"More hangups than Woody Allen on a Friday night."
Also, just because the fringe is complaining doesn't mean the nation has become prudish, but to does mean that ABC should respond to its customers.
Also, thanks to that first line, I've got Lenny Kravitz: "Let Love Rule" in my head.
the "respond to its customers" point is a good one, but I'd hate for the media to become a "tyranny of the whiny, prudish minority". I don't want the media to have to put a giant child safety cap on itself for relatively harmless stuff, I don't want the standards to be dictated by a judge in Alabama.
It seems to me that the prudish minority is geographically concentrated. Would it be so hard for ABC to show different intros in different regions? I'm pretty sure the commercials on MNF are regionalized.
Regionalizing ads is easy because there's always been room in the broadcast for local ad content, which benefits local stations and local merchants because they get to buy, from the local affiliate, an ad during the big game that'll only reach their local customers.
Regionalizing intros would put all the cost on ABC, and Kirk would have to make a post about the "tyranny of the greedy shareholders" as to why that's not gonna happen, heheh.
What I could see happening is ABC revealing what's in the broadcast, and letting the local affiliate decide what to air, or whether to talk over a promo or whatnot. I don't know if they'd want to open the door to, say, a locally-accented John Madden play-by-play, but a promo with nudity would be a candidate for omission.
As for the judge in Alabama, I don't care for that sort of judicial activism any more than you do, but as long as the customers are deciding, well, let them decide. It's up to ABC to manage its distribution so that localized content is possible. Heck, for, say, MNF subscribers, they could have special costumes on the cheerleaders...
But the customers don't want to just decide for themselves...they want to decide for *everyone*.
I'm sure many of the people boycotting Procters and Gamble weren't P+G customers to begin with--and the reason they still matter is that they brought a lot of bad publicity, and made it into a bandwagon.
Some of them want to decide for everyone, you're right, but I think they're a small and vocal minority.
Most of them just don't want to flip on a football game and get nudity. I mean, geez, who'd've thunk it?
is a bare back nudity?
A bare back is all they showed, but the implication with the dropped towel was nudity, so yeah, implicit nudity is what it was. I don't consider it the same as a backless dress (which is also not appropriate for Monday Night Football, but for much more practical reasons).
Add to which fact, a bare back was all that was seen in hindsight (pun!), but when you're tuning in to watch the game, you don't know if that's all they're showing.
That's part of the allure, certainly, but also the basis for the complaint. Better complain to ABC now before they bore full-throttle onward from inappropriate to indecent.
The prudes are running the asylum.
Some people just like their light sexy fun after Wednesday.