[Bianculli here: TV WORTH WATCHING is very proud to welcome yet another new columnist to our fraternity. Noel Holston is a veteran TV critic, most recently for New York Newsday, whose perspective is both scholarly and playful. His introductory column, for example, tackles an oft-neglected TV topic: "douche" as an acceptable prime-time punchline...]
We've Come a Long Way from Dingbats and Dirtbags
By Noel Holston
Is it just me, or has mainstream, prime-time TV undergone a little douche coup? Seems like everywhere I turn lately, there's some character insulting some other character by tossing out the d-word. As in, "What a douche." As in, "You're such a douche."
I've heard the insult mostly on sex-joke dependent sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother and Accidentally on Purpose and Cougar Town. But I even heard it in one of the last episodes of Ugly Betty, a show I'd always given credit for more wit than that. Invoking this feminine hygiene procedure/product for purposes of disparagement is threatening to become as commonplace in prime time as shots of pole-dancing strippers in cop shows.
Why douche, all of a sudden, has become the insult du jour, I can only guess. Maybe some influential Hollywood writer's estranged wife sent him a case of Eve as a parting gift. It's conceivable. There's a legendary showbiz story, after all, about an actor who sent an unkind critic a case of toilet tissue with a note that read: "These foolish things remind me of you."
The thing that annoys me about this trend is not that I find the word douche -- or Charmin, for that matter -- offensive. It's just not terribly clever or memorable.
We've come a long way from the restrictive, prudish days when Rob and Laura Petrie had to have twin beds in their New Rochelle bedroom on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the writers of Maude had to get special permission from CBS for their heroine to call her husband, affectionately, a son of a bitch. And, generally speaking, that's a great thing.
But let's not forget that the ever-cautious souls in the networks' Standards and Practices departments for years forced TV writers to find euphemisms -- more colorful speech -- that caught the public fancy and were repeated endlessly.
Think of Archie Bunker on All in the Family saying, "Edith, you dingbat."
Think of Mick Belker on Hill Street Blues growling like a rabid dachshund and addressing lowlifes as "dirtbags."
Think of Flo, the mouthy waitress on Alice, saying, "Mel... kiss my grits."
Now imagine Archie or Belker invoking the phrase "douche bag" instead. Or Arch calling son-in-law Mike Stivic a "douche" instead of a "meathead." Or Flo telling her boss at the diner to kiss a body part that any, uh, dingbat on the street could come up with.
Sure, it might sound more authentic, more real, more everyday. But somehow I don't think we'd be getting any national catchphrases in the bargain.
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Noel Holston wrote about TV, radio and popular culture for The Orlando Sentinel, the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Newsday before semi-retiring to grow wine bottles near Athens, Georgia.