THE Jack Paar Show, 1960: Paar walks off the show because NBC has censored some terrible words he uttered on the air. The words were not really words but initials: W.C., for water closet, the British equivalent of toilet.
Petula, 1968: the sponsors, Chrysler Motor Corp., try unsuccessfully to quash a shocking sequence in this Petula Clark special. In the sequence, Petula's white hand rests momentarily on the black arm of Guest Star Harry Belafonte.
The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, 1969: the brothers, already in jeopardy with CBS for their satirical barbs, lose their show after an allegedly blasphemous guest spot by David Steinberg. The vein in which Steinberg took the Lord's name was comic.
Incomplete. That was the way it was on network entertainment shows. Scripts were judged not only by what they said but by what they did not say. Blacks were visible but untouchable, and bathrooms simply did not exist. By and large, any subjects were fair game except those that bore on the reality of viewers' lives. The result was prime-time programming that was at once obvious and incomplete, like connect-the-dots pictures without the lines drawn in. Reduced to japes about mistaken identities and absentminded fathers losing their car keys, even situation comedies had few situations with which to make comedy.
But no more. TV has embarked on a new era of candor, with all the lines emphatically drawn in. During the season that began last week, programmers will actually be competing with each other to trace the largest number of touchy—and heretofore forbidden —ethnic, sexual and psychological themes. Religious quirks, wife swapping, child abuse, lesbianism, venereal disease—all the old taboos will be toppling. Marcus Welby last week joined the abortion debate with a patient who had not one but two in a single year. An upcoming ABC Movie of the Week will feature Hal Holbrook explaining his homosexuality to his son. Just for laughs, Archie Bunker's daughter will be the victim of an attempted rape.
NBC's The Bold Ones will be getting bolder, mainly by knifing into such delicate surgical issues as embryo transplants and lobotomy. The lobotomy episode will also depict that rarity on TV medical shows: a crooked doctor. No new adventure hero, it seems, will be admitted to the schedule without an ethnic identity badge. ABC'S Kung Fu is a sort of Fugitive foo yung—a Chinese priest permanently on the lam in the American West of the 1870s, nonviolent but ready to zap troublemakers with the self-defense art of kung fu. The title character of NBC's Banacek (one of three rotating shows in the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie) is not only a rugged insurance sleuth but also a walking lightning rod for Polish jokes.