Another great reason to turn off your TV.

A few years ago I cancelled my cable and shut off the TV. It was the commercials and movie trailers, mostly. Couldn't stand them. Since then, I haven't missed broadcast TV at all. If a movie comes out that I want to see, I rent it.

I also stopped listening to the radio. Commercials. Can't stand 'em. Media marketing wieners, take note.

Well, today I see that things have gone considerably down hill in TV Land since last I checked.

Violence has long been a staple of US cable television shows, but most producers have been coy about sex -- until recently, when an explosion of explicit content flooded the small screen.

The titillatingly-titled "Masters of Sex" is the most obvious example, but while there are no recent studies most industry watchers say fornication has never been as widely on display on TV.
Pushing boundaries, the series includes multiple simulated orgasms and acres of nudity, as well as sex toys/research tools like one named the "Ulysses," basically a clear plastic vibrator with a camera inside, which films what happens in orgasm.
"Certainly TV, including broadcast TV, seems far, far more able to tackle subjects it previously didn't address," professor of cinema and television Richard Walter told AFP.
Many modern shows "contain sex and violence in ways that would have been unthinkable not too many years ago," added the academic from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

Call me a prude if you must, but "a clear plastic vibrator with a camera inside" is not what I want to be looking at for my after dinner viewing on a regular week night.

Now would be a perfect time to get off the electronic teat while your brain and moral fiber is still more or less intact. Because as we know from recent movie history, soft-core porn is not the bottom of the barrel. Ron Jeremy making a comeback in made-for-TV miniseries isn't even the bottom.

Remember, you can't un-see stuff.

Think "Running Man" and "Hunger Games". Hollywood will be showing torture/snuff films on cable TV in ten years in their ever more frantic efforts to titillate and gather viewers. "America's Funniest Fatal Accidents" or "Concentration Camp Booty Call" or some such.

I wish I was kidding, but I fully expect I can't even think of anything as obscene and f-ed up as what's going to be on TV in five years, let alone ten. Just imaging the grossest, most objectionable thing you can, and know you're not even close to what they're coming up with right now.

I think we should all arrange that they go stoney broke. It will look good on them.

The Phantom