Let's go back to the days when Rickie and Lucy shared a bedroom but not a bed! Where Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore had the cutest little twin bed set, and their son Robbie appeared like magic with not a hint nor a glimmer of sweat on Laura Petrie's Brow. Just some cute maternity tops for an episode or two and then Viola! Here's baby Robbie.
Nowadays, even on "FRIENDS", we have to sit and watch some charming, glamour-puss celebrity actress grunting and panting with her legs in stirrups while she gives birth to the obligatory olive-oil and ketchup smeared infant. It's disgusting, it's in bad taste, and if you complain about it, you are considered some kind of commie pinko who is against Nature. Because, you know, childbirth is NATURAL. So we should WATCH it a LOT. So we can celebrate our natures.
But it wasn't like that in the old days. You were not expected to be NATURAL. You were expected to have manners, decorum, and keep private things private. People did not swap spit and swallow each other's tongues upon greeting their beloveds. The bedroom was off limits to the camera, and all body functions were not even alluded to, much less shared with the television audience. You never even SAW a bathroom on a television show!! Ladies had powder rooms and vanities, sure, right next to their twin bed, but that was as far as they went.
And never, not once, not never, not no-how, were we ever subjected to someone PUKING on national television and then standing around afterwards talking about it!
I'm speaking about the episode of So You Think You Can Dance which I had the misfortune to catch last night. Where that poor chubby girl in the tutu and greasy smeary black eyeliner (who did she think she was, Britney Spears????) reenacted the Dance of the Pink Hippos from that old Disney Movie, Fantasia. Where the network, not content with showing her vomit just one time for shock value, decided it would be BETTER if they use that shot in the trailer, in the promo, in the segway, and at every station break for the duration of the episode. So that we got to watch her puke....what? 5 or 6 times before it was all done? What's next, people? Now that we've broken the projectile vomiting taboo in our society, are we to go ahead and just let it all hang out?
Well, I won't go into graphic detail about what they could start showing us next. You can figure that out for yourselves. I'm frankly suprised that they didn't give us a CLOSE-UP and a fade-out on the puddle of nervous vomit that poor soul left behind. But apparently someone must have thought that was tacky. Someone thought that might be pushing the envelope! Taking it a little too far.
I shudder to think how desensitized we have become. I think I am going to try and cash in on this trend for 'outing' it all and making it for our viewing pleasure. I'm going to propose a television show called "So you think you can DIE?" and then go around and film a bunch of people dying. There could be a panel of judges giving their remarks after the person is dead, and then a nice shot of the family members dragging the corpse off stage and complaining about how ignorant and unfair the judges are. The best DEAD PERSON could win a prize and go on tour.
You think I'm being over the top here? You just wait. It's the next thing! After the 6 or so Seasons of America's Top Puker, of course.
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