From Greg Eckler comes the following message with the subject line, "Emmys Plane Crash Bit"…
I would love for you to weigh in on that one, as somebody who is both a news junkie and would understand the implications of dropping an opening bit from a major show that probably took weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars to make.
I think this plane crash was far from a space shuttle incident. It got big play all day on cable because that's what cable does, but was not in the national consciousness and most people probably didn't even make the connection with the Emmys bit (I didn't). The bit could've been dropped just from the Kentucky affiliates. I mean, if it's just about offending bereaved people, how many summer weekend drowning incidents took place this weekend and could those families not have been haunted by the Bob Newhart suffocation bit? Where do you draw the line?
I think I'll weigh in by agreeing with you. We have a tendency to turn into Little Old Ladies about these things, taking offense where we don't have to…and for no good purpose. I have, as I so often do, a story. Years ago, for reasons too boring to even appear on this weblog, I spent an afternoon hanging around backstage at The Tonight Show. Richard Dawson was guest-hosting and his entire monologue was about air travel and being nervous on the plane.
About the time taping completed, the producers got word of a major air crash in the mid-west with many fatalities. I got to eavesdrop on a sudden discussion between them and some network folks about whether or not the show should air in that context. Nothing definite was decided near me but I was struck by the essence of the debate. It was not about whether the loved ones of the crash victims would be hurt. The presumption was that those people probably would not be watching television that evening. If they did, they'd be seeing news footage of the crash that would surely be more unsettling than some reference to airline problems that had not actually occurred.
No, the potential problem was complaints from people who were not, themselves, impacted by the crash. "People who look for reasons to be offended" was what one person called them. And I've found this to be the case in my own wrestling with Standards and Practices. The networks are too quick to react to what are often very few complaints and even then, a lot of the complaints they get are from people who are saying, in effect, "I'm offended because I just know this will offend someone else."
This is the essence of too many censorship moves in television: Worrying about offending theoretical people who rarely seem to be actually offended, themselves. That's pretty much what this bogus controversy over the Emmy Awards comes down to. Yesterday, Matt Drudge linked to all these news reports that quoted people who said they were "horrified" at the insensitive airing of the plane crash sketch…but all those people were upset because, they said, it would upset someone else. Well, maybe. But maybe not. If I'd lost a loved one in a plane crash this morning, I don't think a sketch on the Emmys would make my day any worse.
(By the way: The final decision on that Tonight Show episode was to not air it that night. I suspect it was a matter of "Why take even the slight risk of offending anyone?" They stuck a Carson rerun in its place and then ran the Dawson-hosted show a few weeks later on a Monday night. It was full of dated references…guests plugging upcoming TV shows that had already aired, several topical jokes about what was in the news that day, etc. I always wondered if anyone wrote in that they were offended by having a show that was obviously taped a month or so earlier passed off as "today's" Tonight Show. I probably should have written one, myself.)