It's a Wrestle

As I sit and write this, it is two-thirty in the morning.  I suppose it is the wrestle going on in my mind that has kept me up.

We invested in Netflix and Amazon Prime as opposed to cable for the simple reason that we had no desire to pay the outrageous fees that come with cable TV.  The fee for having cable for the internet is bad enough, but the gouging that takes place for as much as we watch TV is unacceptable.  We had heard so many good things about Netflix and wanted some of the other benefits that came with Prime, so we placed our investments there.  I know there are other alternatives such as Sling and Hulu, and who knows?  Perhaps one day we’ll try them.

Here’s the wrestle.  So many of the movies are R rated and made-for-TV movies have the same functional equivalent.  I’m sure we miss a lot of really good content because of the decision we made to not view that kind of programming, but it is a decision we have made.  In short, we do not need to allow adult-content material to invade our home.  Adult language is anything but adult and sexually explicit or implicit scenes appeal to the basest of desires.  Likewise, I’ve found that excessive violence portrayed on any screen to have a numbing effect, and I think that is dangerous.

The first series we began watching was of interest to us for multiple reasons.  It was a murder mystery and was clean enough to be on family, prime time TV.  But, the season and episodes morphed into unacceptable content and we stopped viewing it half-way through the seasons.  We watched a second series and found it mostly acceptable.  There was no gratuitous sex, but I cringed when I heard the F-bomb once or twice throughout the entire short-lived series.  Surely, I thought, a BBC production would have higher standards, which it did through most of the first season, but as we watched an episode in the second season we were bombarded with more F-bombs and gratuitous sex.  The sad thing is that the series has an interesting story line. 

Yes, I can buy filters and yes, I can skip through scenes that I find offensive, but why should I have to do that?  Is anyone capable of creating a series that is a cut above everything else and yet is not Sesame Street or Sponge Bob?  Have we become so base that we find four-letter word vocabulary, nudity and sexual content, and extreme violence just another walk in the park?  Do screen writers and producers have to throw those in to hold our interest?  Are story lines and plots so weak that they have to be spiced up with these attention-getters?

You can tell me that these are all facts of life these days, that this is just the way it is in our society.  How sad!  But I know different.  I’ve lived and worked in both environments and I know that it does not have to be this way.  I can also tell you that choice of language, for example, is not dependent upon socio-economic status.  I’ve heard doctors and lawyers profane the name of God as good, hardworking men and women who get their hands dirty for a barely livable wage, and I’ve heard the exact opposite – people on the lower end of the socio-economic scale with much cleaner language and values than others who are higher on the food chain.  So, these facts of life in these days may be true in some elements of society, but they are not true in all venues of society.

Call me a prude if you wish.  Just keep in mind that I have my own sins and demons to contend with.  If you enjoy these types of movies and programming and the things I’ve talked about and they don’t bother you, then you are either stronger than I am or you have become so accustomed to it that you no longer find it offensive and perhaps you’ve inculcated it into your life.  Maybe you have an “offensive content radar” that blocks this material from your eyes, ears, and mind.

So, an hour later after I began putting my thoughts down on paper, you should have an idea as to why I’m awake at this unearthly hour of the night.  It’s the wrestle.  It’s not just about movies and programming on Netflix or Amazon Prime.  It’s about where we’ve come from since Andy Griffith, My Three Sons, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Murder She Wrote, Home Improvement, I Love Lucy, Gunsmoke, and Laramie.  I’m not just talking about TV programming, movies and streaming TV series.

It’s the wrestle.