Aquarius Is Having A 'Ball'

When I was a kid, there were lots of words you never heard on TV unless you paid a lot for the channel -- not just the seven dirty words everyone knows about but even pretty mild ones like "dick" and "bitch." Thanks to original series in 10 PM time slots on basic cable networks, "shit" is relatively commonplace -- as anyone in the cast of Suits could tell you, because they chew on it every time -- and Comedy Central will air pretty much any bad word, after midnight ET and with a stern warning. But on network TV, the old restrictions are proving more intractable, even in shows that are absolutely not for children.

I am not a crackpot: I just think the producers of Aquarius should have tried harder to get the word "fuck" into S01E03 instead of "ball."

First of all..."ball"? Yes, I realize that the word's use as slang for "have sexual intercourse" is accurate to the period in which the episode is set. But you know what else was? "Fuck." And in a scene in which Hodiak's just found out Cutler is having an affair with Hodiak's ex-wife Opal, for him to describe Opal by saying "She can drink and she can ball" feels noticeably, if you'll pardon the pun, neutered. Hodiak's obviously trying to be dismissive and hurtful of the relationship: if he were a real guy, he'd instinctively know to say "fuck." It's an Anglo-Saxon word, which as George Orwell taught us are always more rhetorically effective in their bluntness -- that hard "k" at the end! -- whereas "ball" might just mean, as in Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly," that Opal just likes to go out and have a good time at a party! (JK, everyone except '60s censors knows what Little Richard meant by "ball.") (Unless he was referring to a drag ball.)

Even if you fanwank Hodiak's usage by positing that he's trying to be respectful of his ex-wife by not using a harsher term, this isn't the only time the term is used in this sense in the episode. Later, when Shafe meets with Roy Kovic, the latter complains about the way Shafe wrecked his knee in the previous episode (he's still icing it like a sophomore with a field hockey injury) and says he's so badly incapacitated that he can't even "ball." Leaving aside the sad fact that he can't think of any other positions that would work even with a moderate knee injury (I suppose this particular gentleman may not be interested in anything that's ever referred to as "female superior"), this guy is in charge of BIKER GANG called THE STRAIGHT SATANS. He's decorously going to use terminology that even the FCC of the 1960s wouldn't blink at? COME ON.

It wasn't so long ago that Breaking Bad aired "I.F.T.," the episode that ended with Skyler's titularly abbreviated announcement "I fucked Ted." Granted, this was basic cable, so the network could get away with keeping the statement's impact by BARELY ducking out the sounds between "f" and "k." But would it be so bad for NBC to do the same -- or even mute the whole word? We'd all obviously know what the characters meant, and even if the word isn't audible, at least the reality of the scenes wouldn't be compromised.

And, okay, even if NBC can't get away with it: I watched this episode on Hulu -- a method the network must hope a lot of us will employ given that it's dropped the entire season on it (and other online platforms) today. If the idea is to give Aquarius the same kind of Event cachet as a Netflix original, why not shoot online-only versions of scenes with iffy content? That could even be a feature and not a bug, encouraging would-be viewers to seek out the online-exclusive edit Too Hot For TV?

Aquarius is, quite obviously, a show that no impressionable child who's going to be emotionally scarred by hearing the beginning and end of the word "fuck" or see the shape of an actor's mouth as he pronounces it silently is going to watch -- and anyway, kids would probably have a hard time seeing anything in the oppressive darkness of every other scene that they'd rather go colour anyway. And any adult who's going to clutch her pearls over the suggestion of an F-word is probably going to be turned off from watching by all the murderous sex cult business around it anyway. So whom is this bowdlerization actually for? It's the most absurdly dainty editing choice of a violent NBC drama since...well, the last time someone said "frick" while standing over a guy turned into a xylophone or whatever on Hannibal. Let's all be grownups and make our peace with grownup words. I am not a crackpot.