Basic cable now gives a fuck (or two)
January 31, 2018 4:47 AM   Subscribe

Until last year, Syfy's policy — and the policy of USA, its corporate sibling — was that the word "fuck" had to be dipped (with one exception: an unmuted "fuck" in the Season 2 premiere of USA's Mr. Robot in July 2016). Syfy declined to put an executive on the phone to discuss the change in the internal rules, but a spokesperson said that when language — "fuck" specifically — is deemed important to the style or plot of a show, Syfy and USA now allow it. Any show with "fuck" airs with the TV-MA guideline, denoting that the program is meant for adult viewers.
posted by octothorpe (52 comments total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
Obligatory: "show as many deaths by guns as you can" on a basic cable show, but start clutching the pearls when "fuck" is uttered...
posted by kuanes at 4:52 AM on January 31, 2018 [22 favorites]


Ah, you funny Americans! I just started watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix, and on the second episode someone was spraypainting dicks on police cars, and they were pixellated! (Or was that for comedic effect but it just went over my head?)
posted by Harald74 at 4:58 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Brooklyn Nine-Nine is broadcast over-the-air on Fox so it has to abide by FCC rules. SyFy and USA were self-censuring.
posted by octothorpe at 5:01 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


On further thought, maybe I need to clarify that the vandal did not create pixellated dicks, they were pixellated in post production. Although pixellated graffiti seems like it has possibilities...
posted by Harald74 at 5:01 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yeah, ok. American Netflix-produced content otherwise tend to not shy away from harsh language, so it struck me as a bit funny.
posted by Harald74 at 5:03 AM on January 31, 2018


Oh good, Avasarala can finally be portrayed in her full glory!
posted by JDHarper at 5:36 AM on January 31, 2018 [17 favorites]


JDHarper said exactly what I came in here to say ... sadly the decision may be too late to have any effect on series 3.
posted by myotahapea at 6:06 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


shit(hole)
fuck
And then there were five.
posted by Flannery Culp at 6:06 AM on January 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Remember the freakout in the 90s when (the American TV network) ABC let a moment of a guy's bare arse be shown after 10:00 PM on NYPD Blue? Good times. I'm all for letting these aspects of humanity be heard and shown on screens, with proper context. I'm one of those people who lets fly with swearing quite often, though I manage to remember not to use those words during meetings!

When I was 6, my cousin with whom I lived and I got into it over something I can't recall, and I screamed, "Well, fuck you!" at him (I had not been taught to regulate my tongue in my birth mother's house, and her husband and brother-in-law who lived with us swore like sailors). My aunt accosted me and demanded I apologize for using that word. "If 'names will never hurt' people, then why can't I say 'fuck' if I'm mad?" I asked.

My mouth got promptly washed out with a bar of yellow Dial soap.

I'm fascinated, though, that the 7 dirty words (well, OK, 5 dirty words) are considered such in the US, and why they're considered such. I've often wondered if it's an attempt to deny the "animal" parts of our existence, as if by not using such language we are that much closer to the angels, or some bullshit like that.

posted by droplet at 6:08 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


shit(hole)
fuck
And then there were five .


I'm not so sure there's even five now. "Piss" and "tits" also occasionally make it on the air.
posted by briank at 6:25 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Well, 'piss' was the first of Carlin's Seven to be occasionally allowed on broadcast TV, usually in the form of 'pissed off', not as a literal synonym for urination.

It was a big event when 'shit' was spoken on the CBS 10PM show "Chicago Hope" in 1999 (it was a medical drama competing with "E.R." so not many people were watching... )
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:26 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


To my best recollection, The Simpsons broke the "shit" barrier on network broadcast well over a decade ago, though I guess it was sort of via the backdoor (ahem) route: ... they're all shite!
posted by tclark at 6:28 AM on January 31, 2018


The idea that someone could exist in the same universe as a sharknado without dropping an F-bomb or two always seemed ludicrous. Samuel L. Jackson couldn't even make it through a five hour flight with some snakes.
posted by AndrewInDC at 6:36 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


Well shit (9).
posted by Nelson at 6:46 AM on January 31, 2018


Dipped= Bleeped?
posted by notmtwain at 6:48 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Dipped = muted. (The volume on the audio track is briefly dipped down to zero.)
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 6:54 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


When Comedy Central went and allowed South Park to swear and advertise it during one of their episodes, I remember that it was done... sort of surprisingly classy. Which yes, is a weird thing to say. (Sorry, the episode is only available on Hulu.)

Basically, it felt like it was going to be a "big thing" and done at a climax in the show... and it wasn't... instead, they put up a counter and wore it out. It wasn't used excessively... well it was... I mean in a 22 minute run time they showed it close to 200 times... but not... just as a tirade of swearing... it was just... brought into the lexicon and finished off. With respect to the final joke, they opt in to reign in the potty humor right at the end. South Park, once again, made a crass point of "there's a line" and still didn't cross it, and they simultaneously embraced it and satirized it. It was vaguely a high-brow satirical take on low-brow swear humor and censorship.
posted by Nanukthedog at 6:55 AM on January 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


Okay, personal story... when I was in college a million years ago, I did the "Sunday-night-something-like-Dr.-Demento-show" at my college radio station (at the time, every L.A. area college station had one). It was soon after one radio station nearly lost its FCC license for playing George Carlin's "Seven Words" monologue uncensored, and I had gotten in my possession a then-very-limited-edition vinyl record of Hanna Barbera cartoon sound effects (distributed widely on CD 20 years later). I got the inspiration to use the cartoony sounds as 'bleeps' for the monologue, with a specific sound representing each censored word... "thud" for 'fuck', "splat" for 'shit', "splash" for 'piss', "boing" for 'tits', "squeak" for 'cunt', the "flappity-flappity"running sound for 'motherfucker' and a string of "thuds" falling downstairs for 'cocksucker' (I needed the longer sounds for the multi-syllable words). I hope you all remember what those cartoon sounds sounded like, because I spent hours in the production studio physically editing with tape and a razor blade to make it all work together, and when I was finished I was pretty proud of what I had accomplished. I played it on my show every week and made it available to anyone else at the station who wanted to play it. It was a hit. More than a year later I graduated and got my first opportunity to listen to the Original Dr. D on a Sunday night... and there, in the middle of his 'most requested' countdown, he played an edited version of Carlin's "Seven Words" that used different, much less cartoony, sound effects, that he credited one of his audio engineers with. It was one of the biggest letdowns of my short radio career. I have a cassette of my version somewhere, but I haven't had a cassette player in years and a big part of me really doesn't want to hear it.
posted by oneswellfoop at 7:03 AM on January 31, 2018 [20 favorites]


> I just started watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix, and on the second episode someone was spraypainting dicks on police cars, and they were pixellated!

That's 'cause the TV producers wanted you to notice them.
posted by ardgedee at 7:40 AM on January 31, 2018


John Peel, the British radio DJ, used to occasionally play records with rude words (or bands with rude names) on his 10pm-midnight BBC show.

It was his producer, John Waters, who invariably had to deal with the reprimands this produced from BBC management, so Peel would try to give him a heads-up whenever a particularly sweary programme went out. He later reported one of their conversations as going something like this:

Peel: "I'm afraid we had two fucks and quite a loud shit on Friday."

Waters: "Sounds like a bloody good night out to me!"
posted by Paul Slade at 8:12 AM on January 31, 2018 [11 favorites]


They have already started putting this into practice. Season 3 of "The Magicians" on SyFy which just started at the beginning of this month has had several un-censored "fucks", where as before they just did a audio drop out on the word.
posted by Captain_Science at 8:16 AM on January 31, 2018


.
posted by bleep at 8:25 AM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


I noticed this while watching The Magicians. As expected, Eliot is particularly adept in his usage. Not Avasarala level because she's transcendent in her delivery.
posted by Ber at 8:43 AM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


Didn't Mad Men (AMC) get a couple fucks? And I feel like some Comedy Central shows also got some.
posted by Automocar at 9:33 AM on January 31, 2018


Half the satisfaction of using the word "fuck" is that you can't say that on television. I remember when Queen singing "Nobody gives a damn," was kind of shocking to an Ohio boy. Now "damn" seems completely toothless.

YOU'RE NOT MAKING YOUR TV SHOW BETTER, YOU'RE JUST MAKING SWEARING WORSE
posted by straight at 9:48 AM on January 31, 2018 [5 favorites]


Remember the freakout in the 90s when (the American TV network) ABC let a moment of a guy's bare arse be shown after 10:00 PM on NYPD Blue?

...and it's now being shown on an OTA channel that is clearly aimed at people old enough to need adult diapers and catheters!

Which, by the way, censors out all racial and homophobic epithets. Since part of the point of the show is that Sipowicz is a racist and a homophobe, this can have quite a weird effect. There's a couple of episodes where Andy calls a witness [who then gets murdered] "n*gger," leading to severe turmoil in the department, so the use of the word is literally the linchpin of the plot, but you can only infer what he said from the context.

I actually can't remember the last time I saw a white character in a show set in the present day use that word. I'm not even sure they did it on Mad Men, where you know a guy like Pete in real life at the time would use it with complete casualness. Personally, except when it's necessary to the plot as above, I prefer a world where adult programming uses the seven words and mutes out the most vicious of the bigoted epithets.
posted by praemunire at 9:48 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Two of the white characters on Better Things* have said it. In episode 3 the half-senile grandmother tells a story about buying pantyhose in "n* brown", and in episode 4 (called "Woman is the Something of the Something") the middle-school daughter quotes the song that is redacted from. In both cases the lead character, who is the center of this generational sandwich, shuts it down hard, but I was still surprised.

* at least on Hulu which also allowed plenty of f-bombs, FX might have bleeped this for broadcast.
posted by Flannery Culp at 10:13 AM on January 31, 2018


It must be noted that two of the Seven Words are 'gender-specific', one of which is generally used derogatorily.

Carlin did a lot of comedy material about Language in general, and he was constantly addressing additional words that people told him should be added to the list. At one point, he assembled "An Incomplete List of Impolite Words" totaling over 2,400, and yes, it has been collected on the internet (in two parts, 1 and 2).
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:27 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I’m certain to this day that I heard somebody on Hey Arnold! say “damn” when I was a kid.
posted by gucci mane at 10:38 AM on January 31, 2018


I have to say, I'm impressed that the CBC is letting a lot of things through on its comedy night. Workin' Moms lets loose a fair number of fucks. There's full frontal, and even more nekkid butts. Last week's episode started off with the lead character asking 'who ever came from anal?' Season one had a full-on nipple piercing.

For the CBC, that's pretty impressive. For network teevee in prime time (9:30, admittedly), that's even better. It's nice to be entertained at an adult level. If there's been any pushback, I haven't heard about it.
posted by Capt. Renault at 11:02 AM on January 31, 2018


This is frackin’ wonderful!
posted by curious nu at 11:15 AM on January 31, 2018


I’m certain to this day that I heard somebody on Hey Arnold! say “damn” when I was a kid.

I'm pretty certain one of the characters on the old GI Joe cartoon said "sam hell", as in "What in sam hell is going on here?". That's a solid gateway-swear.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:27 AM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sam Hill
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:30 AM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


I remember there being a bit of fuss when I was a nipper that some American cartoon (possibly Yosemite Sam?) said "bloody" on children's TV.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:52 AM on January 31, 2018


So, tangentially—has anyone else recently run across movies shown on Syfy with an audio description track for the visually impaired aired instead of the normal English audio track?

If you're ever having trouble figuring out a particular character's name, an audio description is evidently the place to look, since they have to be able to name people to describe what they're doing. This might just be on my cable system, Comcast in the NE US, which is having other bizarre and stupid audio problems at the moment.
posted by XMLicious at 12:04 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


While I still hold to the idea that it's a bad thing for children to be able to hear swears while watching television, I also believe that children watching cable TV unsupervised in 2018 probably have bigger problems than whether they hear someone say "fuck."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:36 PM on January 31, 2018


yeah they might accidentally watch a certain president
posted by numaner at 12:47 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


she's transcendent in her delivery.

chills, every time.
posted by numaner at 12:48 PM on January 31, 2018


Oh-oh. Once fuck goes mainstream? what's left? when you're really pissed? Rat-bastards?

Standards? Look at the TV. Even Le Guin couldn't take any more. We -need- fuck more than ever. This is -not- the time for this, people. What the rat-bastards was SyFy thinking?
posted by Twang at 1:10 PM on January 31, 2018


Ah you Americans. On radio here I can occaisionally hear the c bomb used without any censoring, which I can't even do on mefi.
posted by deadwax at 1:44 PM on January 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Surprised that no one has mentioned Saturday Night Live's first "fuck." (There are more in the list than I expected, although a big chunk were from musicians.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:52 PM on January 31, 2018


The silly pixelations (on Brooklyn 99 and lots of other shows), clever swears on shows like Arrested Development, and the fake swears on The Good Place are the best. I was once fake flipped off by the Friends flip off gesture. I still remember that pretty fondly, and I didn't even get it but a friend did. I think this pronouncement by sci-fi - that the swear has to serve the story is all wrong. Most people who swear regularly don't do it dramatically, they do it casually.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:14 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


"Creative" censorship is a long, well-established and honorable tradition in Hollywood, including cartoons of the 1940s and '50s with Yosemite Sam ("rassin' frassin' flim flam")*, Robin Williams' Mork from Ork ("Shazbot!!"), and the entire frakkin' cast of Battlestar Galactica.

But currently, the most obvious and therefore funniest censorship on TV is the use of automatic euphemisms on "The Good Place" (“Holy motherforking shirtballs.”)

"Yosemite Sam Swearing" was a habit I picked up in childhood, along with the use of other cartoon catchphrases ("I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque." "Of course you realize, this means war!") which is why I have, in my real life, cursed much less than most non-religious males of my generation.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:18 PM on January 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Didn't Mad Men (AMC) get a couple fucks?

Vince Gilligan claimed that Breaking Bad was allowed one uncensored "fuck" per season, which made them think very carefully about where to deploy it.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:39 PM on January 31, 2018


I was considering the suitability of Good Place for children; it's quite an adult show in many ways despite no realistic violence and no actual curse words. But I concluded the bowdlerized cursing is not something I'd want a kid repeating, and they swear a lot!
posted by wnissen at 2:49 PM on January 31, 2018


GOOD PLACE SPOILERS

...I guess the bowdlerization actually exists, not to keep Heaven's air nice and clean, but to further frustrate the damned souls? Nice subtle point.
posted by praemunire at 3:21 PM on January 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


I REPLY THUSLY
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:27 PM on January 31, 2018


Very related: I just saw an ad for the 'new flavors' of Diet Coke with the headline "because it's fizzing delicious."

We are all in The Good Place, or something like it.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:43 PM on January 31, 2018


Remember the freakout in the 90s when (the American TV network) ABC let a moment of a guy's bare arse be shown after 10:00 PM on NYPD Blue?

Oh, that’s nothing compared to Archie Bunker uttering “damns” and “god damns” on All in the Family way back in ‘71. That was like an earthquake shaking tv to its core.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:58 PM on January 31, 2018


* at least on Hulu which also allowed plenty of f-bombs, FX might have bleeped this for broadcast.

If I recall, FX let it run uncensored on the first showing at least. They may have censored the later rebroadcast. Better Things is really good for pushing the language buttons. One episode featured the middle Daughter, Frankie, graphically describing an incident in the girl’s restroom at school. I was quite amazed to hear “pussy” uttered by both Frankie and her mom. That was a basic cable first for me.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:12 PM on January 31, 2018


Rachel Bloom faces this regularly on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. You can compare the explicit versions of songs, which are posted on her personal YouTube channel, and the CW-run ones. I'd say the constraints often make for better, more creative wordplay probably 60-70% of the time. They could have used a third "shit" in "It Was a Shit Show". The CW should have given it to them.

I would love to adopt The Good Place-style swearing but I'm pretty sure that "motherforker" coming out of my 4 year old's mouth would still not be well-received. Unfortunately. Maybe at work.
posted by emkelley at 9:13 AM on February 1, 2018


I love The Magicians and I love that this policy changed.
posted by limeonaire at 8:54 PM on February 1, 2018


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