Mr. Milch has fought such codes in the past. He was a co-creator, with Steven Bochco, of the network police show, "NYPD Blue," which prompted protests in 1993 for its rude language and exposure of David Caruso's backside. That battle was won; "NYPD Blue" overcame the howls of the American Family Association and an early blackout by some ABC affiliates to become a huge hit that ended its run only this month. But it's a measure of what has happened since that now even the backside of a cartoon toddler is being pixilated in the animated series "Family Guy," on Fox. Mr. Bochco told Variety, "I don't think today we could launch or sell 'NYPD Blue' in the form that it launched 12 years ago." He's right. We're turning the clock back to the days of Hays.
This is why "Deadwood" could not be better timed. It reminds us of who we are and where we came from, and that even indecency is part of an American's birthright. It also, if inadvertently, illuminates the most insidious underpinnings of today's decency police by further reminding us that the same people who want to stamp out entertainment like "Deadwood" also want to rewrite American history (and, when they can, the news) according to their dictates of moral and political correctness. They won't tolerate an honest account of the real Deadwood in a classroom or museum any more than they will its fictionalized representation on HBO.
Lynne Cheney has taken to writing and promoting trrumphalist children's history books that, as she said on Fox News recently, offer "an uncynical approach to our nation and to our national story." (So much for her own out-of-print "Deadwood"-esque novel of 1981, "Sisters," with its evocation of lesbian passions on the frontier.) That's her right. But when her taste is enforced as government policy that's another matter. The vice president's wife has used her current political clout, as The Los Angeles Times uncovered last fall, to quietly squelch a Department of Education history curriculum pamphlet for parents that didn't fit her political agenda. It's no coincidence that Senator Stevens attacked the Smithsonian Institution in the 1990's when it mounted an exhibit deromanticizing the old West, "Deadwood"-style, by calling attention to the indignities visited on women, Indians and the environment.
At a certain point political correctness on the right becomes indistinguishable from that of the left. On the Oscar telecast, Robin Williams was prohibited by ABC from delivering a satirical comic song by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the "Hairspray" songwriting team, inspired by James Dobson's attack on the "pro-homosexual activism" of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. One of the no-no's: an unflattering reference to Indian casinos in the lyric "Pocahontas is addicted to craps." If the lyric had said Pocahontas was victimized by white guys, the right would have shut the song down just as fast.
"It's a dangerous world we're living in when you get to the point that a joke about Jude Law is the most controversial thing in the Oscar show," says the TV star and standup comic Bob Saget. "I'm missing Marlon Brando's Indian wife, David Niven and the streaker." I had called Mr. Saget because he is one of the hundred or so comedians who appear in the documentary "The Aristocrats," in which another comic, Paul Provenza, and the magician-comedian Penn Jillette interview their peers about the decades-long history and countless improvisational variations on the film's eponymous joke.
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023099