Naomi Schaefer Riley

Naomi Schaefer Riley

Opinion

Escaping modern TV

At 8:42 last Thursday night, with my husband out of town on business, I turned on the TV and heard something like this:

Husband tells wife he’s leaving her because they haven’t had sex in 10 years. Wife replies that they did, on his birthday. He says no, she just walked in on him “masturbating in the shower.” She insists she deserves credit because she waited until he was done “with his business.” Husband tells wife she has a habit of criticizing everything he does. Wife tells him he “holds it” incorrectly.

My 6-year-old recently learned how to turn on the TV by herself. She’d been in bed a whopping 45 minutes when this conversation ran on the premiere of “The Millers” on Channel 2 — which, in case you’re keeping track, is the first channel that appears when you turn on the TV.

We didn’t get to this point overnight. When I was a senior in college (probably the last time I regularly watched TV beyond “Law & Order”), my roommate turned on the pilot episode of “Dawson’s Creek.”

A few minutes in, Joey (Katie Holmes) tells Dawson (James Van Der Beek) that they’re not as totally honest with each other as they once were. To prove it, she asks him how often he “walks the dog.” He doesn’t answer right away — but as she’s leaving he leans out the window and yells his answer: in the morning while watching Katie Couric on “The Today Show.”

Yuck. (Thanks, at least, for using a euphemism. Apparently, the writers for “The Millers” couldn’t think of any.)

“Dawson’s Creek” was geared toward 12-year-olds in prime time, and this was a main topic of the first episode. I looked at the roommate who’d put the show on and told her about my plans to keep any kids I had away from the TV.

Rewind a few more years to 1996, when “Friends” aired its infamous premature ejaculation/juicebox episode. After it, the inimitable George Will quoted his own 15-year-old daughter on the subject: “Uncalled for,” she told him.

Will predicted, “When parents cannot watch early-evening television with their children without wincing, their distress will take on political coloration, and the winner of the nation’s premier political office is apt to be he who best exemplifies credible disgust with what distresses them.”

If only. The winner of that year’s presidential election added CNN to the number of channels we couldn’t watch with our children.

For me, the golden age of TV was 1989 — the first time I was left alone on a regular basis with the device my parents always told me “was turning my brain to mush.” I used my newfound freedom to become one of the very few middle-schoolers hooked on a daytime soap, “Santa Barbara.” What seemed to me fairly scandalous at the time — couples with sheets up to their chins — is Jane Austen compared to what you find on TV today.

Indeed, in 1986, a young Whitney Houston appeared on the primetime show “Silver Spoons.” When she sang her hit single “Saving All My Love For You,” she had to change the lyric “We’ll be making love the whole night through” to “We’ll be holding each other the whole night through.”

It’s not so much the greater amounts of skin on TV these days, or the dirtier language. It’s that the topics deemed acceptable for prime time have expanded considerably.

As our culture coarsens, though, there is some good news from technology. A friend, annoyed by all the eye-rolling and sarcasm on shows meant for preteens, tells me she’s DVR’d every episode of “Full House” and is showing her daughters those instead.

Which got me thinking. Why should I be subject to the evolving standards of TV executives? The Riley family could just spend the next decade reliving the ’80s: “The Cosby Show,” “Family Ties,” “Alf,” “Punky Brewster,” “Head of the Class,” “Silver Spoons, “The Wonder Years” . . .

Maybe they’ll turn our brains to mush, but at least I won’t have to wince while my kids are in the room.