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Admit it. Angus T. Jones was right. From “Glee” to “Girls” to “Two and a Half Men,” television has devolved into a vacuous wasteland where ordinary notions of morality, fidelity and decency are not just censored. They’re a joke.
TV shows present teenage virginity as a curse, human intelligence as a disease, and promiscuous sex as the norm, while average human attention spans are as alien as the Martian landscape.
That’s what Jones, all of 19, suggested when he made a video that went viral on YouTube last week, an impassioned, 20-minute religious rant that had Hollywood’s amoral glamazons shocked and appalled — while hiding the remote from their own children.
In it, Jones trashed the CBS show that has made him a star since age 9, “Two and a Half Men,” calling it “filth’’ that’s driving young ones to Crazytown.
“Please stop watching it. Please stop filling your head with filth,’’ he said, sitting beside spiritual adviser Christopher Hudson.
“Do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you’ll have a decision to make when it comes to television, especially with what you watch on television. It’s bad.
“You cannot be a true, God-fearing person and be on a television show like that. I know I can’t.”
Jones has since apologized, sort of, to his “wonderful” castmates. Show creator Chuck Lorre last week welcomed him back to the series.
That great arbiter of taste Charlie Sheen, who last year was bounced from the show, accused Jones of suffering a meltdown from the “cursed” TV series. And yet, Jones has not for a moment taken back his message: Watch my show, and your brain will rot.
Consider the latest episode.
Jones, who plays Army recruit Jake Harper, giddily tells dad Alan (Jon Cryer) his girlfriend “gave me the clap!’’ Jake’s thrilled. Now everyone knows he’s having sex!
“So you’re telling people?’’ his dad asks incredulously. “I don’t have to,’’ responds Jake, “because I scream when I pee.’’ Two minutes of my life, irrevocably ruined.
And that moronic episode, all you connoisseurs of fine TV, tied the season’s highest rating. Nearly 14 million folks tuned in, proving that the public’s acceptance of “humor” of the lowest common denominator is not just limitless. It’s soul crushing.
That’s not to say “Two and a Half Men” is alone. Far from it.
In a sad attempt to be “edgy,” HBO went misogynist. It’s soon to start the second season of Lena Dunham’s series, “Girls,’’ a show that explores, in all its dimpled ugliness, the sexual debasement and unplanned pregnancies of four 20-somethings who supposedly represent genuine, hip New York females.
“Glee” is a Fox series I once thought superior, with its cool depictions of high-school misfits. Then an episode a while back showed two girls, played by adults, getting rough with each other. Brittany (Heather Morris) wanted to kiss. Santana (Naya Rivera) talked about “scissoring” — a term that sent me rushing to UrbanDictionary.com. (You don’t want to know.)
“What’s that?” my then-11-year-old daughter asked.
Another show banished from my house.
Clever word play à la “Seinfeld” is an ancient relic. Today’s audiences aren’t trusted to possess the brain power to untangle the complex messages of Lucille Ball.
Jones is now making peace with “Men,” as well as the $8 million-a-year salary it brings. His girlfriend, identified on Celebuzz as “Sarah M.,” says he’ll finish out the season, then start college.
“He was just talking to the younger fans who are studying the Bible and that they shouldn’t be watching a half-hour of dirty jokes if they’re starting their walk with God,” Sarah said.
He’s right, of course.
Just don’t expect television to clean up its act. Filth is hot.
Aw, Alec’s tweet on me
What a guy! Buxom bully Alec Baldwin went on a tirade last week against little old me, whining passionately and semi-literately in a mouth-foaming 10-part series of tweets.
“Everyone who breathes air knows the Post is the worst newspaper in human history,” Baldwin raved. “But shame on them for politicizing a criminal case . .. and shame on the morally bankrupt partisan trash Andrea Peyser who demeans all women by inferring [sic] that a charge of criminal harassment is overkill when the defendant is a woman.’’
What spurred this smackdown? What made the college grad forget his grammar, and write “inferring’’ rather than “implying?’’
All I did was criticize Alec for waging a campaign to lock up his alleged stalker, Genevieve Sabourin, 40. She was arrested in April after arriving at Alec’s doorstep to ask why he bedded her only to dump her via text message. Last week, she was locked up for 24 hours after allegedly violating a protection order by tweeting to Alec’s Stockholm syndrome-suffering wife, Hilaria Thomas.
I also called Alec, 54, “a bloviating psycho who seduces small women and bashes puny photographers.’’ Those things he failed to deny. Later, he took down all but one tweet.
Maybe I need an order of protection.
Lindsay fully loaded
It was 4 a.m. A sloshed Lindsay Lohan, depressed over rotten reviews for “Liz and Dick,’’ her top falling off, allegedly cold-cocked psychic Tiffany Eve Mitchell last week in Manhattan club Avenue.
This is news?
Lohan, 26 and looking worn, continues to cut a swath of terror that began in LA and wound up in this city’s booziest nightclubs. She’s on probation for stealing a necklace. She was charged last week with obstruction of justice by California prosecutors who say Lindsay lied when she told them she wasn’t driving during a car crash.
When will someone, finally, lock her up and throw away the key?
Sadly makes you Wonder
Good riddance. Stevie Wonder became the latest celeb to bow to pressure from Israel-haters, canceling a planned singing performance Thursday for the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces annual gala in Los Angeles. It raises millions for Israel’s military.
Wonder caved after an outcry from performers and the hugely anti-Semitic United Nations, which last week upgraded Palestine to a nonmember observer state.
He did it, he said, “with a heart that has always cried out for world unity.’’
That is, a world in which Israel is wiped from the map.
Our blue angels
New York cops too often get a bad rap. But Police Officer Larry DePrimo’s act of kindness — he bought boots for a barefoot homeless man, then put them on his blistered feet — is not an aberration.
“The truth of the matter is cops every day do things that help people,’’ said Mayor Bloomberg.
I can’t say this enough: Thank an officer. New York has the greatest police force on Earth.