Oh, great.
Now she'll be forever typecast.
Posted on 09/30/2006 12:05:11 AM PDT by beaversmom
Students of history know that over the millennia, great civilizations crumbled not from without, but from within. The Visigoths may have crushed the Romans in 476, but long before the Roman Empire had begun to disintegrate internally, its social fabric slowly shredded apart and ultimately it became a paper tiger unable to sustain itself. In our own lifetime, it’s quite apparent that we are witnessing an increasingly rapid and equally worrisome descent in the moral mean.
Here’s one spectacular, depressing example. In the 1970s, one of the most celebrated family shows on TV was "Little House on the Prairie." One of NBC’s most durable series, its audience would trounce today’s television “hits” because back in those days, “family” TV shows were watched by the family, not just the youngest offspring. The lead role was played by Michael Landon, but the show also gave rise to another star, the gawky, pig-tailed child named Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls, or "Half-Pint," as she was lovingly called by Pa Ingalls. In recent years she has starred mostly on family-friendly shows like “Touched by An Angel” and “7th Heaven.”
Perhaps this is a classic example of how pathetically low our society’s morals have fallen in 25 years: Melissa Gilbert just guest-starred on the FX cable network’s grotesque show "Nip/Tuck." Are you ready for this? As a woman needing to have a nipple replaced....because her dog bit it off....during sex.
I’m not kidding. I wish I were.
It was somehow not enough to have a little light fun of sex with a cow (ABC’s “Boston Legal”), or sex with a horse (on Fox’s “Keen Eddie”), or even violating a parrot with a finger (on the aptly named UPN show “Shasta McNasty”). Now it’s bestiality with the family dog as the punch line. Lassie and Rin-Tin-Tin: be glad you’re dead.
Gilbert’s husband returns home from Iraq to discover his wife’s enraptured with a whole new definition of "puppy love." He screams at her in disgust that he failed to expect she would turn into a "faithless, demented whore," a special breed of floozy to be sure given she used peanut butter to seduce the family pooch into the sack. To complete the circle of sleaze, the husband vengefully dumps the dog, now a lifeless heap, out of a duffel bag in front of her. This being a graphic show about surgery, we see – we have to see -- Gilbert’s bare breast (albeit covered by a plastic wound) as they prepare her for a new nipple.
Why did she do this? Is the “wholesome” tag such a scarlet letter in today’s Tinseltown that it requires this level of penance? Perhaps there’s even more to it. Until recently, Gilbert was president of the Screen Actors Guild, which has fought proposals to strengthen protections against televised indecency. Gilbert couldn’t have taken a more public stand (in this case, in the prone position) than this disgusting stunt.
“Nip/Tuck,” television’s most overwrought sleazefest, is beginning its fourth season of plastic surgery and gaudy immorality with a load of new guest stars clamoring for seats on the bandwagon, but the same perverse drive to shatter every barrier of good taste. It’s so graphic, violent, and sexually repulsive that one prison banned its inmates from watching it. And with it’s available to millions of impressionable children on the cable or satellite TV systems in their homes.
And TV critics continue to applaud every new outburst of wickedness. The Hartford Courant has raved that "no show has been as consistently audacious, finding the very edges of taste and acceptance each week and using every power of its extended cable status to leap beyond them." The Palm Beach Post lovingly described it a "shocking, sexy, graphic, funny, wildly over-the-top, I-can't-believe-what-I'm-watching drama."
They aren’t looking for artistic excellence. They are looking for the fastest path to subversion, a roller coaster ride to the depths of excess. “Nip/Tuck” can meet them there with great enthusiasm.
Up next on “Nip/Tuck” is Rosie O’Donnell, and it wouldn’t be worth the guest starring role without Rosie’s character having sex with Dr. Christian Troy, the show’s stud muffin. TV Guide has already spurred O’Donnell to recount the filming of the “absolutely hilarious” sex scene, how the actor playing Dr. Troy was naked except for a sock and she decided to go topless, and how her lesbian partner loved watching every minute.
And Hollywood’s loving it. “Nip/Tuck” creator Ryan Murphy is popular enough that he’s preparing another project for FX called “4 oz.” named for the average weight of a flaccid penis. It’s a drama about a transsexual sportswriter with a wife and two teenage sons. There’s no cast yet, but he claims his phone "is ringing off the hook" from A-list stars who he says shall remain nameless. The wages of preposterous sin are rich indeed in today’s Hollywood.
Michael Medved did a vague reference on Friday's show about Melissa Gilbert portraying a character that was having an affair while her husband was in Iraq--with a dog. I couldn't believe what he was saying so I had to look it up.
Oh, great.
Now she'll be forever typecast.
If my grandmother were still alive, this would kill her. She lived for "Little House." I watched the first Nip/Tuck and was appalled. Never watched it again.
The only thing worth watching on TV is "Antique Roadshow".
This is the way I prefer to remember Half-pint.
That and the PBS shows with the nature walk, my Grandfather loved those.
She looks really creepy in that picture.
"She looks really creepy in that picture"
You mean that a woman's face, on a man's body, with two nice breasts somehow worked, in seems creepy to you?
Anyone want to comment on this?
Now that you mentioned her body, her neck does look kind of thick--like a man's. But the breasts creep me out too. Too round, too pasty, and too much.
I was too busy throwing up to comment.
I just remembered my tag line is the comment on your question.
LOL:)
Can you imagine if men walked around with bulges (not utterly gay men, but straight men) and the bulges were made of gel in a bag. That would be insane, bizarre and hilarious wouldn't it? Well, this is what I now see when I look at all these fake chests walking around my town day and night, night and day. It is enough to drive one to want to go . . . where? I fear this has spread everywhere sadly.
me too :-).
Yet. Melissa is attractive otherwise and she has brains. Which is more then I can say for most in this town.
The last couple of years I watch very little series television. There isn't a single regular network program that holds my interest.
At the same time though F/X network the last several seasons has been offering almost the only interesting new shows on the air. Nip/Tuck, The Shield, and Rescue Me all push the boundaries of basis cable, and are totally upfront that this is what they do. They aren't right for everybody and give fair warning they are mature programming with foul language, nudity etc at the beginning of each episode (MLV etc) may as well be a Roman numeral geometry problem it uses so many warning letters. They are also broadcast late night past the bedtime of youngsters.
With several hundred channels now there is room for mature subjects programming to be offered to forewarned audiences.
Do you actually want All Barney the Dinosaur all the time?
I so agree. I never got the fascination with plastic boobs. They don't even move.
Also I read that often the procedure takes away the woman's ability to feel her breasts, in other words all sensations are numbed.
So what's up with that?
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