This week brought another fine example of how U.S. network TV series often send laudable moral messages even when the context is one of seeming immorality. In "Burn, Bougainvillea, Burn!," the most recent episode of Surviving Suburbia, a new sitcom starring Bob Saget, there was the usual complement of sexual innuendo and leering, bawdy humor.

Yet the overall thrust of the episode was that the central character, Steve Patterson, a married suburbanite played by Saget, was trying hard to avoid putting himself in a situation where sexual temptation was likely to occur, while his wife and others were certain that he was indulging in lascivious thoughts and actions.

The message was clear: our current social and cultural environment creates an expectation that everyone will be loose-moraled, and that extraordinary measures to resist such temptations are both necessary and good.

This was all done without being overtly moralistic or unsympathetic toward those with lesser powers of resistance. One of the subplots exemplified this by showing sympathy for a character while criticizing her moral failures. It concerned a neighbor girl who is pregnant with her second child at the age of seventeen. Steve’s teenage son is very sympathetic toward her, saying, "She feels really bad about it."

Steve responds tartly: "She shouldn’t feel bad. She should feel ashamed! But we don’t feel shame in this country any more, do we? That’s why China’s kicking our butt!’

–S. T. Karnick