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Ironically, this ongoing obsession with TV's responsibility comes at a time when the networks' hold on the viewing public continues to erode--just this past February the networks' share of the total viewing audience dropped 4.6% from a year ago, continuing a two-decades-long decline. But whatever Ellen's fate with the Nielsens, television's treatment of sexuality is likely to continue becoming increasingly frank, vulgar or immoral, depending on one's vantage point and what, of course, one is viewing (Chicago Hope? Married...With Children? A made-for-TV movie starring Tori Spelling as a hooker?) The medium--and America--has patently come a long way from the 1952-53 season, when the cast of I Love Lucy couldn't utter the word pregnant during Little Ricky's gestation period, or 1965 when, a year after network TV got its first double marital bed on Bewitched, Barbara Eden was forbidden by NBC to show her belly button on I Dream of Jeannie.
It would be a mistake, however, to think of TV history as one long, uninterrupted drift toward untrammeled license. Moral values are, of course, relative. Party of Five features yards of premarital sex, yet is also a warmer celebration of family bonds than, say, Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. Today there are new taboos. "Nobody's going to do abortion on a sitcom today, but Maude did it back in 1972," says Bruce Helford, co-creator and executive producer of The Drew Carey Show. He's referring to the famous episodes of Maude in which Bea Arthur's title character not only considered having an abortion, as a number of TV characters have in years since, but actually went out and got one. "Abortion," Helford believes, "is way too hot a subject now. Stuff that shows like All in the Family did--I don't think they'd let you get away with the kind of show with humor about racism, like the episode where Archie Bunker met Sammy Davis Jr. We've really gone backward in a big way." Marta Kauffman, co-creator and executive producer of Friends, complains that her series wasn't allowed to show an actual condom, whereas just a few seasons earlier, Seinfeld was. "Things have changed over the past few years," she grumbles. "You couldn't do the masturbation episode of Seinfeld today."
In the big Ellen episode--filmed over two consecutive Fridays last month amid an atmosphere that seemed half party, half support group--an old college friend (male) comes on to Ellen, who slowly realizes that she is attracted to the friend's female colleague, played by Laura Dern, a close friend of DeGeneres' in real life (a description that should not be read into). Oprah Winfrey, in a surprisingly droll and low-key performance, plays Ellen's therapist. A whole flock of other celebrities--also friends of DeGeneres', including Demi Moore, Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang and Billy Bob Thornton--showed their support by doing cameos on the episode.
Both ABC and Touchstone seem to be genuinely pleased with the results. "We're very proud. We think Ellen and the show's staff have executed it beautifully," says Jamie Tarses, president of ABC Entertainment. At the same time, she adds, "obviously this is an experiment. We're not sociologists. We don't know how this is going to be received."