Where’s the Family-Friendly Sci-Fi?
[Psst. Welcome Clayton Cramer readers, where he gives a bit more insight into why Hollywood does what they do.
And welcome to any folks coming from Usenet, where someone copied this. FYI, I don’t mind this sort of copying as long as the link is provided, which it was in this case. Some discussion over there on this, and some…shall we say, tangents. But that’s what Usenet does best. >grin<]
Last TV season, I thought my kids would like to get into a show that was rather science fiction in nature called “Surface”. I’m a big sci-fi fan (mostly TV, don’t read it much) and my kids have shown an interest in it (my sister introduced them to her Star Wars videos), and it’s rubbed off a bit onto the kiddos. “Surface” looked like an interesting story, so we started watching it. (Unfortunately, it didn’t last past the first season.)
Well, actually, how it happened was that I started taping and watching it myself, and after a couple of episodes thought it would be OK for the kids…except for the occasional thing here and there. And that annoyed me a bit. There would be occasional questions to one of the main characters, Miles, from his father and his friend from the marina about whether or not he was surfing the Internet for porn on the occasions they walked into his room while he was doing some research. That may be happening on home computers in a lot of homes in America, but must it be brought up in a TV show going into homes where that curiosity and potential addiction hasn’t been started? Even in homes where it may be starting, the references were light-hearted, in almost a “no big deal” way, which would give the impression to a kid that everyone’s doing it so how bad can it be.
Later on, Miles is urged by his neighborhood friend to fondle a bikini-clad girl who was giving him a kiss. In one scene, Dr. Laura Daughtery, needing to swim out in cold ocean waters to a nearby boat, stripped off all her clothes, leaving only underwear, oiled up (to stave off the cold) and dove in. Sure this might have been a bit of realism, but in a show about sea monsters and other genetically manipulated animals, quite a number of other bits of accuracy were certainly sacrificed for the sake of the story. Missing this one wouldn’t have made one bit of difference to the story.