You don’t want to be a rear about it, but, crud, shouldn’t these networks do something about all the hugs on television?
That’s right, hugs. Connect a few wires and suddenly the tube is as full of them as a convention of effusive grandmothers. TVGuardian, a relatively new and relatively simple add-on device, turns sex on TV, or at least mention of the word “sex” on TV, into the innocuous, even sweet term for physical comforting.
As in Joey, on NBC’s “Friends,” hastening to inform platonic pal Monica that his unsettling dream including her “wasn’t about hugs or anything.”
The curse catcher, which functions not unlike a cow catcher on a locomotive, also turns “ass” into “rear,” even when the three-letter word is carefully used in a family newspaper to mean “ignorant horselike animal.” It swaps “crud” for the more common excremental oaths. And it has some 97 other words and phrases that its little computer brain is programmed to flag, mute and replace, from the verb describing a vacuum cleaner’s principal function to the noun for a fellow who hugs your maternal parent.
Putting TVGuardian in place for a night of NBC’s “must-see” Thursday comedies demonstrates the truth of long-simmering complaints about how common once-objectionable language has become: The machine’s built-in ticker claims to have counted 45 non-bon mots in the four sitcoms last Thursday.
Phoebe’s early “omigod” in “Friends” became “Oh, man.”
On “Jesse,” there was (sanitized) discussion of “big-rear hives,” and the title character complained that “all that talk about bad hugs made me nuts.”
In “Frasier,” a “hell” disappeared from the greeting “how the . . . are you?” And John Mahoney’s father character ordered one son to “rear out” of another’s love life, a substitution that sounds dirtier than the original phrase, which has more to do with goats than backsides.
And “Veronica’s Closet,” whose reflexive smuttiness is offensive even to the sailors and longshoremen who happen to watch, was a tawdry little festival of “rear,” “crud” and “hugs.”
But just as notable as the words TVGuardian did flag were the ones it didn’t, proof that you can take the epithets out of TV but you can’t necessarily take the barnyard.
Ross, describing his relationship with ex-girlfriend Rachel on “Friends”: “We did it 298 times.”
Phoebe, on that show, to a cop: “I’m a whore.”
The cop, later, to Phoebe: “You’re the prettiest fake undercover whore I’ve ever seen.”
Roz, yelling across a room on “Frasier” about baby feeding equipment: “Niles, have you seen my nipples?”
One female character on “Veronica”: “I did hear my ex-husband permanently bruised his left testicle on a biking trip.”
And another: “Oh, yeah, right, and I bought that shower massage for my lower back pain.”
Indeed, “Veronica’s Closet” remained nearly as lewd with the device as without, and “Friends” as clever. Smut is as much a matter of environment as language.
Setting aside questions about the philosophical implications of routinely subbing “man” for “God,” there are other caveats. Innuendo, as Thursday TV showed, is essentially lost on the device,
And the way it works makes it reliant on people beyond the inventor and the parents employing it to do its job.
TVGuardian looks a little like a cable box, but it functions by means of a microprocessor that is a sort of real-time censor. It reads a program or rented movie’s closed-captioning information about three frames ahead; closed captioning, primarily intended for the hearing-impaired, is the text rendering of dialogue that is most commonly seen at the bottom of TV screens in health clubs or airports.
The machine is attached between the VCR, cable box, satellite receiver or DVD machine and the television. When it detects one of the words or phrases in its dictionary, which also includes derogatory terms for race and sexual orientation, it mutes the sound for a length of time, usually about two seconds. So that viewers don’t miss the plot point the term might have been making, it flashes on screen a freshly scrubbed substitute phrase.
The closed captioning information does not have to be visible on screen for the device to work, but it does have to be encoded as part of the program, as it is with almost all network, cable and video-rental fare.
It also has to be accurate, as captioning sometimes isn’t, and in sync with the dialogue. On the Thursday “Frasier” broadcast, the rapid-fire banter left the captioning in the dust at times. Even after the screen flashed “Rear out, Frasier,” you still heard his dad coming on to say, quite forcefully, “Butt out, Frasier.”
“Dealing with the English language, there’s a lot of variables,” says inventor Rick Bray.
Bray is a 39-year-old Rogers, Arkansas, parent who cashed in his business of writing software for real estate title companies and partnered up with family members to fund the more than $500,000 he says it has taken to get TVGuardian to market.
A careful and soft-spoken man, Bray, whose product has sold more than 5,000 copies since its debut last April, is growing practiced at the publicity game. In a phone conversation, he offers an anecdote he knows journalists will find irresistible: In an early version, before he programmed it to also include contextual clues in its foul-language search, TVGuardian transformed “The Dick Van Dyke Show” into “The Jerk Van Gay Show.”
“We laughed about that for weeks,” he says.
There is a switch to choose between “off,” “tolerant” and “strict” filtering. Tolerant will let pass mild expletives — “butt” and “sucks” included — and religious invocations such as “Jesus” and “My God.” Strict adopts a better-safe-than-sorry approach.
The suggested retail price of vigilance is $199.95, although Bray allows that the device can be found for as low as $150. the device is not available in major chains — he says they would force him to cut his price to an uncomfortably low point. Nor does it count any Chicago-area stores among its 120 vendors. (You can find it at www.tvguardian.com.)
But Bray is confident of growth, especially in the Christian market. He says that on Web sites where his device is offered alongside a similar one that offers V-chip blocking technology, his is leading the sales race by a wide margin.
“We want to see ’em. We just want ’em cleaned up,” he says of TV programs. “The V-chip says, `No, you can’t see ’em.’
Bray got the idea because he, like many parents, was growing frustrated by the slackening language standards on television and by the 15 to 25 expletives that even a PG or PG-13 movie will contain. He started thinking about ways to control it that would still allow his kids to take part in the culture.
It was during a vacation on Lake Michigan, watching a TV with closed captioning on, that the solution hit him.
There is no record of what Rick Bray said at his moment of inspiration, but it was more likely “eureka” than “damn.”
