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Television Q&A: What the heck is up with the swearing in TV shows?

Rich Heldenfels, Tribune News Service on

Published in Entertainment News

You have questions. I have some answers.

Q: What is it with the proliferation of F-bombs in TV shows? We really love Taylor Sheridan's shows, but the copy and paste of F-bombs in every other sentence is annoying and frankly, representative of poor, unimaginative writing. The long-held argument that “art imitates life” is sorely misrepresented by these writers.

Conversations in real daily life do not seem to include using a constant barrage of “F” this and “F” that.” Are writers so desperate that they can’t come up with better writing techniques than using words that once were taboo but now are just overwritten gutter language? I thought they got that out of their system with “Succession.”

A: This issue comes up in my letters from time to time, especially when there’s a highly praised show that attracts viewers who are then surprised by the content. “Succession,” as you mentioned, had its language critics here, as did “The Night Agent” and “The Diplomat,” and my own ears were scorched by “Landman,” even though I like the series generally.

As I have mentioned here before, standards in television and movies have changed dramatically over the years. (I mentioned one reader’s lament about movies not long ago.) I remember more than 30 years ago, when a colleague was outraged that an early-evening comedy had a character saying, “You suck!” — which wouldn’t raise many eyebrows now. Then, around seven years ago, I wrote in this column about cable shows such as “Yellowstone” embracing raw words with growing frequency. (While broadcast programs are bound by some standards, premium services such as HBO, cable channels and streaming services like Netflix have looser rules – and sometimes no rules at all. You can learn more at fcc.gov.)

But the harsher talk is happening in a world where everything from private conversations to political rhetoric has gotten rawer. And the use of such talk in entertainment is a way of connecting to larger, crude worlds and to the characters in it overall. For that reason, I can understand some of the language in, for instance, "Landman." I still can’t accept that there is so much of it – leaving me asking myself, as one reader has suggested, if I should just watch something else.

 

Q: Where is the show “Best Medicine” filmed?

A: I mentioned this series — based on the British series “Doc Martin” — in last week’s column. But letters including the one above keep coming from viewers of the show — which should explain why it’s expected that Fox will order a second season. As for this question, while the show is set in Maine, shooting has been in New York. The New York Post said the show’s makers found “quaint Hudson Valley towns about ninety minutes outside of Manhattan that could be transformed into Maine onscreen, including New Hamburg, Cornwall, Beacon, and Hudson,” with the Hudson River a handy body of water for scenes.

The office of the main character, Martin Best, is “on a soundstage, but otherwise, the production used buildings such as real homes, or an old barn in Cornwall for on-location shoots,” the Post said. But why not just use Maine? Too remote, the “Best Medicine” showrunner told the Post, with “no television infrastructure.”

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