I work from home and my wife is retired, which means that in the morning, I do my work at a laptop in the sunroom at the same time she is watching TV. So except for when I retreat to the office to do a Zoom call, most of my work time has a TV show in the background.
In the morning, that show is “Reba”, the Reba McEntire sitcom from abou 20 years ago that is run with episodes back-to-back for a few hours every morning on the Hallmark Channel. I can’t say it is watched carefully, partly because it serves mostly as background for whatever my best girl is doing in the morning, and partly because she’s seen every episode multiple times.
Very briefly, in the show Reba is a divorced mother of three, the oldest being a daughter who gets pregnant in high school at the same time her father’s new wife is also pregnant. The seven-year run of the show takes the family through all manner of fun — it actually was funny and well-written, certainly compared to today’s shows’ attempted humor.
More important though, it is on the Hallmark Channel, from the company that brings you greeting cards with fun rhymes. Also, to their credit, they helped pay for my college education — the Hallmark Foundation gave me a four-year, $500 annual scholarship in 1969 which M.I.T., to their eternal detriment, promptly subtracted from what they offered me (even though the combined amount was far less than the annual costs there).
And they have a cable TV network. I’d say they run “family-friendly” programming, except that Reba and its teen pregnancy and adultery plots are not exactly … well, you get it.
Now, what they do have at good old Hallmark Channel is a censor. And that’s today’s topic.
We know that there is a censor, because you’ll be watching a moment of an episode of the show, and you realize that a character is speaking, but a word or two seems not to escape the lips of the character whose mouth is moving.
Today, my best girl was watching an episode, wherein the low-IQ high-school football star who got the daughter pregnant (they’re now married and they live in Reba’s house) is complaining that he had to go through practice that day “with an acorn in his jockstrap.”
The way she knew that’s what the line was, is because she could read his lips. That was necessary because the Hallmark Channel censor had blanked out the word “jockstrap” from our delicate ears.
That pretty much did it for the missus. I won’t quote her directly, because the specific words might have needed a censor themselves, but the upshot was this:
Reba is not a children’s show. It has specifically adult themes, which dominate most every episode. The people who watch it, twenty years after it first aired, and at 8:30 in the morning in 2023, are mostly adult women.
Those women know what a jockstrap is. They also know that “jockstrap” is a rather inoffensive term for an otherwise inoffensive piece of male athletic wear used to protect an area with which such women are quite familiar. And if they’re not that familiar, at least they know what a jockstrap is.
So what was the thought process at the censor’s office? Did they screen the episode and pick words out that were deemed to be offensive to adult women’s ears? And if that’s the case — or even if they’re trying to protect the sensitive ears of the preschool kiddies who might be in the room — how is “pregnant” perfectly fine but “jockstrap” isn’t?
Was there not a post-censor at the Hallmark Channel, you know, someone to screen the show after the censor’s work, to decide if blotting out the word “jockstrap” didn’t make the network look ridiculous? And to be clear, after dozens of episodes, we know that there are plenty of other, equally innocuous words in the show that are blotted out as well.
This is normally where I would blame the left for overdoing something, you know, sort of the way the AOCs of the world blame global warming for everything from leaky faucets to runs in stockings.
But I don’t really see a leftist kind of thing here — I see a nanny network feeling the need to do nanny things without thinking how foolish they look. It’s a power thing — you know, “We know better than you what you should and should not hear” — and that’s a leftist thing, though they don’t have a monopoly on power grabs.
And ultimately, what I see is stoopid.
Copyright 2014-2023 by Robert Sutton
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