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Let's chat about Tammy 2, censorship, and Family Viewing Hour

Tammy Swanson is back. That’s all that matters this week on Park It. We could spend time talking about how Leslie and Ben really and truly start undeniably flirting in this episode, or how Ann’s showing early signs of adopting her boyfriend’s traits as hers (her fatal flaw), or how Andy’s still adorably trying to win April back. But we won’t. All of this pales in comparison to Tammy Swanson’s return.

In case you don’t remember, Tammy (actually, Tammy 2. We’ll meet Tammy 1 later) is Ron’s ex-wife who works at the library. Her life goal is making Ron miserable, which she accomplishes by luring him back into her clutches, time and time again. Tom brings Tammy as his date to a party as payback for Ron dating Wendy, Tom’s ex-wife. But unbeknownst to Tom, Wendy’s broken up with Ron a few hours earlier to move back to Canada. She asks him to move with her and:

To all of my Canadian colleagues, you know I love ya. I say screw you Ron!

Ron and Tammy, upon seeing each other at the party, quickly devolve in their usual madness: they end up in the Pawnee jail, married, with new piercings and Ron’s hair in cornrows. The Parks department tries to stage an intervention, but Ron won’t listen to anyone (including a prerecorded video of himself). It’s not until Tammy publicly beats up Tom at a gathering in the library that Ron sees the error of his ways.

Throughout the episode, Tammy tries to seduce Ron. She slaps some jerky around on her face in the library, makes innuendos left and right, jumps his bones in the middle of the Parks department conference room … We have to admit it: not sure the girl’s got some game, but she’s definitely got no chill.

This episode feels like a PG-13 departure from such a normally PG network sitcom. Up to this point, Parks and Rec has been pretty vanilla. It has to be! It would have been streamed on NBC to millions of viewers of all ages, so family friendly was a must. This episode is only the second time it veers even close to raunchy — the first time was actually in Ron and Tammy’s first reunion, back in season 2.

I was thinking a lot this week about Parks and Rec’s toe dip into some PG-13 vibes, and how this applies to network sitcom censorship more broadly. Might be time for a little history lesson here on Park It.

I read a great book last year about the history of LGBTQ+ characters in TV that taught me a lot about network censorship. Hi Honey, I’m Homo! moves chronologically through historical sitcoms, starting in the 1950s with Bewitched and spanning all the way up to Friends and Modern Family. It covers how the inclusion of queer characters in TV has always been an uphill battle for showrunners and writers, mostly because various shitty governing bodies and network execs tried to stop them at every point and ensure TV reflected “traditional American values.” But as ideologies in the US evolved in the 90s and 2000s — and showrunners were able to slip in queer characters and/or advocate for their inclusion, like Ross’s ex-wife Carol in Friends — representation in sitcoms also changed American culture along with it, normalizing rather than stigmatizing queer people. Seeing Cam and Mitchell on Modern Family wasn’t something new or shocking, because you probably had an out gay couple in your life in some capacity.

I was thinking about this book while watching this week’s ep. Even though queer representation isn’t relevant in Parks and Rec at the moment, the book taught me a lot about various roadblocks in play at a network level, all geared towards ensuring that shows reflect back the values the networks want to portray. Hi Honey, I’m Homo! also devotes ample real estate to Will & Grace which — coincidentally — stars a young Megan Mullally, who years later would play Tammy Swanson. So it’s a double whammy in my brain for the week.

Back in the 70s, the biggest networks trialed something called “Family Viewing Hour,” an extreme measure which dictated that anything airing between 8 and 9 pm on weeknights had to be “family friendly.” Governing “standards” bodies at the networks would receive the scripts in advance of the episode taping, often taking a red pen to anything at all deemed “controversial.” In the ‘70s, this could mean really anything: mentioning that you have a gay friend, talking about sex before marriage, or women divorcing their husbands in many cases all largely didn’t fly. “Family Viewing Hour” was overturned in the late ‘70s for being unconstitutional, but a censorship hangover remained: Big TV wanted its shows vanilla, family friendly, and as non-spicy as possible.

There’s actually a great scene about this in the Saturday Night movie that came out last October, all about the few hours leading up to SNL’s first episode. A representative from NBC’s standards department asks for the various scripts for the sketches and takes her big ole red pen to them, minutes before the cameras start rolling live. Lorne, Chevy Chase, and co. are able to save some of their jokes by tricking standards into thinking that their innuendos are innocent, thus Trojan Horsing some raunchy jokes into live air. But it takes fighting tooth and nail for every single word.

As times changed, Big TV also adapted and relaxed their standards. Now, the streaming era has essentially stripped what little power networks held onto into the late 2010s to censor what viewers see. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) still regulates what gets shown on major networks between ~6am - 10pm, but viewers of all ages can now watch pretty much whatever they want on Netflix or Hulu. Case and point: zero chance Bridgerton or Normal People would exist in a network-first era. HBO would’ve been their only potential home.

My wheels got turning around all of this seeing Tammy and Ron’s performance in this week’s Parks episode. Their scenes are tame enough that you’re not going to have to stand up and leave the room if you watch the episode with your parents, but definitely not something that would have flown on air before the mid-1990s. Not on NBC at least.

Thank god for loosened censorship restrictions so we get this iconic scene of Tammy slapping some jerky around on her face:

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Quote of the ep:

Be: “Oh! Wow, look at that. You shaved off part of your mustache. That's lovely.”

Ron: “I didn't shave it off. It rubbed off. From friction.”

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Bye!