(Editors' note: The following article contains subject matter that may be offensive to readers) After reading this piece, you may be tempted to think that Bozell finally has lost his marbles, simply because what is presented just cannot be true. If you will trust me that everything I'm going to present you is very real, you may instead conclude it is La-La Land that has gone completely Ga-Ga.
Channel-surfing with your remote, you've doubtlessly come across the E! cable network -- and clicked right past, for good reason. E! is owned jointly by Disney, Comcast and Liberty Media, making you wonder where all the adult supervision went. With the exception of the original "Talk Soup" show with Greg Kinnear way back when, it's mindless junk, usually consisting of programs focused on the vacuum that is Hollywood, produced by people who are just as mindless, and designed for -- well, that's the rub. It's directed at youngsters enthralled by all things Tinseltown, and that means it must be ever-edgier in order to retain the attention of a generation that has seen it all.
Meet "Dr. 90210," an E! series starring Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Rey, a fussy young doctor with half-bleached hair who looks qualified to rebuild iPods, not the human body. When the show was launched in 2004, it was fairly straightforward, with the usual cocktail of Beverly Hills plastic surgeries -- tummy tucks and face lifts and breast implants/reductions.
Fans of the Discovery Health Channel and its attendant medical shows might defend these intimate procedures as having more than a cosmetic value given their ability to improve physical health, boost self-confidence and the like. But this isn't Discovery. This is E! "Dr. 90210" isn't aimed at sophisticated adults. As its TV-14 rating declares, it is deemed acceptable for eighth-graders. And it's not about health. It's all about sex.
So what to offer the young ones (and the adults who refuse to leave childhood) with their insatiable appetites? You can imagine the production meetings. How about we find patients who are porn queens? No, we did that last month. OK, wait ... wait ... I got it! How 'bout we find patients who are teenagers themselves? Yeah, that's the ticket!
That's where they went, but soon that wasn't enough, either. So lower and lower they plunged.
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