television producer. He is also the author of Junkyardblog.