About a week ago, I had a conversation with my liberal dad (we watched part of an episode of “The Virginian on YouTube) and he told me about back in those days, westerns just dominated everything on prime time. Kind of like these crime/political dramas nowadays and Dad remarked about how he was getting a bit fed up with that and how graphic they had become in recent years.
I don’t know if this is fully relevant to the thread here, but I could not help but think about something like this (then there are my fond memories of Friday nights on CBS with “The Incredible Hulk” and later “The Dukes of Hazzard”) when I read this story.
TV in the 1950s and 1960s was just fine with adult oriented shows on at 9 PM. They were still safe for children to watch.
Then Bobby Kennedy was murdered and America went into hysterics.
The news media blamed TV show “violence” which was very mild at that time. So TV shows were “dumbed down” to kiddie shows.
Comic books were dumbed down. Pulp fiction removed their lurid blood soaked covers. Gun laws were passed that did nothing.
Movies on TV were butchered to remove “violence”.
But the movie industry said they would “police themselves” with a joke of a ratings system. They then began to turn out the most blood soaked movies they could. Mild movies were reshot to add more sex and blood to get the coveted “R” rating.
Today’s movies and TV shows are now so violent they would have never been on TV back in the 1960s.
I remember when PSYCHO was going to be shown on TV for the first time. The TV execs were so nervous about it that it was pulled at the last minute and another “safe” movie shown in it’s place.