It is after 2am in California and i was just surfing around the channels as usual and on our basic cable Comedy Central is showing "Katt Williams Live".This show contains every FCC regulated word i can think of and very x-rated material,way more explicit than any "mature" rating.This is the first instance i have seen anything like this at anytime night or day on basic cable.Am i just behind the times or is this now commonplace?

They usually have "Secret Stash" programming overnight that is uncensored.

Yep.

Cable has never been subject to FCC regulations. Their censorship is self-imposed, mainly for purposes of staying on basic cable. I think Comedy Central started doing this when they started running the South Park movie, since it would be almost impossible to clean it up.

Look at what FX gets away with on their original programed shows after 10 PM.

language alone could never earn something an 'x' rating.

i don't find katt williams funny at all but i'm glad some of the puritanical restrictions put on broadcast entertainment are being loosened a little

comedy central has shown the South Park movie uncut overnight before

in a free society people should be allowed to make their own choices re: what they want to put into their eyes and ears

if someone feels offended or is worried that 'the kids' will be corrupted by a person on tv using certain words then they should block that channel or not watch it, or just don't have cable in their house

words never hurt anyone

Regular network programming is not subject to FCC regulations after 10 PM either. Remember when NYPD Blue got in trouble for airing partial nudity after 9 PM in a different time zone? The entire reason they put the show at 10 PM was so they could push the envelope and not be in violation. The affiliate screwed up.

Any network can air whatever they want after 10 PM. They self-censor.

Like 6 years ago.

...or maybe put your kids to bed before 2 am.

The first time I saw uncensored on Comedy Central was the Pam Anderson roast.

neither did capitalization or writing a complete sentence

but at least your defense in an imaginary argument is good

There's really no such thing as the "X" rating. The MPAA didn't copyright it, so adult film producers co-opted it for their own use. The official "adult" rating is NC-17, which is copyrighted, I believe. And FWIW, the Kevin Smith film Clerks was originally given a rating of NC-17 for dialogue alone. It was later changed.

There did indeed used to be an official MPAA X rating. It was never trademarked (for some reason) so porn adopted it. NC-17 replaced X about 15 years ago.

And yeah, movies can very easily get an NC-17 rating based on dialog alone.

That said, there are V-Chips to block TV MA and above content.

Cable is allowed to show pretty much anything it wants as long as the sponsors continue to pay for advertising -- some products don't want to be associated with vulgar material, and some groups will boycott items and companies for supporting a show (I think this happened to Married With Children) and the companies will pull advertising.. there's a reason why most of the items advertised in that time period are doritos, mountain dew, ED drugs and condoms. The other downfall could be cable companies dropping the channel, but thats extremely unlikely.

Broadcast is also allowed to show just about anything from 10 pm to 5 am.

So you are saying this has been going on for 6 years?I'm a pretty prodigious channel surfer and this is the first time i noticed it.I am certainly not upset by this or prudish it's just surprising specially when most basic cable stations seems very careful to edit out even the most benign curse words even at night.

According to Wikipedia, it's coming up on its fifth anniversary:

Well, apparently almost 5 now. I remember watching several uncut films late at night on Comedy Central uncut. They advertise it quite a bit too.

There is still officially an X rating. And porn used XX, then XXX (niether of which exist),

D

E

It's a shame that the Secret Stash has any sort of censorship in it at all. Just reading this thread helps to drudge up my ill feelings towards censorship and kind of makes me want to throw up.

I actually had been wondering what they would do with nudity on the secret stash.

Down the road I really would like to see less censorship in the media. I mean, I'd like to see none, but I'm not holding my breath.

i notice you didn't capitalize



which one of my sentences was 'incomplete'?

Actually, it's a little unclear if there was an "official" X rating. I may have been wrong. Apparently it existed before the MPAA ratings system went into effect (on films with material unsuitable for minors) and the MPAA just borrowed it, since it wasn't trademarked.

At any rate, it was indelibly linked with porn, so the MPAA came up with NC-17 as their "official" adults-only rating.

Not sure what you mean by this -- the MPAA no longer gives out X ratings and it doesn't exist in their current guidelines. As noted earlier, the X was never trademarked and can be self-applied by anyone who wants to use it (some of the advertising for Brown Bunny carried the old 1970s-vintage X logo), but the "official" MPAA-sanctioned X was abolished in 1990 and replaced by the trademarked NC-17.

Examples? The only ones I'm aware of are You So Crazy (which was given an NC-17 but went out unrated) and Clerks, which was reduced to an R after Miramax brought in Alan Dershowitz to argue that language alone shouldn't be enough for an NC-17. If Runteldat and Clerks II can get by with Rs, I doubt it's really that easy.

And on the main subject...Comedy Central and FX have been mentioned, but I'm fairly certain that the first basic cable channel to allow "X-rated" language as a matter of policy was Turner Classic Movies, which began airing uncut R-rated movies in 1998. Before that, R-rated films (and even some non-R-rated ones) were cut.

now granted it wasn't submitted to the mpaa, but the movie the Aristocrats (based on the worlds dirtiest joke) would have more then likely gotten an NC-17.

Clerks 2 really wasn't that bad, nothing really happens on screen and the dialog isn't that raunchy, ass the mouth and a donkey show, oh no. I don't have full blown examples, but have heard it mentioned many times and if you were to go make an indie flick that described sexual acts for 2 hours you wouldn't be getting an R rating.

The Aristocrats was apparently warned about it, and opted to bypass the process altogether (releasing as Unrated in theaters).