Entertainment

Raise you hand if you pick leering promos

While watching last Sunday afternoon’s Jets-Oakland game on CBS, it struck me that if you only watched Sunday afternoon pro football on CBS the last, oh, 15 years — and if you watched CBS at no other times — you’d by now be convinced that the network, at most other times, exists as a pornography channel. Seriously.

To judge the rest of CBS content on the basis of the primetime entertainment-side promos that are presented, there would be no other logical conclusion to reach.

Year after year, CBS carefully culls its programming to find the most salacious, vulgar and obscene content; those snippets then serve as representative come-ons for those shows — and they’re fed into and around Sunday afternoon NFL telecasts.

That’s why, as families watch football on CBS, they see and hear promos that refer to fellatio (once spoken by a minor), who’s “doing” whom, who slept with whom, threesomes, masturbation, skimpy underwear bedroom scenes, under-the-sheets scenes and not-so clever double entendres that invariably point to breasts, buttocks, genitalia and copulation.

Much of it is put to laugh tracks, as if to supply justification.

While CBS is hardly alone , it is alone in one, significant and unforgettable aspect. It was on CBS’s time and dime that corporate sibling MTV produced a 2004 Super Bowl halftime show in which Justin Timberlake undressed Janet Jackson, fully exposing her right breast.

The fallout from that “breakthrough” was fast and frantic. And CBS execs sat before a Congressional hearing and promised to voluntarily clean things up. And that promise was fulfilled — for about two weeks.

Last Sunday, just before kickoff, a promo for the show “The Good Wife” appeared: A man was seen pressing a woman against a wall, making an aggressive sexual play. “It’s Sexy!” read a full-screen graphic. “Shocking,” read another, “Passionate” read a third.

“You slept with my best friend?” a female character asks a male character. Then, one woman to another, “How was my husband, was he good?”

And that commercial break ended with a promo for “Mike & Molly,” Molly on all fours, a gym instructor standing close behind her. Easy does it,” said Molly, “the last guy I let back there had to buy me a ring.”

And CBS, as well as the game, was just getting started.

Is there a CBS exec who wants to put his or her name and title to that? Is there one who’d like to be quoted that Sunday afternoon sports events are an appropriate time and place for such promos?

If so, I’m here. Let me know.

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Checkout Counter: Sunday afternoons, 12:30, WNBC news vet and all-pro Gabe Pressman hosts and narrates “Mr. Mayor,” half-hour retrospectives on NYC mayors, loaded with footage and fascination.

The one on pipe-smoking, Ireland-born, former common laborer Bill O’Dwyer, mayor 1946-50 — and the first NYC mayor to regularly appear on TV — was superb.

Wonder if Ch. 4 can’t string all these together on some holiday weekend.

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Seems the best questions are rarely asked of Presidential aspirants during televised debates. Rick Santorum, for example, was a relentless family values advocate as a Republican Senator from Pennsylvania. He still claims to be.

So how come no one bothers to ask him how he could have supported Linda McMahon, queen of the drug and death-infested pro wrestling industry and a longtime kiddie-sleaze profiteer, during her failed run, last year, for U.S. Senator from Connecticut?

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Regis Philbin, 80, recently threw out the first ball at a Yankee game. He stood on the mound and threw a perfect strike! Then again, he’s got a lot of new parts.