The Latest Poop

I was idly surfing the cable TV spectrum last week and happened upon a CNBC interview between Maria Bartiromo and Richard Branson concerning the grounding of all European planes due to the eruption of that Icelandic volcano with the name that sounds roughly like an airy Welsh fart. At one juncture the exasperated Branson blurted out "What can I say? Shit happens." Maria didn't skip a beat and only minutes later referred to his colorful language. Well, I caught it.

The dropping of the "s" word was followed up yesterday in the Senate hearings regarding Goldman Sachs malfeasance when Senator Carl " Levin referred to an e-mail from a Sachs employee calling one of their bogus deals "shitty." "Shitty" was then repeated several times, including reiteration by Sen. Claire McCaskill. Some news outlets tried to bleep out the horrendously horrible and blasphemous word but Keith Olbermann delighted in it on "Countdown." As agog as I was on the apparent breakthrough of this expletive on cable TV, I then reminded myself that many basic cable dramas have included the word in their scripts, and it's been nearly a decade since "South Park" used the word 336 times or so (as indicated by a counter in the upper right corner of the screen.)

But now that it has snuck into the more dignified arena of news broadcasting (Fox News notwithstanding) perhaps the barrier has been permanently broken, and "Shit" will become what "fart" was in the Aughts and "suck" was to the '90s. We still have a ways to go before the F word takes its comfortable place in the TV world, before the TV world becomes subsumed into the Internet world, where, of course, anything goes.

But speaking of shit on Cable, (and weirdly watchable shit, at that), how about Showtime's series "The Tudors"? This has to be the dumbest historical series ever. Not because it subordinates factual depiction to sexual titillation--after all, that is what cable means--but because of its ludicrous portrayal of the elderly King Henry VIII as a 25-year-old stud. I cannot fathom the ego that it took for Jonathan Rhys-Davies to insist that his character never age. So fine, he didn't want to imitate Charles Laughton. And granted, when Henry was a young man he was pretty cool. But by 37, 19 years into his marriage to his first Queen, already older than the average life span of one of his subjects, he had yet to grow one gray hair, one crease in his brow, or any inkling of a love handle. Now, three seasons later, and approaching 60, he looks like one of the swankier candidates on "Dancing with the Stars." Slight graying of the temples, still svelte, still outrageously horny. Meanwhile his daughters are aging, his surviving friends are in their middle years, but aside from some unpleasant ulcers on his leg, Henry VIII is more-or-less Dorian Gray. I'd love to see the Hans Holbein portrait of him. I bet that got fat.

Okay, I understand that this is a bodice-ripper series and the sexual escapades are important, but isn't anyone ugly in mid-16th England aside from the peasants? Can you imagine what dentistry was like then? You couldn't tell from the perfect choppers seen in Rhys-Davies' mouth and those of all his courtly friends. And what about Anne of Cleves? She was supposed to be so homely that Henry couldn't look at her (though some revisionist historians maintain the revulsion was reciprocal). In this series she is cute as a button and Henry decides, after the divorce, that he desires her more than his teen-age Queen Catherine. So they do it in Anne's bedchamber. As they say on SNL, really?

I'm not sure what my point is here--after all, Showtime has some hysterically intelligent programming as well, including the two latest comedies "Nurse Jackie" and "The United States of Tara," so they don't seem to be pandering to the great unwashed dumb people in America. But I do object to the wrenching of historical fact into something utterly fictitious. This is Sarah Palin-type of rendering. When the truth is too ugly, replace it with something more palatable, and thus history gets rewritten and the truth forgotten. It's been evidenced in the Texas Schoolbook Massacre, in which the contributions of Thomas Jefferson--the greatest American statesman--are relegated to minor status, and Phyllis Schlafly surges to prominence.

Now, that's what I call shitty.