Was TNG considered a "family tv show" at the time? And anyway, what does "family tv show" mean?

Some people have been arguing that, yes, but I'm surprised you'd take it seriously, since you yourself disproved it way back in post #8 of this thread by posting these links showing that dozens of other shows had already featured gay characters and issues for nearly two decades before then:
List of 1970s American television episodes with LGBT themes
List of 1980s American television episodes with LGBT themes

I mean, good grief, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote, two of the most mainstream, cozy, and uncontroversial shows on television, were doing stories with LGBTQ characters in 1984. So it's beyond ridiculous to argue that it was "too early" in 1987.

 

And I’m noting how they are all either sitcoms, legal dramas/crime drama/police procedurals, or soap operas. The only sci-fi entry is The Twilight Zone in 1986, and its not until Quantum Leap in 1990 that there’s any movement at all in Star Trek with "The Host" and "The Outcast".

And I also note how many shows, but not all of them, were aired at 10PM, implying its aimed at an older audience, not children. TNG usually aired around 9PM, and kids might still up at that hour.

It begs a couple of questions.

Did the FCC regulations of 1987 scare off the Trek producers, despite those regulations clearly not scaring off anyone else?

Or was it that since TNG usually aired at an early hour and seen as a family show, they just chose to avoid the subject matter altogether? And let the other shows airing handle it, as LGBT topics at the time were approached as mature subject matter to be watched by adults only?

 

I googled and found nothing about the FCC banning LGBT representation in the 1980s. Do you have any sources on this?

 

That is a blatantly false statement. There are multiple shows on the lists that fit none of those categories, like Marcus Welby, M.D., Medical Center, The White Shadow, Lou Grant, The Love Boat, Trapper John, M.D., American Playhouse, St. Elsewhere, and CBS Schoolbreak Special. It's also quite ridiculous to lump Murder, She Wrote, the archetype of what we'd call cozy mystery today, into the same category as serious crime dramas like Hill Street Blues.

What the hell has that got to do with anything? If it was showing up frequently in literally dozens of other shows of multiple genres, what could possibly make it more objectionable in science fiction? If anything, it's the other way around. Science fiction TV was often a way to handle subject matters allegorically that were considered too controversial to handle directly, so if anything, SF -- and especially Star Trek -- should've been ahead of the curve, not behind it.

Another blatant falsehood, easily disproven. The list includes shows that aired in every prime-time slot.

This is a very silly question. First, as Skipper says, what regulations are you talking about? If they did exist, it would make no sense for everyone to defy them with one exception.

Another outright counterfactual. I watched many of the listed shows as a child and a teen. Nobody would've seen Matlock or Fame or The Love Boat as an adults-only show. Good grief, Doogie Howser M.D. is on the list, and that starred a teenaged Neil Patrick Harris as a child prodigy doctor!

 

This reminds me of something I heard about, several years ago. Apparently, Mr. Harris was at some kind of awards show, as a presenter or something...and when he walked on stage, the band started playing the "Doogie Howser" theme. Now, I didn't see this, so I don't know if his attitude was serious or comedic...but he apparently lost his composure and said, "No! I am not going through this again! Its in my contract!"

As a childhood fan of that show, reading the article made me laugh.

 

You seem to have deliberately ignored my post here. I already went into it in some detail.

Next, did you consider looking at the role the watershed plays in television?

Source: Watershed (broadcasting)

 

At the time I was a kid. I considered anything on TV before late night, maybe 11pm, to be family. I sort of thought it was the law. Sadly, I would have though the mere mention of LBGTQ people to be non-family, something for after 11pm TV if appropriate even to speak about. I was a few year from believing the Easter Bunny, so I'm not sure what adults would have thought of this bigotry. It seemed common to me. I obviously don't believe in the Easter Bunny or abide bigotry at age 48.

 

Yes, and in fact MASH had a gay guest character in the episode "George" in 1974 (!), sympathetically portrayed and without homophobic jokes except by the resident camp bigot which reflected more on him than on George. Have an episode with a gay character did not prevent MASH from being the most successful series in American television.

The relationship in Buffy between Tara and Willow was also accepted, though their relationship was introduced in May of 2000, after TNG and DS9 had concluded.

 

Well, TNG, being a first run syndication, was broadcast literally at all times in the country. So, could the rule of thumb of whether or not a program was suitable for younger people based on the time really apply here?

Ps: But you couldn't put a spoiler tag on the fact that the Easter Bunny doesn't exist!?!

 

Just as a brief side note, I woulnd't consider subtle references to sex as a problem for a family-friendly status of a show. It's simply part of life and such subtle references probably go over childs' heads anyway. If they don't, it's likely the kids are old enough to broach the subject anyway, at least in a rudimentary fashion.

Now, openly blatant or even lewd references, I can understand you don't want those in a family-friendly show.

Then again, I'm no American, so my sensibilities might be somewhat different.

 

I have to rewatch the Risa planet episode! How blatant was it?

 

^I agree, that's fairly blatant, but still somewhat indirect. I don't think any parent is forced to explain the issue in explicit terms when Jamaharon comes up.

But I'll admit it's a long time ago I saw any Risa episode.

 

By the way (from Memory Alpha)
--------------------------------------------
At first, the TNG writers were very excited by this episode, though the installment still had to be approved by Gene Roddenberry. "Rick [Berman] says, 'You've got to go in to see Gene'," Ira Steven Behr continued. "So I go in and he's very nice." Despite liking the inclusion of the pleasure planet, something Roddenberry was keen to see in the episode, however, was copious amounts of erotic activity taking place in the background of the scenes set on Risa, particularly between same-sex partners. Remembered Behr, "He says, 'I like the idea of the pleasure planet and I want it to be a place where you see women fondling and kissing other women, and men hugging and holding hands and kissing, and we can imply that they're having sex in the background.' Huh, really?!" Behr was briefly flummoxed on how to politely tell Roddenberry that such scenes would never make it past network censors. "I'm going, 'Oh, man, I'm in the freakin' Twilight Zone.' I go back to Rick. He goes, 'Pft, pay no attention to that, just get the captain laid.'"

 

If I have to trust my memory alone, nothing in the episode explicitly explains what it was about, but anyone over the age of 13 could have drawn their own conclusions...

 

Yes, anyone over 13.

But I wouldn't consider that a particular problem. That's an age where life itself starts to confront young people with such issues whether even the strictest parents like it or not.

 

I must say that even the concept of "blatant" in the early 90s of network TV was relative even in the more adult-oriented series. I don't think there were series in '92 in which, I don't know, the protagonists talked about the fantastic sex they had the night before, describing in detail all the positions and counting the number of orgasms and absent-mindedly asking what the best method was for cleaning the sheets from all the humors produced. Let's say that the room for maneuver between "For everyone" and "For adults" was quite narrow.

 

As I mentioned, the list you posted of '70s and '80s shows with gay content included a good number that were aired in the 8 PM "family hour," and even a few daytime shows. Of course, daytime soap operas often featured sexual subject matter, and syndicated talk shows in the '80s and '90s aggressively embraced prurience and controversy. So no, it would be completely counterfactual to assume that syndicated shows would've been forbidden to address mature content.

I already mentioned the extremely racy bedroom scene in a season 2 episode of War of the Worlds: The Series, which was ST:TNG's partner in its syndication package. It's true that there were stations, including mine, that refused to air that episode, but since it was syndicated, that means it was up to the individual stations to decide whether or when it was appropriate to show it. So the "syndication means it couldn't be mature" hypothesis is getting it backward. A syndicated show was subject to less censorship than a network show, because there were fewer authorities it had to answer to. A syndicated show could include more mature or controversial material, and local programmers would choose its time slot based on its content. If they thought a specific episode was too adult for the show's usual time slot, they could either pre-empt it or move it to late night for the week. That flexibility on the part of the broadcasters gave the producers more flexibility, not less.

It's deeply inappropriate to equate the depiction of actual sexual activity with the simple acknowledgment that LGBTQ people exist and have relationships. They're two entirely different subjects. Sitcoms of the '50s and '60s had to show a married couple sleeping in separate beds and obviously couldn't have shown them actually having sex, or even acknowledged that sex existed, but that didn't preclude them from acknowledging that the couple was married or telling stories about their relationship.

Obviously the same applies here. The fact that the censors wouldn't allow such graphic same-sex makeout scenes doesn't mean they couldn't have allowed just acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ people and relationships. I mean, come on, today we have overtly same-sex couples in children's shows like Power Rangers Dino Fury and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Acknowledging the existence of a relationship is a completely different thing from showing a sex scene.

 

Of course he exists. He and Santa Claus play a round of golf in New Zealand, every December 25. But sorry, Linus... Jack Skellington told me that the Great Pumpkin got misdirected and wound up in Thanksgiving Town a few years ago, and was turned into a pie.

Blatant as .

Especially since these very disparate things pretty much had the opposite effect from one another, concerning LGBTQ acceptance.

 

I would also add that War of the Worlds: The Series was a horror series that regularly featured gory violence, and it was the syndication partner of ST:TNG. It would make no sense for a gruesome horror show and a kid-friendly family show to be offered together as sibling shows in the exact same syndication package to the same markets, where they were frequently scheduled back-to-back. So no, TNG was not a kid-friendly family show. It was perfectly free to be as adult as it wanted within FCC rules, to be as sexy as "The Naked Now" or "Justice" or as violent as "Conspiracy" or as graphic in depicting torture as "Chain of Command." Its producers after season 1 just didn't want to go that far most of the time, not without a compelling story reason. And nothing stopped them from acknowleding the existence of LGBTQ people except Rick Berman's own adamant refusal to do so.