Word: moral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...plot is always the same. People with problems--"husband says she looks like a cow," "pressured to lose her virginity or else," "mate wants more sex than I do"--are introduced to rational methods of problem solving. People with moral failings--"boy crazy," "dresses like a tramp," "a hundred sex partners"--are introduced to external standards of morality. The preaching--delivered alternately by the studio audience, the host and the ever present guest therapist--is relentless. "This is wrong to do this," Sally Jessy tells a cheating husband. "Feel bad?" Geraldo asks the girl who stole her best friend...
...right, the subjects are often lurid and even bizarre. But there's no part of the entertainment spectacle, from Hard Copy to Jade, that doesn't trade in the lurid and bizarre. At least in the talk shows, the moral is always loud and clear: Respect yourself, listen to others, stop beating on your wife. In fact it's hard to see how The Bill Bennett Show, if there were to be such a thing, could deliver a more pointed sermon. Or would he prefer to see the feckless Susan, for example, tarred and feathered by the studio audience instead...
...venture has something of an old-fashioned feel--a kinship with those "condition of England" novels of Wells, Galsworthy, Forster--that's probably all right with Hare, 48. With these plays (and others, such as Plenty and Map of the World), he has embraced a theater of social and moral probing. By frequently setting one character to debating another (about the ordination of women, declining church attendance, the desirability of chastity), Racing Demon exemplifies another old-fashioned genre: the play of ideas...
...slumming with the rest of them. Ratings, ratings, ratings: Di's up and Charles is down. This week they may well capture our interest, but in a few months they could just as easily be yesterday's amusement--and even more amusing if they pretend to have any moral authority, as a King and Queen should...
...reading David B. Lat's column "Imposing Morality is Fun" (column, Nov. 28), I was struck not so much by the supposition that "all laws rely on certain assumptions that are distinctly moral in nature," but rather by the morality of absolutism which his support for a ban on divorce demonstrates...