Wash their mouths out with soap

I recently started watching a show on the A&E network called "Minute by Minute." Every episode goes through a chronology of a certain event, of the type that tends to have a year and/or the name of a city attached to it, such as The 1981 Kansas City Hotel Disaster, or The Great London Omnibus Disaster of 1974, and contains a lot of interviews with the people affected, plus news clips and such.

Two of the episodes I've seen so far, The 1994 O.J. Simpson Bronco Chase and The 1988 Pan Am Bombing Over Lockerbie, Scotland, have had one thing in common: they each contained exactly one use of the word "shit," unbleeped. In fact, in the O.J. Simpson episode, since it was part of a 911 call, it was presented both aurally and visually.

First of all, that's unusual for basic cable, that it wouldn't have been bleeped. But what's more unusual is that A&E has given each episode the same TV-PG rating, including those two, not even going one step up to TV-PG-L.

Yes, you can supposedly use "shit" once in a movie and still get a PG rating, but so far, television has been much more conservative with its ratings than the Motion Picture Association. I can actually cite two examples I saw on Turner Classic Movies, which shows all of its movies unedited and is a basic cable channel in some areas (in mine, it's in that nebulous area between "basic" and "premium" called "digital basic"). "The Hudsucker Proxy," rated PG in theaters, was given TV-14-L, I believe, by TCM. And "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," rated PG-13, was TV-MA.

(Yes, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" really was shown on Turner Classic Movies, I swear, uncut, letterboxed, and with what's-his-name coming on before the movie to talk about why they were showing it in the first place, and after the movie to mention what everyone in the cast is doing these days except for Mia Sara, who apparently has dropped off the face of the earth.)

Anyway, if I were in charge of A&E's ratings, I would have gone ahead with the special "L" advisory, just in case, if for no other reason than to distinguish "Minute by Minute" from, say, Game Show Network's "Match Game" reruns, which are rated TV-PG while almost everything else on the network is TV-G, and that's solely because of the double entendres, gratuitous use of words like "tinkle," and Fannie Flagg's tight T-shirts.