PBS recently fired Melanie Martinez, host of the children’s show “The Good Night Show,” because of the content of a short film she appeared in seven years ago. Here’s the CNN story about the debacle.
From the PBS website:
PBS KIDS Sprout has determined that the dialogue in this video is inappropriate for her role as a preschool program host and may undermine her character’s credibility with our audience. As a result, PBS KIDS Sprout has decided that she will no longer appear as host of The Good Night Show.
Curious about what she filmed? Had to be really bad, right? I’ve got two videos for you, and here they are.
Yeah, that’s what she got fired for. Shit, I’d have put those on my resume.
How in the hell could she get fired for that? Not only were those filmed years before she took the job with PBS, but they were also intended for an adult audience as opposed to a child audience. I could understand if she had made a video wherein she demonstrated to an audience of four year old girls how to have anal sex; then yeah, she shoulda been fired. But she made a satirical video, for adults, about adult subjects, which was never intended to be seen by children.
I’m sure that the producers of “Thomas the Tank Engine” and “Shining Time Station” had seen George Carlin’s stand-up routines before they hired him to perform on those popular children’s shows. Likewise, the producers of “Full House” no doubt knew that Bob Saget was a complete and total debauched human being when he got cast as the straight-laced Danny Tanner.
Look, we need to face the fact that people like Fred Rogers just don’t exist anymore. So unless these children’s shows want to create CGI hosts they need to get used to the fact that real people have real pasts. We’ve all done some things we’re not proud of or things we wouldn’t necessarily want a host of other people to see. I’m quite sure that the preschoolers who watched her show were not on the internet googling her name and suffering debilitating disillusionment when they discovered that their role-model had a proclivity for anal sex. That just wasn’t happening.
It coulda been worse. They could have caught her masturbating in a skeevy adult theater.
I mean seriously, we let a guy who considered dropping his boxers a form of foreplay, and another who snorted more coke than Chong, both become presidents. If we can overlook the antics of those decadent-loving nitwits then surely we can overlook the fact that the girl who teaches our children likes big pink vibrators.
At least she’s independent, right? I consider independence a virtue worthy of passing on to our youngsters.
😯