As public protests weaken,

TV sex comes on strong

By Tom Shales

Washington Post/L.A. Times Service WASHINGTON She's svelte; she's slinky; she's wearing a peekaboo bathing suit. She turns to the man standing at the other end of the bedroom and purrs, "Get naked." Then she turns her back to the camera, starts to disrobe, and the scene ends.

Three years ago, you wouldn't have seen that on network television. You might not have seen it even one year ago. But you saw it this year on a commercial network in prime time on ABC's "Rich Man, Poor Man" and it was by no means the only scene of its kind on the air.

Family viewing time, which bans sex and violence from early evening TV, has pushed it all into two nightly hours chock-full of intimated couplings, depictions of sexual deviation, and hotsy-totsy dialogue raunchier than TV audiences have ever heard before.

The early evening time is called Family Hour. What follows has been called the Murder Hour, You could also call it the Sex Hour.

Censors at all three networks deny completely that their vigilance has been relaxed or that standards have changed. But unquestionably the content of SexHour shows is spicier than TV has seen in seasons past.

Sex may have been the very secret of success for "Rich Man, Poor Man," the $6 million, 12-hour "novel for television" that included at least one implicitly nude

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bedroom scene a week plus, over the weeks, brawls, beatings and homosexual rape besides.

Nudity is never shown, of course, only implied. On another chapter of the series, we find Rudy Jordache (Peter Strauss) in bed with Julie Brescott (Susan Blakel).

"You're trying to make an honest man of me," he tells her.

"That's something I rarely discuss in the nude," she says.

The series premiere offered what may have been a teenceyweencey TV milestone: Ms. Blake-

'We never show complete nudity, and I don't think we ever will . . .”

ly gasped aloud the once verboten word "Fornication." She was promptly reprimanded by another character for talking dirty.

"We've had undressed scenes of some sort over the years in any number of shows," says ABC censor Grace Johnson, who had some of the "Rich Man" episodes preceded with a "Mature audiences" warning. "We never show complete nudity, and I don't think we ever will."

Sex on television is going one step further at a time when public concern over sex on television

seems to be waning. This may be the year of TV's New Sexyness, but apparently violence worries viewers more.

Some will find this an encouraging realignment of priorities. Others may consider it shocking and a harbinger of moral decay. You can't please everybody.

At the Complaints and Compliance Division of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), fewer protests about sex on television have been received this year than any time since 1972.

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It was in 1973 after CBS aired a radically censored version of an X-rated movie called "The Damned" that written complaints to the FCC about sex jumped from 2,141 the previous year to an amazing 32,438. This was primarily the result of organized letter-writing campaigns by pressure groups.

Then, by 1975, the number of annual complaints about sex had fallen to 11,716. So far this year, the FCC reports, the number is down still further.

"But the violence complaints," a spokesman says, “are rising steadily."

Many people still do get agitated about sex and sexual subjects on television. In one of its rare industry-chastizing editorials, Advertising Age magazine recently denounced "locker room or burlesque theater humor" on TV series filled with "lots of talk-talktalk about sex-sex-sex."

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After the family hour, it's time for sex and violence.

Strongly supporting that complaint is Morality in Media, Inc., a New York-based pressure group that compaigns steadily against alleged smut on television. A member of the group's Massachusetts board recently signed out Norman Lear's spoofy soap opera

"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" as being "a one-sided jeer at the Judeo-Christian values that many hold dear."

But by and large, we seem to have reached a crest of broadcast candor and passed a crest of public clamor. Television has gone

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about as far as it can go at least about as far as it. will go on the foreseeable future in depicting and discussing sexual subjects.

This year, television continued the evolution begun five years ago Continued on Page 6

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