Adultery Is Everywhere You Look, It Seems
Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, “adultery” has seemed a quaint little word. It carries echoes of the Bible, “The Scarlet Letter” and the 1950s, when private investigators snapped photographs of unfaithful spouses as evidence to present in that arena of scandal, divorce court.
In the ‘90s, adultery has become one of mainstream television’s hot topics almost overnight, but things are different now.
In the pilot for “Brooklyn South,” the new season’s most anticipated drama, a police sergeant cleans out the locker of a colleague who has been killed. As he separates items that go to the wife from those that go to the girlfriend, he tells a rookie that the dead man had compartments in his life. “He died today doing his job, and there’s no reason those different parts have to wind up hurting each other.”
In the pilot for the season’s most anticipated comedy, “Veronica’s Closet,” the lingerie-company mogul played by Kirstie Alley gets tips from friends about how to deal with her unregenerate philandering husband. Their unanimous advice is to leave him. If she won’t, her best friend offers an eye-for-an-eye alternative: “Cheat.”
Several other pilots for new shows also bring major characters into intimate contact with at least the possibility of extramarital affairs. The hero of “Nothing Sacred,” a Roman Catholic priest played by Kevin Anderson, runs into a former lover, now in a troubled marriage. Will they get involved again?
In “The Gregory Hines Show,” the star plays a widower with a small son; in no time, a married woman comes on to him.
And a running gag in the pilot for the drama “Total Security” is that the security specialist played by James Belushi has a penchant for falling into bed with his married clients.
Adultery on television may be epidemic, but the theme’s treatment does not reflect conservatism or a backward-looking approach. Instead, these shows mirror a newly realistic and deeply pessimistic attitude toward marriage in the contemporary world.
In the old days, unfaithfulness automatically marked a character as a villain or a home wrecker. For the last five years or so, dramas have turned a corner. Now the people involved are often major characters we like and sympathize with.
The infidelity cuts across sexual lines: the married Greg Medavoy and the single Donna Abandando on “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” or the married Jeanie Boulet and the single Peter Benton on “E.R.” In those high-profile plots from recent seasons, all four characters were depicted as realistically flawed people who made understandable mistakes.
This is a great improvement over the days when television defied reality and insisted that marriage was a constant state of unblemished monogamy. Where did all these grown-ups suddenly come from?
They reflect not only real life but the celebrity life that so often sets the standard for public opinion. Look at what has happened in the last few months alone.
Last month Prince Charles gave a 50th-birthday party for Camilla Parker Bowles. As everyone knows, she was his lover while both were married (the Prince quite famously) to other people. Bill Cosby admitted to a brief extramarital fling more than 20 years ago, and said he had been paying the woman to keep quiet about it.
Cosby revealed that private information, of course, only in the wake of actions by Autumn Jackson, who claimed to be the daughter of that affair and who was convicted of trying to extort $40 million from him.
And the tabloids went wild when Frank Gifford was videotaped in a hotel room with a flight attendant because he was frequently the subject of his wife, Kathie Lee’s, rapturous conversations on her morning talk show with Regis Philbin. All three cases had once represented storybook marriages. Suddenly that storybook turned out to be a Jackie Collins novel rather than “Cinderella.”
The cumulative effect of such revelations is to undermine, not only these individuals but the very concept of happily-ever-after, replacing it with a more complex model. Today infidelity is depicted as common. And though it remains a serious threat to a television marriage, it does not necessarily lead to divorce.
Television shows are not copycatting these real-life stories. The new season’s adulterous pilot episodes were shot long before the most recent cases made the headlines. The shows merely reflect the way Americans have been dealing with infidelity in more complex terms.
Every recent poll (and there have been many) has found that a great majority of people believe adultery is wrong, with some findings as high as 90 percent. Yet a recent Lifetime special called “Your Cheatin’ Heart” claimed that half the marriages in America have been marred by adultery. That figure can be traced to readers of Penthouse and Cosmopolitan magazines, so maybe they were bragging.
In other polls, people may be just as likely to deny their guilt. A 1994 University of Chicago survey puts adultery much lower (11 percent of women and 21 percent of men said they had had affairs). Whatever the rate of infidelity, attitudes toward it have certainly changed.
When Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton admitted during the 1992 presidential campaign that they had “problems in our marriage” (universally believed to be a code for infidelity), it signaled that such problems had become a part of modern marriage.
In keeping with such complexity, the NBC, ABC and CBS broadcast standards departments, better known as censors, all say they have no rules about the treatment of adultery and deal with the issue case by case. The new realism comes not from guessing at public attitudes or by network fiat, but from each show’s producers.
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: SPOTLIGHT WILL BE BACK Spotlight columnist Jim Kershner is on vacation. Spotlight will return Aug. 17