HBO's '90s-Era Late Night Documentaries, Again (Shock Video)

The late night documentaries that were HBO's counterpart to the offerings that got its sister network Cinemax jokingly referred to as "Skinemax" have long since passed out of pop cultural consciousness for all but a few, but there does still seem to be something to be said of them and their legacy nonetheless. Certainly in the thinking behind it the Real Sex series, reflecting how what some call "wokeness" is not the novelty that the culture warriors on both sides of the conflict make it out to be but rather part of that long tendency in the cultural politics of the postmodernist era that was known as "political correctness" before it was called "wokeness," inclined toward what can seem a very contemporary attitude in the female-produced show adhering to the principles of what today would be called "inclusiveness," "diversity," "body positivity" and the "centering of marginalized perspectives" in its segments--such that, for much of the audience, it was probably more "sex" than "sex-y."

One might credit its fellow HBO series Shock Video's Turn-On TV with having tilted a bit more in the direction of the sex-y. If not uninformed by the same sensibility, the series also happened to consist of clip shows bringing HBO's viewers bits of sexually-themed television from around the world--stressing not what real people did, but what people looked to for small-screen entertainment, with all its unavoidably speaking to what relatively large audience might be expected to find appealing that way (as promised by that subtitle with its pun, turn-on TV), all as its scripts, breathily read by Ann Magnuson in those years when she was the narrator, endeavored to tantalize as the episodes presented glances at content from soap operas where the bedroom scenes went rather further than they did on American daytime (or nighttime) TV, to talk shows that presented unpixelated what even Jerry Springer could not present at all, to game shows that would never have appeared on America's over-the-air channels, including the kind of British TV one did not see on PBS (like a '90s-era Denise Van Outen hosting a certain segment for Something for the Weekend that instantly became notorious in its home market).

Of course, just like Real Sex HBO has dropped Turn-On TV down the memory hole. This would seem to have principally been because of the combination of the channel's concern for "image" with the declining potential of HBO's late-night programming to interest an audience due to the easier availability of sexually-themed material generally, but in this case likely also because of how American TV changed--and one might add, also Americans' contact with foreign television. In the still mainly analog media world of the '90s American TV was still dominated by the major networks, which then conformed to a standard of censorship that, if much changed since the Golden Age of Television, was still relatively staid in comparison with the rest of the culture--as the envelope-pushers of the day who caused such moral panic reminded us--while American television was generally thought by Americans themselves to be prudish in comparison with its foreign counterparts (American censors supposed to be less uptight about violence, but more uptight about sex, than their European counterparts, for example). Combined with how that foreign television was for American viewers "terra incognita" to the point that even when there was no sexual or other such sensationalistic edge at all a glimpse of what people were watching overseas (a piece of variety television from the Continent, wacky Japanese game shows) still had some interest, Turn-On TV had its draw. In the years since it may be that the standards for over-the-air broadcast have not changed so much as some might have imagined they would over that time frame, but the cable and streaming booms that for so many have been "where the action is" in TVland (as the singers of prestige TV and streaming never cease to remind us) have meant that American TV's staid image is a thing of the past. Meanwhile, if America's remains a relatively closed market to foreign product it is not as closed as it once was, with vast amounts of television from all over the world to be found in your streaming service's lineup, sometimes in combinations as exotic as they are surprising to North American viewers. (Thus may you be seeing commercials for a whole streaming channel devoted to Turkish soap opera dubbed into Spanish--Pasión Turca!) In short, the world moved on in this respect as well, as the old episodes of Turn-On TV appear a curiosity or a nostalgic memory for those who still remember them at all.