The '90s Moral Panic Over Sex on Network TV

Three decades on Seinfeld remains a cultural touchstone, with the episode "The Contest," if not one of its best, at least one of its most notorious for the "show about nothing" devoting a full half hour to the theme of a certain conventionally solitary activity that the conventional wisdom regards "everyone" as doing all as "no one" admits to doing it, with the awkwardness of "admission" quite central to what the episode's script does with that theme. The results, of course, contain their share of "edgy" moments putting many of the protagonists' less seemly traits front and center--not least George Costanza's dutifully visiting his mother in the hospital in spite of her really, really not wanting to see him just about now (those who have seen the episode are unlikely to have forgotten why) simply for the pleasure of seeing on the curtain separating his mother's bed from her roommate's the silhouette of the attending nurse (Andrea Parker, just a few years short of her rise to TV stardom with her role on The Pretender) giving a spongebath to the room's (similarly sexy) other occupant. Still, it is notable that the episode achieves its charge without, indeed in part because of, the extreme obliqueness of its references to the act in question, no character ever speaking any of the formal or medical terms for such activity, or any recognizable proxy for it of a slang or any other nature. Rather the writers put on a virtuoso performance of tap-dancing around them that, even as it appreciably added to the entertainment value of the goings-on likely left many, due to the combination of shock at seeing this (apparently) the theme of a half-hour prime-time sitcom episode in that era with the aforementioned obliqueness wondering even at the very end "Was that really about what I thought it was about?"

In 2025 that virtuoso performance, and the inevitable blowback from parents' groups and the other usual suspects in these affairs, is a reminder of the tensions, and moral panic, that surrounded the content of American network television in the '90s. This was certainly the case where violence was concerned, as the rather muddled affair that saw the Clinton administration cynically playing the old game of using culture wars as cover for class wars with pop culture the favored terrain (grandstanding about violence on TV as it brazenly betrayed its supporters by ferociously pushing a neoliberal economic program). However, as the matter of Seinfeld shows this was the case with sex as well as violence, as one remembers when alongside this they recall the furor over ABC's teasing that those portions of the female anatomy considered red lines by the censors would not always be "strategically concealed" when Mariel Hemingway went nude in an episode of her legal drama Civil Wars; and the rancor over June Chadwick's actually crossing those red lines in a skinny-dipping scene in the Northern Exposure-in-Hawaii that was Going to Extremes; and the outrage over what the controversial-before-it-even-hit-the-airwaves NYPD Blue was expected to (and ultimately, did) bring to the small screen.

Of course, many of those shows over which there was such a brouhaha are not even a memory today. (In spite of the sensation surrounding the episodes just mentioned both Civil Wars and Going to Extremes were so short-lived that they were never even close to making it into syndication, seem to have left no legacy of any kind, and are apparently unavailable in streaming or through any other medium.) Others are better remembered, but not for shock value--the enduring affection of fans of Seinfeld and NYPD Blue ultimately having little to do with what shock value they had by '90s-era-network-TV-standards, with the lingering of an episode like "The Contest" in the pop cultural memory a testament to its wit rather than its provocativeness as what was shocking no longer seemed to be so. Part of that story was that network TV censorship in such areas did relax somewhat in subsequent years (thus did a decade later Friends devote an episode of its own to a character "getting caught" that addressed the "incident" in much more direct fashion but also with far less fuss). But a still bigger part is the way in which network TV became decreasingly central to people's experience of television generally in a milieu where most people had cable TV, and most of those at least one of the premium channels increasingly airing content that made what horrified parents on a Big Three network look like nothing by comparison, all amid the dawning of the Internet that changed the game out of all recognition as der kulturkampf increasingly looked like bandenkrieg.