TV'S Sex Problem
KITMAN, MARVIN
OnTelevision TV'S SEX PROBLEM by marvin kitman T he night of February 9 on NBC, James went all the way with a Swedish exchange student in what had to be the most widely discussed and deplored...
...The protagonist, James Hunter, is very well acted by Lance Kerwin, who would be even better if he cut his absurd and annoying bangs...
...Another example of that—and one of the most remarkable viewing experiences in the history of television—occurred in the fifth episode of Prizes...
...at 20-29 he is prepared to lose his virginity...
...Although heroes and heroines are portrayed as leading exciting and rewarding professional lives, they appear to have austere private lives lacking in even physical expressions of tenderness...
...The issues were complicated, I'm sure, but whatever Wakefield said, he was right...
...Their foreplay lasted 2,572 hours over a four-year period...
...The program can be pat, too...
...One kiss and, you guessed it, Miss Sweden was pregnant...
...Not even Chester Tate in Soap would think of anything so ridiculously far-fetched...
...I remember last year suggesting something along this line to NBC's Paul Klein, who eventually became vice president in charge of programming...
...Incredible problems dogged James as he tried to find a private place to do—uhhh, it...
...Actually, 1 hear NBC has trap doors under the desks that neatly rid the office of excess clutter, like execs...
...Equally typical is the fuss that was made over a word or two in the script —but not over the act itself...
...I would prefer, of course, that my kids learn about sex from the street rather than from TV...
...His heart simply wasn't in it, leading me to speculate that he did it solely because NBC wanted him to, in order to boost the ratings...
...This is especially true in the cold northern counties of Scotland and Australia—you know how randy they are over there—and in Canada's Northwest Territories and Saskatchewan...
...But what I found most intriguing is that everyone involved in the affair seemed to assume the show should be a sex education course, as if whether James and the Swedish chick did or didn't use contraceptives would overnight affect the nation's birth rate...
...But whereas in James the moment of truth was awkward, sinful, grim, tedious, and worst of all embarrassing, in Glittering Prizes, it was warm, tender, interesting, revealing, romantic, and fun to watch...
...The show's creator Dan (Going All the Way, Home Free) Wakefield, quit in a controversy about the propriety of using "responsibility" as a euphemism for contraceptives...
...James' coming of age in Boston reminded me of The Glittering Prizes, the remarkable six-part BBC series (broadcast on the Eastern Educational Network in January and February) based on Frederic Raphael's eponymous novel...
...A man of the cloth who has come to the meeting to serve as arbitrator in the dispute devoutly glues his eyes to the pages of a magazine...
...she asks coldly...
...Eli A. Rubinstein, with Dr...
...When I was 16 it was well known that they came from the fadeouts in the movies...
...He is a man of integrity—he will tell you so himself—and not one of those guys from Beverly Hills who write about real life while floating with the prevailing pool tides...
...In the first episode Adam (Tom Conti), then about 20—all the schoolboys look like 29, but they are such good actors it doesn't matter—goes to bed with his friend Barbara...
...In the case of the detective, sex occasionally becomes part of his life through the apprehension of sex criminals...
...In fact, James losing his virginity is how the network would have liked the series to begin last season...
...Without central heating, I am told, it is so cold that people in England never take their clothes off, even when they have sex under the covers...
...In my opinion, he wasn't ready for many of the earlier problems he had to cope with, such as hitchhiking with Kate Jackson...
...one is a black youth and the other a white girl...
...What happened to Dear Abby, Ann Landers and National Geographic...
...Why...
...This was Dick Van Dyke losing his virginity with Morey Amsterdam coaching from the closet...
...Written by Dr...
...Fortunately, the pregnancy turned out to be a scare, lasting only until the final commercial...
...First there was the controversy in the newspapers, then the barrage of promos and finally the program itself...
...OnTelevision TV'S SEX PROBLEM by marvin kitman T he night of February 9 on NBC, James went all the way with a Swedish exchange student in what had to be the most widely discussed and deplored congress since the 80th (the famed do-nothing Congress...
...Susan Franzblau and Dr...
...It is typical of this show's uniqueness that it tried something new, like grappling with the problem of virginity on the commercial airwaves...
...The coupling was over in three seconds...
...James at any age is, for the most part, a pretty good series...
...Still, for television the escapade with the Swedish babe was such big stuff that it not only changed the young hero's life, but the title of the program as well—from James at 15 to James at 16 (Thursday, 9:00 p.m...
...does not have to be that way...
...As 1 watched James that night, 1 was struck by an even greater question...
...At any rate, the network decided to handle the controversial mating episode in the American way—they turned it into a sitcom...
...Yet compared to other dramas on the tube—Charlie's Angels, Love Boat, Three's Company, or Fantasy Island—James is not merely pretty good, it is excellent...
...The striking lack of physical intimacy on dramatic programs identifies sex as a taboo topic for serious consideration and conveys an incomplete picture of the life styles of policemen, detectives and doctors...
...For a moment I had the feeling I was standing on the beach at Guada-loupe with Club Med...
...Adam has been trying harder and longer than James to lose it, and with more reason, being a Jewish intellectual and a philosophy student...
...Why should he be losing his virginity in the first place...
...This could have been NBC's answer to the kid-porn on ABC, the so-called pimple network, where all they do is spout double en-tendres...
...James has only two friends, and they are both from oppressed groups...
...It is marvelous how those British treat sex so naturally and unobtrusively...
...But between the two coasts that supply video guidance, 1 opt for the British approach over that of their revolting cousins in California...
...Long Wu died before the act was consummated...
...It would serve him right for having sex...
...The little fellow kissed that Swedish girl like she was his mother...
...They've got class...
...James' punishment for his sins, though, did not end there: On the March 2 program, he was worried that he had caught VD...
...Only the running dogs of the Establishment are consciously aware of her breasts...
...A recent paper from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, incidentally, has corroborated the link I have detected between comedy and sex...
...Well, you are wearing less than the rest of us...
...He opens her blouse and kisses her nipple...
...Like James, he has gone through a lot to arrange the place, and he is walking on air afterward...
...I wish Dan Wakefield would get a Fulbright or Rhodes scholarship to remake the James-reaches-manhood episode at the BBC anthropology department...
...A classmate of Adam's has just returned from America to teach at a newly created university, whose tranquil academic life is destroyed by a student revolt...
...Whatever the case, on British TV undressing performs a function that should not be judged by esthetic standards alone: It is a form of sex education, often the single opportunity the young have to see the anatomy of the opposite sex...
...Their moral code bobs up and down like the stock market and the Nielsen ratings...
...Uncle Chester, for example, arrived from out of town to help his nephew celebrate his birthday by stashing away a high-priced call girl in a hotel room reserved for James' use...
...I wish Groucho Marx could have been alive to see how the flustered chancellor of the university interrupts the young woman's har-rangue about Chairman Mao to invite her to stand close to the fire...
...Who knows, in the future he may worry about going blind...
...With the sex circus act, Klein would be a hero today—instead of waiting to jump or fall from power as soon as his archrival Freddy Silverman, the pious kiddie pornographer, arrives to take over in June...
...Joyce Spraf-kin, "A Content Analysis of Physical Intimacy on Television," maintains that references to physically intimate behavior appear most frequently on situation comedies and variety shows, thereby supporting "the conventional notion that sex is a disturbing topic and is best handled humorously...
...The second week they would have shown us his second close encounter, the third week his third, etc...
...No wonder so many kids today think babies are made by smooching...
...True, this build-up did not match that given to the proposed union of the Emperor Weng and his girl friend, Long Wu, during the fifth dynasty in ancient China...
...Can you imagine TV as a source of sex education...
...Also, the dialogue is sometimes a little stilted, making James sound like Dick Cavett at 15 or 16, if one can accept the premise—and many can't—that Dick was once a kid...
...Single entendres on the audio and actual sex on the video would be a whole new thing...
...The story traces the evolution of Adam Morris' Cambridge class...
...At the height of this protest, Denise, a student leader, doffs her blouse, and stays that way throughout the long negotiations with the administration...
...I would give this scene a prize for maturity and realism in modern drama...
...Even if he had only enough integrity to fill an ant's navel, it would still be more than what the network censors possess...
...But Denise, Raphael and the BBC were making an important point or two here—that you won't go blind from seeing such things for extended periods of time, and that there is nothing unnatural about it anyway...
...I told him to go to Cuba and sign Superman, that country's major cultural attraction in Batista's day...
...Some scholars, however, have noted that the penchant for stripping in British TV—it happens at least once an episode in Glittering Prizes—is not very true to life...
...That was the gift you may have heard about in the promos...
Vol. 61 • March 1978 • No. 6
