Season Of The Vagina

Forget the singing competitions, cop shows, fairy-tale dramas and the “Mad Men”-Style melodramas. For network television this is the season of the vagina. On Monday night on the premiere of CBS’s “Two Broke Girls,” one of the most highly touted new shows of the season, a waitress, played by Kat Dennings, got back at two men who were snapping their fingers at her by letting them know the deleterious effect their behavior had on her vagina. The show is slated to run Mondays at 8:30 p.m.

At that same time next Wednesday, a new ABC comedy called “Suburgatory” has a scene in which a teenager named Tessa is appalled by another girl who is thrilled that a pair of absurdly tiny shorts will show off her belly ring. “You know what else it shows off?” says Tessa. “Your vagina.” And on the new Thursday night comedy “Whitney” on NBC, the pilot originally contained a sequence of jokes — which was edited out but which a producer said was likely to be in a later episode — based on the act of intimate decorating known as “vajazzling,” culminating in the star, Whitney Cummings, saying: “When did vaginas get so boring? Do you think a guy ever saw a naked woman and went, ‘No thank you; not sparkly enough?’ ”


Pushed by the more free-wheeling language on cable television, network television shows have been including common curse words, then bleeping them out, for years, even in mainstream shows like “The Office” and “Parks and Recreation.” But this year, with unbleeped references to anatomical parts being tossed around so freely, it is clearly a new era for network comedy, one that might have parents reaching for the remote, or at least for Google.

“I think our tolerance for what is edgy is changing,” said Ms. Cummings, who, besides writing her own comedy for NBC, also wrote “Two Broke Girls” with Michael Patrick King, a longtime producer and writer of “Sex and the City.” “We’re getting a little desensitized, so sometimes you have to be more and more shocking because now you have YouTube and the Internet and all the rest that’s available for us to watch.”

Ms. Cummings has a special place in this year’s vagina-theme season, having worked on two of the shows using the word. “If one day passes without me writing any more vagina jokes, my career is blown,” she said jokingly. “Vagina jokes paid for my house.”

With many of the shows yet to have their premieres, it is too early for the Federal Communications Commission to note any surge in complaints about language in them, and so officials there declined to comment. CBS did not report an unusual number of complaints about “Two Broke Girls” on Monday night.

Many series creators say the changes should come as no surprise. In addition to cable they point to the crude humor that has made the movies of Judd Apatow, Todd Phillips and other filmmakers staples of contemporary comedy.

The intense pressure on networks to find new hits should not be underestimated either, said Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts who specializes in the linguistics of cursing. “Each season the competition is so stiff over who you can get to watch,” Professor Jay said. “That’s why you’re getting more explicit, or more explicitly inferential, use of language.”

It is not incidental that most of the efforts to break through the language boundaries are coming from female writers, and that the words are frequently put in the mouths of female characters. The liberation of language could be read by some as barometer of how far women have come as creators of television content. Female viewers have always been the dominant audience on television. “I think it’s great this is all coming from women,” said Liz Meriwether, the creator of another new show, “New Girl.” “This is all part of the human experience.”

Emily Kapnek, the creator of “Suburgatory,” noted that it would be difficult to challenge a woman’s using clinical words for female parts of the body. “How could anyone take issue?” she asked. “It’s not like vagina should be perceived as a dirty word.”

Professor Jay agreed that the writers were pushing the limits on speech by exploiting legitimate anatomical terms rather the street equivalents. “I think we’re in lot of trouble if we censor clinical terms,” Professor Jay said. “There’s nowhere to go then.”