What the %&#!?! Everyone’s Cursing on the Screen
It’s not just in your head—the language in movies and television is getting more profane. We have the data.
These days, just turning on the television seems to trigger a blitzkrieg of F-bombs. Or a real S— show, one could say.
“We’re seeing a big spike in the use of crude and profane language in movies and TV shows,” says Chad Michael, CEO of EnjoyMoviesYourWay.com, a content-filtering service for smart TVs based in Edwall, Wash. “As it increases, we become numb to it,” he adds. “And that gives writers and media [outlets] permission to add even more.”
In May, for example, the season finale of “Succession” on Max (formerly HBO Max) featured 235 expletives, according to a script analysis by learning website Preply for the Mental Floss website. Before CBS could air reruns of cowboy drama “Yellowstone” on broadcast TV, it had a little cleaning-up to do. Originally streamed on Paramount+, “Yellowstone” included 24 utterances of the F-word, 14 of the S-word and visual taboos such as blood spatter, breast exposure and pelvic nudity, according to the network’s Program Practices department. And that was just the first episode.
In the U.S., 83% of consumers use a subscription video-on-demand service, according to Statista. And these services, such as Netflix, Max and Amazon Prime, are subscription-based, so they don’t have to comply with FCC profanity rules imposed on broadcast television and radio programming.
Engineers at EnjoyMoviesYourWay.com deploy artificial intelligence to identify crude language in programming, allowing the app to filter thousands of titles. In an analysis for The Wall Street Journal, Enjoy scanned over 60,000 popular movies and TV shows released since 1985 and tracked the usage of bleepable words over time.
In the sample, usage of the F-word went from 511 in 1985 to 22,177 through early November 2023. The S-word went from 484 in 1985 to 10,864 into November 2023. Of course, the explosion in expletives is also partly due to the sheer volume of programming that’s now available to viewers.
The Enjoy analysis shows overall decreases in foul language recently, but Michael attributes the drops to the onset of the pandemic and the Hollywood writers’ strike, both of which temporarily shut down entertainment production. “Without those two aberrations, we would see the trend continue to go up,” he says.
Had enough? To make TV more family-friendly, parents and other viewers can subscribe to filtering services like EnjoyMoviesYourWay.com to skip or blur objectionable content. The Enjoy app works with users’ smart TVs and includes tools to control which words and behaviors are filtered. The Enjoy app is free for those who want to filter YouTube and Amazon Prime content. To filter other streaming services, users pay a $7.99 monthly fee.
Beth DeCarbo is a writer in South Carolina. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.