The decline of television's family hour.

• Author: Johnson, Pepper

Programs shown between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. and designed for family viewing have been replaced by sexy sitcoms and steamy shows that once used to air later at night.

TWO DECADES AGO, an official Family Hour was established for prime-time television. As a result of prodding from Congress and the Federal Communications Commission, the networks formally agreed in 1975 to set aside the first hour of prime time (eight to nine p.m. on the coasts, seven to eight p.m. in the heartland) for programming suitable for all ages. The Writers Guild of America and other groups challenged the restriction on First Amendment and anti-trust grounds, and won. The Family Hour was struck down in 1976.

In a sense, though, eight to nine p.m. always has been the unofficial family hour, the home of such wholesome series as "Little House on the Prairie," "Happy Days," "The Cosby Show," and "Full House." In turn, more adult-oriented fare, such as "The Golden Girls," "Designing Women," "L.A. Law," "thirty something," and "Knots Landing," was broadcast between nine and 11 p.m. Sometimes, this form of segregation offered a stark contrast. In NBC's powerhouse Thursday lineup of a decade ago, the 8:30 program, "Family Ties," featured an intact nuclear family and contained virtually no sexual content; it was followed at nine by "Cheers," which was populated mostly by unmarried adults and was a font of innuendo.

The boundaries were not always so clear, but there was a sense of what material was appropriate for children and what wasn't, and there was a general understanding that the latter would not air before nine p.m. This understanding began to crumble a few years back and now is largely in ruins.

The family hour's decreasing respect for parental authority and traditional values has been troubling, but the deterioration of standards has been most noticeable in two areas: language and sexual content. We focused on those during a four-week survey (Sept. 21-Oct. 19, 1995) of family-hour programming on the broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and the newer UPN and WB).

We were mindful of some questions, such as whether or not certain words, jokes, themes, or other material were appropriate for children, and if the content under consideration was some thing that would have been seen or heard on TV between eight and nine p.m.--or at any hour, for that matter--as recently as the early 1990s. Moreover, there was this common-sense barometer: Would family members speak to one another this way at the dinner table? In instance after instance, the answer to all these questions was "no."

Five years ago, there was an uproar when a young character on CBS's short-lived "Uncle Buck" yelled, "You suck!"...