I noticed an odd thing tonight. I was watching one of the later reruns of Barney Miller. In this episode the Lou Costello-ish uniformed officer Carl Levitt has brought in three citizens who are witnesses to an act of heroism he performed earlier, and has done this without telling Barney. While testifying in Captain Miller's office, the one woman in the group goes into a "kids today" tangent and contrasts it with the way she raised her own son, who still lives with her at the age of 42.
Now the thing is, I saw this episode years ago, maybe when it first aired. And I distinctly remember that a little after she finishes this riff, one of the other witnesses says, "Is your son gay or what?" So I was waiting for that line this time, but it never came.
It's pretty obvious what happened. Somewhere in the gap between airdate and second generation rerun, the joke fell out of favor. For the record the edition I was watching had the TV Land insignia in the corner, so in itself it was from a few years ago.
The cut is a shame. It's not really integral to the episode―the crux of which is about one elderly man who wants to kill himself so that another can collect the money from a tontine they're both in. But if shown in context it would be pretty clear that the joke doesn't really target gay people either.
2 comments:
Ever since they were first introduced I've disliked e-books for the simple reason they make censorship far too easy. Whereas it's simple to see if someone has blacked out text they didn't like or to note when pages are missing it's next to impossible to determine if words or passages are missing from an e-book.
Cutting chunks out of films because certain scenes were viewed as offensive by the people who oversaw the Hays Code was pretty much universally adopted back in the 30s - never mind the Ladies Common Decency brigade or whatever they were called. When those rules were overturned it was considered a victory for openmindedness and artistic creativity. The idea that individual companies can feel free to remove scenes or interchanges between characters on a whim these days is idiotic.
When we reflect on the technological advances made over the decades and find ourselves amazed at how a people can be less advanced, less informed and less enlightened, not despite these innovations, but because of them, then
we can finally see Orwell's prophecy has come true.
Most people don't have memories as good as yours.
It's obviously not my place to tell authors how to run their business. Still, it seems to me that if a book only exists in e-book format, in a very real sense it doesn't exist. There are people who could wipe out entire libraries with the push of the button, and then there'd be no one to argue with them.
There were quite a few good movies made when the Hays code was in effect, but really that's because there were a lot of clever and creative people involved. Censorship didn't really make anything better. And the one thing that can make censorship itself worse if nobody even knows about it. The digitization of so much media makes that possible.
Civilization was created by a lot of effort and it takes effort to maintain it. One side effect of technology is that it makes people expect instant gratification and no longer expend that effort.
I'm certainly capable of forgetting stuff, but when presented with certain stimuli, memory goes into effect. It's a congruent thing.
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