Was TNG considered a "family tv show" at the time? And anyway, what does "family tv show" mean?

[Moviefan2k4]

Remember that TV was far more mainstream: fewer channels, more people watching, and fewer ways to block content. Material that we consider mild was pretty racy then. I remember how certain videos could only be played on MTV after 9 PM, such as "Baby Got Back" and Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time". I doubt either would draw much notice today.

People are much more desensitized these days - its truly sad.

 

[NickolasDay]

In the case of Star Trek, which is often seen as embodying the ideals of equality and diversity, the lack of LGBTQI+ representation can be interpreted in different ways. Regarding the concept of a "family TV show", I can say that it can be perceived differently in different contexts and cultures. For some, this may mean a show that is suitable for the whole family, including children and older generations. In the case of Star Trek, it would be logical to assume that the creators were trying to create just such a show that could attract a wide audience. However, the lack of LGBTQI+ representation can be interpreted as a limitation in promoting diversity and inclusion.

 

[Moviefan2k4]

In the case of Star Trek, which is often seen as embodying the ideals of equality and diversity, the lack of LGBTQI+ representation can be interpreted in different ways. Regarding the concept of a "family TV show", I can say that it can be perceived differently in different contexts and cultures. For some, this may mean a show that is suitable for the whole family, including children and older generations. In the case of Star Trek, it would be logical to assume that the creators were trying to create just such a show that could attract a wide audience. However, the lack of LGBTQI+ representation can be interpreted as a limitation in promoting diversity and inclusion.

I think a lot of people need to understand the difference, between "intention" and "interpretation". Just because one person or group sees something as wrong or unfair, it doesn't mean the people behind such things meant for it to be that way.

 

[Skipper]

I think a lot of people need to understand the difference, between "intention" and "interpretation". Just because one person or group sees something as wrong or unfair, it doesn't mean the people behind such things meant for it to be that way.

Well, usually people don't think that behind their actions there are wrong or unfair intentions. Even the worst and bloody dictators in history thought they were perfectly justified in doing what they did.

 

[Michael]

I think a lot of people need to understand the difference, between "intention" and "interpretation". Just because one person or group sees something as wrong or unfair, it doesn't mean the people behind such things meant for it to be that way.

By that same token, there‘s a lot of people who need to understand that just because something someone said or did wasn‘t intended to be problematic it can still be read, understood, perceived or interpreted to be so.

 

[Moviefan2k4]

Well, usually people don't think that behind their actions there are wrong or unfair intentions. Even the worst and bloody dictators in history thought they were perfectly justified in doing what they did.

Good point, especially since history is often understood better after-the-fact. I've heard it said by some people, that if Hitler had died before the Austrian / German "Anschluss" of 1938, he would've been known as the best political leader in his nation's history. But instead, he let his ego and ambitions go to his head, and at least 56 million people died as a result.

 

[Christopher]

By that same token, there‘s a lot of people who need to understand that just because something someone said or did wasn‘t intended to be problematic it can still be read, understood, perceived or interpreted to be so.

Right. What matters is the impact, not the intention. If you didn't mean to step on someone's foot, that doesn't make it hurt them any less. Often the lack of awareness of the impact of your actions is exactly the thing that does harm to others, so it's not a justification, it's the root of the problem.

 

[Moviefan2k4]

Right. What matters is the impact, not the intention. If you didn't mean to step on someone's foot, that doesn't make it hurt them any less. Often the lack of awareness of the impact of your actions is exactly the thing that does harm to others, so it's not a justification, it's the root of the problem.

I wasn't trying to imply that ignorance should be treated as a justification, but too many people just start screaming and hurling insults at each other anyway over it. That doesn't help, either; we need to be more patient and constructive, making our points firmly and unapologetically, but without being a bully. Sometimes, that can be a very precarious balance to attempt...but we still have to try. Constant accusations and unreasonable outbursts solves nothing - just look at the local news today. If those tactics actually helped anything, we'd be a lot better off.

 

[FederationHistorian]

You're fixating on a label and trying to cherrypick the evidence to "prove" it. Labels are not the end goal of understanding, just the first rough approximation. We dwell far too much on them.

As I've said, I reject reducing this to a binary question, either it's a family show or it's not. Life is an essay question, not a true-false test. There's a whole continuum of maturity levels in commercial TV, and TNG was somewhere in the middle, albeit toward the more mature end.

I also reject the "some creatives" characterization. As I've said, Star Trek was all about pushing the envelope. That's what defined it originally. Gene Roddenberry's entire goal in creating TOS was to make the first non-anthology science fiction series that was an adult drama instead of a kid-friendly family show. He strove to make it as mature and sophisticated as the most acclaimed adult dramas of the '60s, and he pushed the envelope of TV sexuality and skin to a degree that put him at constant odds with the censors.

By the time TNG came along, SFTV had hardly matured at all since the '60s, and '80s SFTV was dominated by lightweight schlock such as Knight Rider and Automan. So TNG coming along as a smart, sophisticated adult drama was as exceptional in its day as TOS had been, and as I've already mentioned repeatedly, Roddenberry strove in TNG's first season to take advantage of lessened censorship and be even more overt about sexuality than he'd been allowed to get in TOS, as seen in episodes like "The Naked Now" and "Justice." So it wasn't just "some creatives" who wanted to push the envelope, it was the guy who created the entire franchise. Pushing the envelope was Star Trek's whole job.

But if the show kept bumping up against the censors, how would that help with LGBT representation if it was deemed something that should be censored?

There are reasons that Trek uses allegories.

In your opinion. But it was still made, and "Chain of Command" was still made, along with other intense episodes that wouldn't have gotten made if TNG had really fit into the rigid "family show" mold you're falsely trying to force it into.

There’s nothing "rigid" about my mold. Since even family friendly comedies would have their “very special episodes” about a serious topic.

But those comedies did not involve a character having a gory death.

It's not about the nature of the weapon, it's about its effect. The Rambo cartoon in the '80s featured realistic guns and bullets, but the bullets never hit a living thing, only inanimate objects, and no character in the show was allowed to say the word "kill" or "dead." By the same token, The A-Team had climaxes driven by huge amounts of gunplay, but since it was a family show, the bullets almost never hit anybody and people rarely died. By contrast, TNG used energy weapons, but those weapons killed people all the time, even blew up entire ships and killed thousands.

The '90s were more "politically correct" than the '80s.

Hell, yes, I can! That's exactly the point! Star Trek was never supposed to be "mainstream." The entire reason it was created was to go against mainstream norms and break new ground. Limiting Star Trek to conventional expectations, especially where social justice and inclusion are concerned, is a failure to live up to what Star Trek was created to be.

It may not have been intended to become mainstream But that’s exactly what happened.

And with being mainstream comes more money. Star Trek was going to go where the money was, like other brands that go mainstream. It’s a tv show first.

Bullshit. Feminism and civil rights were much further along in the '80s-'90s than gay rights. As I said, gay rights were the hot issue at the time as much as civil rights were in the '60s. Star Trek, if done right, would've been on the vanguard. Roddenberry promised in 1987 that it would be, that he would give the fans the gay inclusion they were clamoring for, but the people who took charge of the show as his health failed consistently betrayed that promise. It is bullshit revisionist history to claim it was too soon to deal with that issue. The issue was on the table before TNG even premiered.

No, not “bullshit”.

Feminism and civil rights were further along, but those advancements still needed to be normalized.

Oh, that's specious. How many times do we have to restate the fact that dozens of other shows in the same era did feature gay characters and issues and did not get cancelled for it? STOP DENYING THE OBJECTIVE FACTS!

I’m not though.

Which shows had LGBT characters that were considered family friendly by late ‘80s and early-to-mid ‘90s standards? What network did they air? What timeslot? What day?

View them in the context of then in that moment of time. Not in the context of now.

 

[Christopher]

I wasn't trying to imply that ignorance should be treated as a justification, but too many people just start screaming and hurling insults at each other anyway over it. That doesn't help, either; we need to be more patient and constructive, making our points firmly and unapologetically, but without being a bully. Sometimes, that can be a very precarious balance to attempt...but we still have to try. Constant accusations and unreasonable outbursts solves nothing - just look at the local news today. If those tactics actually helped anything, we'd be a lot better off.

The problem is that when people do point it out patiently and reasonably, the ones doing it often accuse them of being irrational and insulting, painting themselves as the victims and discrediting the critics as a way of dodging the real issue. If you're going to talk about people acting reasonable, that applies to the person being criticized as well as the critic. Reasonable people are able to question their own behavior and consider criticism with an open mind rather than pre-emptively dismissing it as a personal attack, because they understand that we're all imperfect and the only way to improve is to confront our flaws.

To go back to my analogy, if someone says "Hey, you stepped on my foot," the reasonable response is not "How dare you accuse me of stepping on your foot?!", but "I'm sorry, I'll try to be more careful." Even if they do express it angrily, the ideal should be to de-escalate rather than escalate.

 

[TheAdmiralty]

TNG was and is by any estimation a family show. Outside of Conspiracy only mild violence (and most episodes have none) and any sexual content was very tame even by 80's standards. TOS had considerably more sensuality on it (Orion strip show, Kirk blatantly having sex in several episodes) and aside from Conspiracy more intense violence (agony booth, Kirk and Spock getting whipped in Patterns of Force, exc).

One thing to remember is that TNG was in syndication and aired in all kinds of time slots. They were in the 4 or 5 PM "after school" time slot in a lot of places. Even in the 80's an adult drama that came on at 10 PM when the kids were in bed like Hill Street Blues or Miami Vice could get away with a lot more than TNG could. Since they had to negotiate with each affiliate separately an affiliate in a conservative area could refuse to air an episode or even drop the show entirely if they didn't like the content. That's been cited as the reason the oft discussed AIDS episode never got made. It's harder to push the envelope if you don't have a network behind you. Plato's Stepchildren and a lot of other things on TOS probably never get on the air if the show was syndicated vs being on NBC.

 

[Skipper]

But if the show kept bumping up against the censors, how would that help with LGBT representation if it was deemed something that should be censored?

...what censors..?

 

[Christopher]

TNG was and is by any estimation a family show. Outside of Conspiracy only mild violence (and most episodes have none) and any sexual content was very tame even by 80's standards. TOS had considerably more sensuality on it (Orion strip show, Kirk blatantly having sex in several episodes) and aside from Conspiracy more intense violence (agony booth, Kirk and Spock getting whipped in Patterns of Force, exc).

Okay, first off, "Kirk blatantly having sex in several episodes?" No way. Not in the 1960s -- the censors would never have allowed it. It could only be implied, and the most blatant implication they ever had was Kirk putting his boots on after being alone in his quarters with Deela in between scenes. Generally, love scenes had to be presented in such a way that you could assume the couple never went beyond first base, and any implication to the contrary had to be extremely subtle. You couldn't even talk about people having sex except in the most indirect terms. Heck, "The Mark of Gideon" acknowledging that contraception existed was startlingly bold for its day.

Second, you're forgetting the season 1 episodes like "The Naked Now," "Justice," and "Angel One" where Roddenberry took advantage of the freedom to include more skin and sexuality than he could've gotten away with in the '60s. As I've been saying all along, Roddenberry always intended Trek to be adult, and he was very much a fan of sexually themed material, but his successors on TNG dialed down the sexuality somewhat and made it more staid. It's an oversimplification to generalize about the whole seven seasons, because there was a lot of change and transition over the first two years.

And the phrase "tame by '80s standards" is poorly formulated, because there wasn't a single set of standards. By the standards of a 10 PM nighttime soap like Dynasty, TNG was tame, but not by the standards of actual family shows of the era. I just finished rewatching The Greatest American Hero for my Patreon reviews, and it was definitely a family show, so much so that the main character and his girlfriend/almost-fiancee hardly ever touched each other on camera or showed any sexual friskiness, until season 3 when the show was briefly moved from 8 PM to a 10 PM slot. It also had little onscreen violence, with the bad guys usually being arrested rather than killed and murders usually taking place off-camera.

It's harder to push the envelope if you don't have a network behind you. Plato's Stepchildren and a lot of other things on TOS probably never get on the air if the show was syndicated vs being on NBC.

Oh, just the opposite is true. Syndicated shows could push the envelope more than network shows, because they only had the studio overseeing them instead of both the studio and the network; fewer bosses = fewer restrictions. I think I mentioned earlier that there was a 1990 episode of War of the Worlds: The Series that had a startlingly racy nude bedroom scene, on a par with the kind of nudity you didn't get on network TV until NYPD Blue came along 3 years later. And certainly Deep Space Nine was more daring than Voyager, because DS9 didn't have nervous network bosses pushing it to stay basic and avoid taking risks.

 

[James Cole]

That doesn't follow. Plenty of R-rated movies in the '80s and '90s had toy tie-ins, like RoboCop, Predator, and the like.

I haven't seen either film, but I'm guessing they were R-rated mainly for violence (that could be tuned down on a TV edit)?

I specifically said it wasn't as adult as a 10 PM show, but it wasn't as family-friendly as the stuff they'd usually put in the 8 PM hour.

Also, despite the Christian Right's influence, the censorship on commercial television was far milder in the 1980s-90s than it was in the 1960s, and that didn't preclude TOS from being an adult-oriented show that pushed the limits of skin and sexual content for the era.

Ok, here's a hypothetical counterfactual. During its later run, TNG replaces Wesley Crusher or Ro Laren with a gay conn officer. Recurring character, there are scenes of the character kissing a love interest. Rush Limbaugh and Evangelical Right Wing radio people pick up on this for some red meat content to fill their timeslot. Locally owned by conservative TV stations that air TNG at 6pm freak out. Pressure is applied to advertisers and licensees like Playmates Toys. The peanut gallery doesn't know the difference between the strip syndication weekday reruns and the first run syndication airing once a week, so the pressure isn't even targeted effectively...

I remember when Ellen came out and ELLEN had "The Puppy Episode". This is arguably the greatest social change between the 1990s and now.

 

[Christopher]

Ok, here's a hypothetical counterfactual. During its later run, TNG replaces Wesley Crusher or Ro Laren with a gay conn officer. Recurring character, there are scenes of the character kissing a love interest. Rush Limbaugh and Evangelical Right Wing radio people pick up on this for some red meat content to fill their timeslot. Locally owned by conservative TV stations that air TNG at 6pm freak out. Pressure is applied to advertisers and licensees like Playmates Toys. The peanut gallery doesn't know the difference between the strip syndication weekday reruns and the first run syndication airing once a week, so the pressure isn't even targeted effectively...

Are you forgetting that DS9: "Rejoined" happened? As I already mentioned earlier in the thread, there were a few stations that pulled it because of the same-sex kiss, or that went to commercial early to avoid showing it, but the show as a whole didn't suffer for it.

 

[Skipper]

If only someone could report at least ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE of a TV show that suffered financially for including a gay character in an episode the whole "Berman only did it for the sake of Star Trek" theory might make sense.

But all I see is people saying that Star Trek would definitely lose money on LBGT representation, but not explaining EXACTLY how.

You know, saying that LBGT is harmful regardless without providing supporting evidence doesn't make you look good.

 

[Oddish]

Here's IRA Steven Behr's take...

“I know they [Paramount Pictures] got a lot of negative feedback, which only goes to prove a point I always believed in, which is that science fiction fans and Star Trek fans are much more conservative than people want to believe, and this whole Gene Roddenberry liberal Humanistic vision is truly not shared by a significant portion of them.”

That might explain why they were hesitant to bring LGBTQ to later Treks. They tried it, they got negative feedback, they decided not to do it again. Even if you don't agree with your viewers' political position, they still pay your salary and you still have to give them what they want.

 

[Weyoun 251]

That doesn't follow. Plenty of R-rated movies in the '80s and '90s had toy tie-ins, like RoboCop, Predator, and the like.




I specifically said it wasn't as adult as a 10 PM show, but it wasn't as family-friendly as the stuff they'd usually put in the 8 PM hour.

Also, despite the Christian Right's influence, the censorship on commercial television was far milder in the 1980s-90s than it was in the 1960s, and that didn't preclude TOS from being an adult-oriented show that pushed the limits of skin and sexual content for the era.

A lot of those came with a cartoon alongside too, right?

 

[Skipper]

A lot of those came with a cartoon alongside too, right?

 

[Christopher]

If only someone could report at least ONE SINGLE EXAMPLE of a TV show that suffered financially for including a gay character in an episode the whole "Berman only did it for the sake of Star Trek" theory might make sense.

We're really going in circles at this point. It's been established multiple times already in this thread, with supporting citations, that numerous shows contemporary with Berman-era Trek included LGBT themes or characters, and that the number increased over the 18-year span while Trek remained in total denial of the existence of non-heterosexuality except in DS9: "Rejoined." So the argument that Berman somehow couldn't have done the same thing that many of his contemporaries were doing is preposterous, especially since Star Trek was supposed to be ahead of the curve on social progress, not decades behind it.