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Showtime’s New Slogan Speaks the Way It Could Only on Cable
By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
Showtime is known for content that is too racy for network television, so it is perhaps fitting that its latest slogan should be inappropriate for the networks, too.
A two-minute promotional spot on the cable network features the slogan, “The Best Stuff on Television,” although the actual third word is an expletive that cannot be used by family-friendly networks (or newspapers).
The ad features characters from shows like “Weeds” and “Californication” uttering the expletive seven times, plus a song from the band Centralia that uses it five times. Showtime also posted the video — with a warning that it was “intended for a mature audience” — on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 25,000 times.
“We didn’t think twice about putting it on our air,” Robert Greenblatt, the president for entertainment at Showtime, told Variety, which printed the slogan unblushingly. A spokesman said the network had no further comment on the promotion, which will be shown through September.
Cable viewers may be growing inured to the use of four-letter words, perhaps because the late-night Comedy Central hosts Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert use them with abandon.
Indeed, the cable networks may be trying to turn their looser censorship rules into a strategic advantage.
“This slogan works so well for Showtime on a couple different levels,” said Erin McKean, editor of The New Oxford American Dictionary. “It makes it clear that it’s cable television, because on simple over-the-air television they couldn’t use that word. And it also connotes less of the artificiality of a traditional sitcom — it seems realer. One of the reasons that people use profanity is to show that they’re gritty and real and not namby-pamby.”
