Television

WASHINGTON — Your child is three times as likely to see characters on broadcast TV having prime-time intimacy with someone other than a heterosexual spouse than he is a happily married couple having a roll in the hay, according to a new study by one of the self-appointed TV watchdog groups.

I am clearly not watching the right TV shows.

"Everybody's having sex on TV except for husbands and wives," complained Parents Television Council President Tim Winter in re his group's latest study, "Happily Never After: How Hollywood Favors Adultery and Promiscuity Over Marital Intimacy on Prime Time Broadcast Television."

It's not exactly the Kerner Report.

Across the broadcast networks, references — that's "references," people, not always images — to adultery outnumbered references to conjugal sex by a 2-to-1 margin, the study said.

And when marriage is portrayed, it is almost always negative.

"Today's prime-time television programming is not merely indifferent to the institution of marriage and the stabilizing role it plays in our society, it seems to be actively seeking to undermine marriage by consistently painting it in a negative light" — at least for those people who look to TV for cues about how to act in a marriage.

Even more troubling, the study says, is TV's recent obsession with "outre sexual expression." Which apparently includes things we just don't talk about here, including partner-swapping and sex with prostitutes, not to mention something called "kinky or fetishistic behaviors," which we think bears further looking into.

And again, we're not talking MTV here, folks — just broadcast TV.

ABC had the most references to marital sex, but many of the references were negative, while references to non-marital sex were almost all positive or neutral.

Interestingly, the PTC lumped transsexuals in with bestiality and necrophilia when looking at NBC.

And yet, no one's watching NBC. Go figure.

NBC, in fact, aired as many depictions of adults having sex with minors as scenes implying or depicting sex between married partners, PTC said.

Fox had only one reference to marital sex in 24.5 hours of programming, with 18 references to non-marital sex and five to adultery.

It all started about a year ago, Winter told The Reporters Who Cover Sex on TV during a phone conference call, when PTC's staff of six full-time TV watchers held one of their twice-weekly meetings to discuss their findings. One of them joked to the others, "Gosh, everybody is having sex on TV except for married couples."

A new PTC study was born, joining the pantheon of PTC studies with such titles as "Dying to Entertain: Violence on Prime Time Broadcast Television 1998-2006," "The Rap on Rap" and, of course, "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing: A Content Analysis of Children's Television."

After four weeks of intensive prime-time broadcast-TV viewing at the start of the last season — Sept. 23 through Oct. 22, 2007 — "we were confirmed in what that initial gut reaction was," Winter said. "Everybody is having sex on TV except for husbands and wives."

Speaking of NBC, Winter spoke nostalgically about the 1980s Steven Bochco NBC drama Hill Street Blues, in which nearly every episode ended with Capt. Frank Furillo and Joyce Davenport — a married couple — in bed together.

"Very intimate moment, talking, and it was a very powerful portion of the show, showing the intimacy of the husband and wife," he said. "It seems that that scene has all but disappeared ... on prime-time broadcast TV today. And it's disappointing. It's unfortunate."

It's also surprising, at least for the Veteran Reporters Who Cover Sex on TV, who remember how knicker-knotted some self-appointed TV watchdoggers got over the Hill Street Blues bedroom scenes and other bedroom scenes with married couples when those were all the rage.

Winter said he hopes the study "is something that can be used as a lever for more public scrutiny on what the networks are doing, to perhaps step back and ask a better question about where did intimacy go in the context of a husband and wife."

The networks decided they'd rather not comment.