Writer Andrew Hearst profiles Richard Dawkins’ latest rantings against religion and concludes (emphasis added),
Tipped off by a thread on Echo, I bittorrented both episodes a few days ago. From the vantage point of the United States, the program is remarkable: You simply would never encounter such a brazen denunciation of religious faith on this country’s airwaves, because the outcry from the religious right would be deafening. Dawkins’s narration drips with contempt; as he goes about his rounds, it’s as if he can hardly restrain himself from shouting, “I’m surrounded by IDIOTS!” The smoke coming out of his ears leaves a trail behind him wherever he goes.
Right. That’s why you never saw someone like Madalyn Murray O’Hair on the Donahue Show during the 1960s and 1970s. That’s why Penn and Teller’s Showtime series Bullshit never features episodes that makes Dawkins’ look like positively moderate (certainly Dawkins does not deploy the F-word to anywhere near the effectiveness that Penn and Teller do).
Meanwhile, much television is blatantly offensive to one religious faith or another because it mocks or rejects their values. But, overall, most television seems to avoid explicit religious or anti-religious overtones for base commercial reasons. Personally, this is not such a bad thing.
Now maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it would be better to have a segment in the middle of What Not to Wear where atheists and Buddhists squared off. Maybe we need to send more pretentious intellectuals to religious services and then make fun of them in prime time.
Frankly, that just doesn’t sound like Must See TV to me.