I feel like I'm stuck in the SNL skit with Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers as they do Weekend Update. "Really?" they ask each other and the perpetrators of such absurdities as the storyline behind one of the new fall sitcoms, Cougar Town. "Really? You're gonna create a show with a woman who flashes and fantasizes about under-age boys? Really? Really?"

Imagine this: I'm a young, hungry writer-producer in Hollywood. I go to pitch studio executive on my show. "See it's about this guy who gets divorced and then he sexes up all the high school girls in the neighborhood. Rockin', huh?"

Are you kidding me? Men are put in prison for the exact same behaviors as Courteney Cox on this show. I agree with Randee Dawn, reviewing for The Hollywood Reporter, "Cougar is a mess of a place no one would want to visit, even for a half-hour. With a little luck, though, it'll have a short shelf life."

In one scene, a boy is delivering newspapers in the neighborhood and Jules (the Cox character) opens her bathrobe to show him her goods. Really? Producer Bill Lawrence. Really? You don't get that criminal behavior is criminal behavior no matter the gender, and we shouldn't condone any adult doing this kind of thing to a kid? Really?

In another scene, Jules is at a high school event and sees one of the "hot" kids on campus. After stating something perverse about her desire to lick him all over, a nearby woman states that he's her son. Again, Lawrence, are you listening? Remember when creepy David Letterman make a sexual joke about Sarah Palin's teenage daughter getting "knocked up" by a professional baseball player and even democrats found it repugnant? It's not okay for any adult to utter comments like these about our kids. Don't use the fact that it's a woman to make some sort of excuse about behavior like this being sort of funny, so then sort of okay.

Glenn Garvin, reviewing for the Miami Herald not only has it right, he should be given a Pulitzer for this piece of journalism: "Cougar Town's obsessive sexual desperation is only amplified by its disturbing incestuous undertones. They include not just Cox's continual attempts at sexual banter with her teenage son (Dan Byrd, Aliens in America) and a scene when he catches her performing what in the quaint old days we called an unnatural act on a kid barely older than himself. 'Why don't you ever laugh at my jokes?' wonders Cox after one particularly lewd crack. 'Because they make me sad,' replies the boy. From the mouths of babes . . ."

Amen.

This show should not only be taken off the air, the producers should be put on trial.

November 2009