# Television episodes that wouldn’t fly today **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 20, 2017, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312 "2017-02-20T12:21:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Marine\_One](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/marine_one/32/3461_2.png) [@Marine\_One](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marine_One)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/101 "2019-01-12T16:09:35Z")
They couldn’t have the Confederate flag on top of the General Lee car in “The Dukes of Hazzard”. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/102 "2019-01-12T17:43:00Z")
> [@Wheelz](#): > > I’ve been watching some old Dick van Dyke episodes, and some of those have not aged well either. Don’t remember the particular episode, but there was one where Rob and Laura were having an argument. Buddy advises Rob to “slap her around a little.” Toward the end of the episode, after Laura has gotten the better of him, Rob turns to Buddy and says, “I should have slapped her around.” Big laugh from the audience. Wait until you see the episode in which Rob and Laura try to set up a male friend - Rob sets him up with Sally and Laura with a friend of hers. But the guy, though apparently having a good time with each, never seems to decide between them. The reason why? He’s a wife-beater and his psychiatrist has advised him that he’ll start hitting any woman he gets too seriously about. > **[The Dick Van Dyke Show](https://tvwheniwasborn.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-dick-van-dyke-show.html)** > > Oh, Roooobbbbbbb... How my favorite TV couple were so different from the ones who came before them The Dick Van Dyke Show , "All About... ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 6:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/103 "2019-01-12T18:05:49Z")
> [@Marine\_One](#): > > They couldn’t have the Confederate flag on top of the General Lee car in “The Dukes of Hazzard”. Or even call it the “General Lee” considering that that would be glorifying a traitor who took up arms against the United States and opposed racial equality. ---
**Author:** ![MrKnowItAll](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrknowitall/32/87_2.png) [@MrKnowItAll](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrKnowItAll)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 6:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/104 "2019-01-12T18:52:44Z")
I’ve been rewatching a lot of “Barney Miller” lately. While it’s still very, very funny, there’s some pretty cringe-worthy episodes. And not even the ones that they intended to be uncomfortable. For instance, there’s the appropriately titled episode “Rape”, in which a woman wants her husband arrested for forcing her to have sex with him. Totally played for laughs. There’s “Hot Dogs”, in which two female police officers are called on the carpet for overstepping their assigned duties, and break down in tears to get out of trouble. There’s “Atomic Bomb” in which a college student builds a thermonuclear device as a physics project, and gets little more than a slap on the writst. And there’s the recurring character Marty (and sometimes his SO, Darryl) as a very camp pair of homosexuals. It was truly a different time. ---
**Author:** ![Baker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/bb73d2/32.png) [@Baker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baker)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 7:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/105 "2019-01-12T19:24:48Z")
I thought about Marty when I was reading this thread. But I still love Barney Miller, one of my favorite TV shows ever. Some of the writing was so clever. There was an episode in which a local bakery had complaints against it, for making “obscene” pastries. They were never described or shown. But the box they were in was opened by various folks, and it was their reaction and comments that were hysterical. “I never would have thought of putting poppyseeds _there_!” And when it comes to complaining about obscenity there was the episode in which a woman vandalized a painting in the window of an art gallery. It was a female nude, and the vandal complained it was inappropriate. The painting had been done decades earlier. Barney looked at the woman, judging her age, and guessed correctly that the woman had, in her youth, been the model, and was now mightily embarrassed about it. Sorry to go off on tangents, I loved that show. ---
**Author:** ![GreysonCarlisle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a87d85/32.png) [@GreysonCarlisle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreysonCarlisle)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/106 "2019-01-12T19:52:58Z")
> [@Wheelz](#): > > Then comes the punchline to the whole episode. It turns out those guys weren’t gay! These two other guys that look straight are the gay ones! Ha ha ha!!! > The end. They’ll do better in season 6 (I think I’m on season 6 now). Rebecca’s upset that Robin bought a house for his French girlfriend, and the Cheers gang sees her picture in the paper. They pass it around and play it up like she’s the most gorgeous woman they’ve ever seen. Norm asks one guy, “Bob, what do you think of this?” Bob (or whatever his name was) takes one look and says, “I’d change.” Which implies that they have gay friends at the bar that they know by name and can make those kinds of jokes with. I wonder if the episode you mentioned ties into one of Coach’s later gags. I don’t recall the episode number, only that Coach goes on a rant about people saying some baseball player is gay, but the guy’s not. Sam butts in that yeah, the guy is gay, always was. Coach is shocked for a beat, then he asks if he can fix the player up with some other guy he knows. ---
**Author:** ![GreysonCarlisle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a87d85/32.png) [@GreysonCarlisle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreysonCarlisle)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/107 "2019-01-12T20:00:33Z")
> [@GreysonCarlisle](#): > > They’ll do better in season 6 (I think I’m on season 6 now). Wow! Season 8. My, how those Rebecca years fly by… ---
**Author:** ![Guinastasia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guinastasia/32/5751_2.png) [@Guinastasia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Guinastasia)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/108 "2019-01-12T20:08:06Z")
How about “King Size Homer”, from _The Simpsons_? Homer decides he wants to go on workman’s comp, so he doesn’t have to participate in the plant’s exercise program, and gains about 100+ pounds. He ends up morbidly obese, and the fat jokes just write themselves. It’s one of my favorite episodes, but damn, I can see people just screaming their heads off nowadays. (Especially when you consider by today’s standards, 300-some pounds isn’t even considered all THAT bad. That’s sad) The Labor Day episode of _Married…With Children_ where Al wants to have a BBQ, and he makes Peggy work her ass off. And the sight of her doing so gets him so horny that instead of HER insisting on sex, HE keeps doing so, while she looks miserable. Since it’s always the other way around (Peggy wants to have sex, Al doesn’t), it’s pretty funny, but there’s no way they’d be able to pull it off today. > [@Wheelz](#): > > But Ralph never did hit Alice, and more importantly, Alice _knows_ he’s not going to hit her. I think it stays funny for that reason. Didn’t she usually roll her eyes and respond with some fat joke anyways? ---
**Author:** ![ekedolphin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ekedolphin/32/10003_2.png) [@ekedolphin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ekedolphin)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/109 "2019-01-12T20:57:58Z")
> [@Don\_Draper](#): > > A whole lot of “Star Trek: the Next Generation” would not go over with a modern-day audience. > > The gender-less aliens who demonized any members of their race who showed gender characteristics. Ironically, this was TNG’s awkward, fumbling attempt at addressing non-hetero sexuality – and it was just a mess. Snipped to discuss this particular episode. It might have worked a little better (maybe) if Riker’s love interest for that episode was portrayed by a male actor. I believe even Jonathan Frakes has said so. But it was a pretty ugly episode. I’ll throw in “The Host” from TNG-- Beverly can fall in love with a Trill man, and even boff him when he’s in Riker’s body, but she can’t handle it at the end when the Odan symbiont gets transferred to a woman. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/110 "2019-01-12T21:22:28Z")
> [@Intergalactic\_Gladiator](#): > > There was a similar Night Court episode where lothario Dan Feilding meets up with a former classmate who has transitioned from male to female. Of course he has issues with it and to add to it, they cast a blond bombshell for the part. They actually cast [Jim Bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bailey_(entertainer)). There IS an episode where Dan interacts with a hot blonde who turned out to be trans (a stewardess, IIRC), but that was much more in the typical offensive ‘laugh at the guy hitting on a woman who used to be a man’ vein. The episode you mention was very good for the era, and actually better than a lot of more recent attempts at addressing it. And, yes, most of the jokes were at Dan’s expense…the closest it got to making a joke out of Charlene was when Harry finally came up with an explanation of what ‘transgender’ meant that Bull understood. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 10:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/111 "2019-01-12T22:26:34Z")
> [@ekedolphin](#): > > I’ll throw in “The Host” from TNG-- Beverly can fall in love with a Trill man, and even boff him when he’s in Riker’s body, but she can’t handle it at the end when the Odan symbiont gets transferred to a woman. I actually think that could be done, it just would need to get rid of the weird speech that Beverly gives. Having a straight person who just can’t change their sexual identity even though she wants to makes sense. Where I think the problem lies is the fact that there is an entire species that will give up their own personal autonomy to be a body for another species. That’s basically slavery. There’s a reason they changed how Trills work when they decided to have one in the main cast of Deep Space Nine. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/112 "2019-01-12T22:48:36Z")
> [@Eclipse\_Chaser](#): > > I seem to remember a John Wayne movie (possibly McLintock) where he spanked his estranged wife played by Maureen O’Hara. Not only did John Wayne spank Maureen O’Hara, but Patrick Wayne spanks Stephanie Powers. With the total approval and encouragement of the crowd, I might add. Both the Waynes hand the other a makeshift paddle in each case as well. ---
**Author:** ![Red\_Wiggler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/red_wiggler/32/13190_2.png) [@Red\_Wiggler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Red_Wiggler)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/113 "2019-01-12T23:06:44Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Not only did John Wayne spank Maureen O’Hara, but Patrick Wayne spanks Stephanie Powers. With the total approval and encouragement of the crowd, I might add. Both the Waynes hand the other a makeshift paddle in each case as well. Worse, both women become compliant and adoring as a result. ---
**Author:** ![Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slow_moving_vehicle/32/291_2.png) [@Slow\_Moving\_Vehicle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slow_Moving_Vehicle)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/114 "2019-01-12T23:38:37Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > Pretty much every episode of _All in the Family._ Archie Bunker’s lovable bigot simply wouldn’t fly today. > > (snip) On the contrary - flip the races, and Archie Bunker becomes Dre Johnson of _blackish_. ---
**Author:** ![Kamino\_Neko](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kamino_neko/32/34_2.png) [@Kamino\_Neko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kamino_Neko)\ **Post date:** [January 12, 2019, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/115 "2019-01-12T23:45:06Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Not only did John Wayne spank Maureen O’Hara, but Patrick Wayne spanks Stephanie Powers. With the total approval and encouragement of the crowd, I might add. Both the Waynes hand the other a makeshift paddle in each case as well. I assume this is two separate scenes, and not some sort of weird group scene… ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2019, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/116 "2019-01-13T00:00:46Z")
Middle and end of movie. First John encourages Patrick to spank his daughter, and hands him an ash shovel mid-spank so he doesn’t hurt his hand. Patrick returns the favor in the closing scene, handing John a grain scoop when he spanks Maureen in front of the whole town. In her bloomers. Covered with molasses and feathers. Times were kinkier then. ---
**Author:** ![F.U.Shakespeare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/aca169/32.png) [@F.U.Shakespeare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.U.Shakespeare)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2019, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/117 "2019-01-13T00:05:11Z")
> [@notfrommensa](#): > > I remember seeing a Hollywood Squares repeat on the Game Show where the contestant pick George Gobel. > > Peter Marshall asked him whether you can cross a Pumpkin with a Watermelon. > > Gobel’s one liner: “Yes, but what you get is a Jack-o-Lantern with an Afro.” Another time, when they asked George what Anita Bryant (a vociferous anti-gay rights activist) did for her talent competition in the Miss America pageant, he replied: “Punch the hairdresser”. ---
**Author:** ![GreysonCarlisle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a87d85/32.png) [@GreysonCarlisle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreysonCarlisle)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2019, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/118 "2019-01-13T00:07:23Z")
> [@Kamino\_Neko](#): > > I assume this is two separate scenes, and not some sort of weird group scene… [From McLintock!](https://youtu.be/3eSM9DxlTYI?t=71). [From _The Quiet Man_](https://youtu.be/nm9MEBPZkcU?t=34) is as bad, if not worse. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2019, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/119 "2019-01-13T00:46:10Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Middle and end of movie. First John encourages Patrick to spank his daughter, and hands him an ash shovel mid-spank so he doesn’t hurt his hand. Patrick returns the favor in the closing scene, handing John a grain scoop when he spanks Maureen in front of the whole town. In her bloomers. Covered with molasses and feathers. > > Times were kinkier then. [Here’s an article from a couple of years back](https://pictorial.jezebel.com/i-dont-know-whether-to-kiss-you-or-spank-you-a-half-ce-1769140132). ---
**Author:** ![ivylass](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9de053/32.png) [@ivylass](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivylass)\ **Post date:** [January 13, 2019, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312/120 "2019-01-13T01:34:53Z")
I read an article recently that _Friends_ hasn’t held up all that well. There’s a scene where it becomes apparent that Joey was molested by his tailor, but it’s played for laughs. And Monica only gets happy when she loses her teenage weight. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/television-episodes-that-wouldn-t-fly-today/780312.md?page=7)