Our first live show! Mike tells Sarah about Janet Jackson, the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime show and the 9/16ths of a second that destroyed her career. Digressions include Puff Daddy, Jessica Simpson and Edward James Olmos. Like all positive developments regarding this show, performing live is something we feel weird about and so we spent the first few minutes talking about it!
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Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
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Our first live show! Mike tells Sarah about Janet Jackson, the 2004 Super Bowl Halftime show and the 9/16ths of a second that destroyed her career. Digressions include Puff Daddy, Jessica Simpson and Edward James Olmos. Like all positive developments regarding this show, performing live is something we feel weird about and so we spent the first few minutes talking about it!
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah: I got a High Ball, the energy drinks they sell at Whole Foods.
Mike: Ooh. The off-brand LaCroix.
Sarah: It’s the LaCroix for dirt bags. Welcome to You're Wrong About the show - wait, welcome to You’re Wrong About, a podcast hosted by two people with complimentary anxiety.
Mike: Are you just saying that cause that's what we were talking about like 10 seconds ago?
Sarah: I mean partly, but also, I would say it's true generally.
Mike: I agree. Yes.
Sarah: I would say that we're both highly concerned about various aspects of making this show and life, but in a way that allows us to come together and balance, you know, the way that Thor and the raccoon balance. I'm Thor and your Bradley Cooper.
Mike: Yeah. I was wondering who was going to be who in that scenario. Okay.
Sarah: We both know I’m Thor. You know that I wear shawl collar sweaters to signify the fact that I'm at peace with myself.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. And I'm working on a book about the Satanic Panic.
Mike: I guess, as our listeners can tell from this slightly shaggy opening to this, that this episode's a little bit different than usual. We did our first live show last week, and this is going to be that live show.
Sarah: And we're still loopy. And we want to talk about what it was like for those of you who weren't able to join us, although it did feel like you were there in spirit.
Mike: It really did. Yeah. I mean, I think it wouldn't be a You’re Wrong About episode if we didn't talk about how weird we feel about something that we've done.
Sarah: Our feelings. Yes. Well, the weirdness here is I don't feel weird about it, which is weird for me. Right? The weirdness is that I don't feel weird, I feel fine. And I really enjoyed doing it. And essentially, we perform this at XOXO, which is this really wonderfully inclusive festival for independent online creators. And before we get into the experience of doing the show, what was your experience at the festival like?
Mike: Fabulous. I mean, I think you can kind of tell from the recording that I was pretty nervous because I've never done anything like this before.
Sarah: I could tell you were nervous in the first like 45 seconds, but then it felt like you didn't sound so nervous after that. I didn't really hear nerves in your voice.
Mike: I was tense and then I basically just went limp and blacked out. So I don't actually remember much of the performance.
Sarah: I don't remember that much of it either.
Mike: But I think the reason I was nervous the day of, and the reason I feel weird about live shows generally, is that there's a very limited way that audiences can communicate to performers. That like an audience can boo, an audience can clap, an audience can laugh. There's a couple of other ones, like you mentioned backstage that in old sitcoms where they'd be like, ‘Ooh’, like if somebody insults somebody else's mom.
Sarah: You did, that was more of a ghost noise. It's ‘whoo’. You know, it's like when there's the suggestion that maybe the parents are going to have sex tonight. The Seavers are going to get it on.
Mike: I mean, this is my thing. I think, you know, as a member of a crowd, the only messages that you can send are very basic, right? It's basically like thumbs up, thumbs down. Hahaha.
Sarah: Withering silence.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, what I was nervous about the day of was that you become the kind of show that just does like zingy one-liners or like sort of hacky jokes, or like you start gearing yourself toward what will elicit a reaction from an audience. Which is different than what will elicit a reaction from like someone who's doing the dishes, or just a podcast listener who's kind of listening to it in the background as they do their commute or something.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, you're right. I haven't thought about that, but if we're doing it just the way we're doing it now, both sitting in our closets today because there's leaf blowing happening outside of your building for some unknown reason. Then like we can be speaking to a much broader range of moods maybe. And I think of our listeners as being like someone driving across North Dakota in the middle of the night. And you're right, it narrows the emotional range of it maybe.
Mike: And also, I'm used to having you as my audience, right? Like I'm used to saying things like jokes that I think you will find funny, or details that I think will resonate with you. Whereas broadening that out, like the goal to a large group of however many people were there, it's like, well, you have to go to a more broad kind of place, right. Because I know the little satanic details that you will really like, whereas the crowd a couple of hundred people, I don't know what is going to catch them, so I have to do something really broad. So it's like the intellectual equivalent of slapstick.
Sarah: Yeah. Well, I don't know. I think that in ways that only suggest I have less of a history of emotional stability than you. I am more used to being a performer.
Mike: Well, none of this means anything, right? I mean, this is all just like the tape that was playing in my head the day of.
Sarah: It doesn't mean anything, but it's just interesting. And I just think it's nice to let people in on this process.
Mike: It’s also interesting because our mental experiences of the live show are so different. Because mine was we had to be done at exactly 7:45. And so the way that we were sitting, there was a clock right behind Sarah.
Sarah: Which I couldn't see it. I didn't know if it was there, if you could see it. So few times I was like, sort of whipping my head around like a horse. Yeah.
Mike: But every time I looked at you really intently, I was actually looking at that clock really.
Sarah: Oh. Now you tell me.
Mike: I'm just thinking of like, oh shit, I have 45 pages of notes.
Sarah: That you made my mom print out.
Mike: And so, I mean, the recording, I am speaking really fast. Part of that is because I want to hit the time mark. And then part of that is just because that's who I am as a person.
Sarah: You talk fast cause you're excited about things, also.
Mike: I mean, there's also that in there. So, I mean, I also want to say that I'm like doing the thing that I always do, like ruining something that was fundamentally good. Like I had a really great time with the live show. I wasn't nervous once we started.
Sarah: You’re not ruining it, you're just adding. You're doing your Great British Bake-Off thing and adding it an icing of pure anxiety, which will only improve the whole over. Because the anxiety really throws it into high relief. I just love this. Well done, Michael.
Mike: So I don't know. I should probably stop ruining it now. But I think that's like all the context for the performance. I should also say that we had a couple of visuals, like four or five slides or something in the live show. And there's one right at the beginning where it says, ‘the wardrobe malfunction’, where we didn't actually say it out loud, but you'll just have to use context clues.
Sarah: Yeah. That's what people are going ‘whooo’ about. I'm excited to hear what people think of this version of the show. And also that as I continue to drag Michael out into my own comfort zone, perhaps a little more, if you would like us to come to your town then let us know, and I will try and drag Mike there.
Mike: Hi everybody. Can everybody hear us okay? So welcome to You're Wrong About.
Sarah: The show where we're in front of a live audience for the first time ever.
Mike: Hi everybody. So for those of you who don't listen to the show, Andy mentioned we go through some things that are a little bit misremembered and a little bit, those things that you kind of remember, but you don't really remember the details. You're like, wasn't that person shitty, but like, not that shitty.
Sarah: Like there was a bimbo and there was a car chase?
Mike: There's always a bimbo somehow.
Sarah: It's a bimbo. It’s always a bimbo.
Mike: And so the way that it works is we sort of switch off where I research one week, and then Sarah researches the other week. This makes it much easier for us to have two weeks to research each episode. So it's my turn this week. And we're going to be walking you guys through an event that is misremembered and I think it's worth talking about what actually happened and how we got it wrong.
Sarah: Which is…
Mike: So I know there's some people here who aren't from the United States, this phrase means nothing to them.
Sarah: I wouldn’t jump to conclusions, even though there's an X right here and that’s exactly what it's for.
Mike: So, Sarah, do you want to walk us through exactly what you think happened?
Sarah: I’m going to tell you what I think I remember, because you have been discussing this with all of my friends around me this weekend.
Mike: Yes, with everyone but you.
Sarah: And I'm supposed to stay in the dark. But I'll tell you what I remember from when it happened. It was 2004. There's a super bowl, which I did not watch, because I was a 15 year old girl. So at the moment this happened, I was probably writing Newsies fanfiction. *applause* Thank you. And my understanding is that Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were doing the halftime show. And at the time it was like, wow, Janet Jackson, a living legend is appearing with this guy who I remember for having cornrows once in the 90s. And he ripped off the cup of her bustier. I think it looks kind of latex bustier.
Mike: A word that we all use all the time, obviously.
Sarah: And it corresponded with a lyric he was singing, and then they went to black. So it was like, is it planned? Is it on purpose? And then it was, because my parents got both Time and Newsweek at the time, and it was in both of them for several weeks. So that was the metric for news. And I just remember that her career just kind of was tainted by that and that the network was fined, or the NFL was fined, and everyone was kind of like Janet, like women do, strolled along, and ruined all our lives for no reason. So I'm guessing based on the 55 previous episodes we have done, that it was not entirely the woman's fault.
Mike: Not entirely spoilers. Spoilers. We're already spoiling this. We can leave now.
Sarah: Okay. So what happened?
Mike: So I think the first thing to mention is, you know, for people that didn't grow up in the United States, how big of a deal this was. Janet Jackson was the most searched person, item, term, on the internet for two years. Not the year this happened, for two years. She is to this day, the most Tivo'd event in history until now. TiVo subscriptions, TiVo was new, this was 2004 so Tivo was like a new, sexy, cool thing.
Sarah: This reminds me of a conversation I was having with your boyfriend right before we started doing this show, where we were listening to a Bright Eyes song that was playing in the bar. And I was like, “I remember hearing this when I was shopping at Urban Outfitters.” And I was like, that was a time capsule of a sentence. And so is that’s “the most Tivo'd event”.
Mike: Yes, it was also sponsored by AOL. I feel like it's like a who's who of a bunch of things that we all feel weird about now. It's also, the founder of YouTube credits event with the inspiration for YouTube. That after the bustier is pulled off Janet, he was trying to search on the internet. The internet was also young at that time, and he thought, I want to see this boob again, I wish there was a website where I could go see that boob again. And he says that he started coding that night to create YouTube.
Sarah: Why did we make that Social Network movie, when we could have made a movie about a loner guy seeing Janet Jackson’s boob for a second being like, “There's got to be a better way. What if we could connect horny young guys with boobs at any time.”
Mike: And another thing, and I think a much bigger legacy of this - and we will get into the reasons for this - is that after this event, the next six hosts of the super time or Superbowl halftime show.
Sarah: Super time, half bowl show.
Mike: What's interesting is that, and I think this, I mean, obviously looking back, this is not a coincidence, but the next six performers at the halftime show were all male, and five of them were white. And so this speaks to, we're beginning to get to sort of what is the actual legacy of this event and how big of a deal it was.
So the way that it happened, as many things do, it all started with CBS trying to reach a younger demographic. Because we have all forgotten about this now, but the Superbowl halftime show for decades was a marching band. It was like not hot shit. It was like this completely random thing. And it was just like oftentimes they would talk over it. It was super podunk. There's one in the early nineties, they used to organize it around a theme. And so I went on Wikipedia, and I looked at all the old themes and they're awesome. One of them in the 1990s was a tribute to the cartoon Peanuts. That's great. There was one called A Nation of Tapestries, that was narrated by Edward James Olmos.
Sarah: I thought after the wardrobe malfunction the Peanuts fan people were like, “Remember when we just played a bunch of, I want to say Lombardi, but that's the Packers coach. The peanuts guy. Remember when we did that? No one got hurt. I don't know why they changed it”.
Mike: And so up till now, now they just do like the Beyonce show. Right? Like they don't have themes anymore. Even in 2004, they still had themes for the halftime show and this sort of idea, which everyone kind of had almost abandoned at that point, was that everything is based around a theme. So the 2004 halftime show was based around the theme of ‘choose it or lose it’. And so it began with, which sounds funny.
Sarah: No, it wasn't the election.
Mike: It was election year. Yes. So it began with a PSA of Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts telling all the kids out there to vote.
Sarah: And Tom Cruise was standing on an apple crate.
Mike: Yes. And then it sort of, it did this whole thing of like, you have to choose to vote, choosing all of this. And then at smash cuts to Jessica Simpson and she says, “But also Houston, don't forget to choose to party”. And then it zooms out and then she's full, like the whole stadium is full of a marching band.
Sarah: I know everyone thinks this, but we grew up in the most embarrassing time.
Mike: And so basically the whole show, the whole gambit was CBS, was this old fuddy duddy network. They had hired MTV to get a younger demographic for the show. So the whole purpose of this was to try to make the Superbowl cool again, and to try to get the audiences that the advertisers really want. So for this halftime show, they had Kid Rock, they had Nelly, they had Puff Daddy. Just name anyone who is kind of embarrassing now probably performed at this thing.
Sarah: Kelly Osbourne.
Mike: She was the MC actually, yes. And so basically, you know, ordinarily on a show like this, because normally we record for three hours, and we edit it down to an hour. So normally we would talk about the performance for like a long time. Because people have literally written PhDs on how all of the backup dancers for all the performances were white until Janet Jackson started performing. And there's all kinds of like weird, fascinating like racial semiotic stuff happening.
Sarah: And also just labor rights. Right?
Mike: Sure. Why?
Sarah: Cause if you’re backup dancer type person and there's a kind of a network kibosh on dancers of color and then someone comes along, who's a headliner act and it's like, I would like to hire dancers who are not all white to dance with me, actually. Then that changes things potentially.
Mike: Yeah. Yes. Sure. Just say ‘labor rights’ and all agree every time.
Sarah: All right. That's it. Right.
Mike: Labor rights. Yes. And so what was really interesting after, you know, there's a quote from Puff Daddy later who says, “A lot of us performed and thought really hard about our performance for months before this, and nobody ever talks about us anymore.” So the real victims of all of this were Puff Daddy, Kid Rock, and Nelly, who nobody talks about.
Sarah: Eh. Kid Rock is being talked about sufficiently.
Mike: That's true. But what's interesting is that the narrative afterwards will be that Janet Jackson did this to revive her failing career. That’s sort of the narrative that everybody talks about. However, when we go to the tape, she was at the top of her career at the time. So her previous album sold 9 million copies. She had just started in the Nutty Professor 2, which again, things we feel weird about now.
Sarah: No, I still like the Nutty Professor. I haven’t seen it in a while though.
Mike: It was like a $400 million movie. Like it's a huge opening. She was dating, apparently, Matthew McConaughey at the time. She was doing well. You know, this is fine.
Sarah: So she wakes up in the morning. It's like January 2004. She's like, I am Janet Jackson and Matthew McConaughey is doing crunches on my terrace and things are going right for me. I hope a bunch of 60 year old white men don't blame me for something I didn't do.
Mike: And so basically the performance goes off sort of normally. She comes out the last two minutes, she plays All For You and Rhythm Nation. Everything goes fine. And then Justin Timberlake rises from the stage, which again, PhDs are written on this. They love this stuff.
Sarah: Does he come out of a platform? Like a platform comes up or does he, like he's lying down, and he sits up like Michael Myers?
Mike: It's like when you go to the bank and you'd have the little tube thing that shoots it to the top, that's what he ends up doing. And they have a pneumatic tube. Yes. So he comes out of the stage, and they start singing Rock Your Body. Which for those of you who remember that not terrific song, but it's a song, it ends with the line “I'm going to have you naked by the end of this song”.
And so I have a couple of slides. There's them singing. She doesn't do a whole lot. I want everybody to look at the outfit that she has on. See how it sort of ringed with the little buttons there. This is the moment right before they're standing very close to each other. Look at her face, she's like already tired of what is about to happen for the next six months. She's like, oh, this is going to suck.
Sarah: This is like the VJ Day kiss analysis, where you’re like, oh, that nurse didn't want to be jumped.
Mike: I'm not going to show the actual breast, because I feel like she's been through enough. So we're just going to go…
Sarah: And so has Janet. That's called a way homer.
Mike: So he kind of reaches over. If you watch the footage, and I've done some Zapruder film analysis on this. And it's very clear that it's like, it's a deliberate act because when he reaches over, you can see one finger is out. So like he knows exactly sort of where to pull to get one of her sort of breast pieces to come off. So for those of you who didn't see it, the breast piece comes off, she has a sort of nipple ring thing over it, but sort of also like you can kind of see her nipple, though it's technically a nipple ring, but it's really large.
Sarah: I saw a picture that when this happened, I was like, do adults, do they just do that all the time?
Mike: And so it is shown on TV for 9/16ths of a second.
Sarah: And what a great 9/16ths they were.
Mike: It's one of those things where, I mean, this is why it's so TiVo’d, is because it's one of those things where no one really knew what happened. It's so fast. And the internet doesn't exist in a place where you can sort of figure out what happened. And so what's amazing is, if they had cut to the fireworks half a second earlier, there wouldn't have been any of this. It's only the sort of accident that we saw, this tiny, little glimpse of it. Immediately she covers herself up. Justin Timberlake says later that he covered her with a towel, which there is no evidence of.
Sarah: Why would he have a towel?
Mike: Exactly. Like what? I'm confused. So there's this event of like, what actually happened. The human species may perish from the earth and not completely know, because it's one of those events where everyone says everyone else is lying. So the networks, MTV, CBS, both say they had no idea. They didn't do it in dress rehearsal. They had experimented with something in dress rehearsal where because the last line of the song is “going to have you naked by the end of the song”. So something has to have happened. So apparently, they tried it, she was wearing this really cool leather kilt looking thing. And they had tried it where he like rips it off of her, but it's too heavy and he couldn't lift it. So it was him like lifting a gallon of milk and being like, ughh. Like he didn't look sexy.
Sarah: Little baby hands.
Mike: And so the theory that the networks put out is that they had sort of played around with this idea of doing something. Then they had decided like, ah, we're just not going to do anything, say the line, cut to fireworks, whatever. Then we have the stylists. There's a guy in Houston who says he made the nipple ring custom for her. And that like another person's-
Sarah: He’s like the guy in Se7en who's like, yeah, this guy came in.
Mike: But like it’s not clear if that's sort of corroborated. There's a tailor who says that he altered the dress. Apparently, what was supposed to happen, see the red sort of thing underneath it, what was supposed to happen with the leather was supposed to come off, leaving this like flame red fabric underneath it. The Zapruder film analysis is sort of, people have questioned if you have this giant nipple ring on, why would you have like a large red thing over it?
Sarah: Well wouldn’t you have the nipple ring on because you have the large ring over it, because you needed to keep it as nipplier as possible?
Mike: Yes. The nippliarity was paramount. Yes. Yeah.
Sarah: It’s mitigating.
Mike: Yes. So I still don't know exactly… what’s interesting is, Janet Jackson, the next day takes full responsibility. She says nobody else knew about this but me and Justin, we planned it. But then two years later on Oprah, she says, that's not true, I shouldn't have apologized for the whole thing. But she didn't give any details.
Justin Timberlake, the next day, and this is so fascinating to me that like throughout this whole thing, he's never evil. He's just totally clueless, right?
Sarah: This is a theme on our program.
Mike: Yes. What he does afterwards is he has this sort of like happy go lucky sort of thing. So he shows up on, I think it was like evening magazine or like something access tonight.
Sarah: Yeah, Evening Magazine Access Tonight.
Mike: And so he sort of just kind of skates over the surface of this whole thing. Where he's just well, you know, you guys wanted something to talk about, we gave you something to talk about. Like he doesn't have any sort of explanation, any sort of thought process that goes into this necessarily.
But what's really interesting is almost immediately the narrative that forms is that she planned it. She engineered this entire thing to get publicity. This is in the New York, or I think it's the Post, or no Daily News. I want everybody to look at the subhead there, ‘millions view her peep show’. So this is what a lot of the organizational actors started saying immediately afterwards, was that not only is it sort of a planned thing, but it's one person, like it is a Janet Joint. Like it is something that she planned.
The head of the FCC says, I'll bet she got what she wanted out of all this. The head of the NFL says she had to have engineered it. And there's also one, the Chicago Tribune, calls it ‘Janet's booby-licious halftime’. Like this was like the level of sophistication that we were dealing with in the immediate aftermath.
Sarah: Also note, they played a game, question mark. And so I have a question, is this something that the people, I mean, obviously if you’re in the game you don't make any extra money off of it because no one knows what's going to happen.
Mike: I mean, this is why none of the theories of this event make any sense to me. Because I don't think she was like, “I'll make more money if I show my boobs, like I live in America, like, obviously I should do this and everybody, they will like me”. Right? Like it doesn't seem like, I mean, my personal theory that I have no evidence for is…
Sarah: Go on.
Mike: You know, people show up at like awards shows with a pasty on just over their nipple, but they have something really revealing otherwise. And I thought, again, I have no evidence, but I think it's something along the lines of like, she thought people would treat it as like a pasty, right? That people would see, well, there's something covering the nipple, right? Because when you look at the photos, it looks like it's covering the nipple. It doesn't look like, it's not bare breasts. Right? So in my head, the logic is well, it's going to be sort of shocking, but it's still like, like little Kim at the Grammy's or whatever. Right? Like, people have done this before.
Sarah: As a human woman, I would like to put forth that I am aware that my nipples are considered of such interest to society that like, if I were to expose even the tiniest part of them, people would lose their minds. Not in a sexual way, in a, think of the children, way.
Mike: Yes. Right. This is why it doesn't. This is why it doesn't make any sense to me. Like, I can't think of an explanation for this where it's like, that's the thing. Right? Like it just doesn't make sense from anybody’s perspective whatsoever. So it's, again like the human species may perish from the earth without us knowing exactly what happened. What's really interesting afterwards. So this is sort of representative of the right wing sort of like she's bad, boobs are bad, women shouldn't show their boobs. Like this is very, like when you read the old, like in Lexis Nexis, the old right wing response to the halftime show, it's really boring. It's just like, she's bad, whatever.
What's really interesting is the sort of left-wing response to it. So there's a bunch of columns that are published in the New York Times that are basically like, well, what did you expect? That like, one of them says, well, Janet Jackson has been closer and closer to showing her boobs for her entire career. Because she's getting like, it's like this whole thing of women are showing more things and bare midriffs and like, kids are on their phones.
Sarah: So it’s not that society and fashion are changing, it's Janet Jackson.
Mike: Exactly. And the woke opinion on this at the time was like, who you really should blame is the corporate overlords because by scheduling Janet Jackson, she's going to show her boob.
Sarah: What?
Mike: Like this thing that has never happened before, like it's not clear how she would benefit from it. She's definitely gonna do that, but like the real fault is with the NFL. So this is the spectrum of opinion.
Sarah: They’re like, don’t hire a professional performer from a family of professional performers if you want her to not do something wildly inappropriate. That's expecting too much.
Mike: It's like very savvy, right? This is like the savvy opinion at the time. And so what starts to happen is we only actually get the real explanation for this, like 10 years later, but almost immediately, Janet sort of falls off of the face of the earth.
Sarah: Yeah. What happened to Matthew McConaughey? Did he stand by her during this?
Mike: Like Justin Timberlake, he has done very well on this whole thing. Yeah. He's upside down somewhere doing sit ups.
Sarah: Yeah, he's doing setups in the hall.
Mike: Yeah. And so the reason that she did this was because she had an album coming out. Her album comes out a couple of weeks later. It's her lowest selling album since 1984.
Sarah: Wait, I have a prediction.
Mike: Okay.
Sarah: Okay. Did people buy it so that they could performatively destroy it?
Mike: Like, no, we didn't. It wasn't that. By this point, the nation's attention had sort of moved on, but what's interesting is her, you know, this album comes out and just sort of disappears into the ether, right? Like people don't really buy it. For some reason, like MTV and VH1 don't play any videos off of it. Like, even though she's a huge artist. And she just played the super time, half bowl show. And you think that they would be excited to play something off it. Also controversy, like the whole argument, is that controversy brings money.
Sarah: So it's, we've also spoiler done maybe 10 stories in the past where it's like, this woman connived to get all of this attention. And it's like, well, all of the attention ruined her life. So your theory is that she was a genius mastermind who was like, I am going to destroy my entire life.
Mike: Yeah. So genius mastermind Janet Jackson essentially disappears. Like the radio stations aren't playing it. This is like the most petty shit. They do a tribute, like a tribute video thing at the 2016 Superbowl, where they show clips from all the marching bands and like the Peanuts tribute, all this kind of stuff, and fucking Janet isn't in there. So like, she has been completely erased from all of these institutions.
Sarah: They thought everyone would be like, oh yeah, I guess nothing happened between 2003 and 2004.
Mike; Exactly. Yeah. And so basically, she completely disappears. What's really interesting about this is that we didn't learn this until last year, so do you know who Les Moonves is? Yes, boohoo. You are right about Les Moonves. We're not going to do like a You're Wrong About Les Moonves.
Sarah: Les Moonves. Wait, I know Les Moonves is the character on 30 Rock, who's a guy with a mini vest that tells Kenneth his ideas to.
Mike: So Les Moonves, yes. Obviously. Do you know who he is?
Sarah: I know that he's a man at CBS who has done very bad things.
Mike: Yes, 12 allegations of sexual harassment. After those 12, Cybill Shepherd says that her show was canceled.
Sarah: Moonlighting. Oh, Cybill. But also, I remember he gave her crap about Moonlighting in some way, or maybe I made that up. Moonlighting is important to me.
Mike: Did you dream it? You might've dreamt it.
Sarah: I dreamt it. Go on. Yeah. Well that's terrible. Cybill Shepherd is only good things.
Mike: Right. And apparently, he hit on her. And she was like, “No, Mr. Moonves”. And he canceled her show. And there's also - this is really dark - you know, E Jean Carroll, who accused Trump of raping her, she says that Les Moonves sexually assaulted her in an elevator. And this is like on top of the other 12.
Sarah: This is like people who survived multiple mass shootings. Like if you've been assaulted by multiple, famous terrible men.
Mike: I mean, this is like Harvey level terribleness. And so what's really interesting is what we find after all of this has happened. His career is tanking at CBS. He gets pushed out eventually. What we learn is apparently after this event, he became obsessed with Janet Jackson. So from anonymous leaks that we have from inside of CBS, apparently the Grammys were a week after the super bowl and both Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson were scheduled to show up at the Grammys. He shows up, he wins a bunch of awards. She doesn't go. And it's always kind of been like, how did this happen? Like, did she bow out because of the bad publicity or like, was she pushed out?
It turns out what these leaks from CBS say is that Justin Timberlake called Les Moonves and personally apologized, in tears, for the event. And the head of CBS, Les Moonves, said you can go to the Grammys, it's fine.
Sarah: I’m just a little boy, bad boy.
Mike: Yeah. And so he's mad because Janet Jackson didn't call him personally to apologize. She apologized in a written statement. She also filmed a video apology that was played on all of the networks, but he wanted a personal one.
Sarah: But she didn’t call him in tears. And you have to crawl, you know, on your hands and knees to somebody.
Mike: I mean, that's basically what he wanted, right. That he said she had a bad attitude. And so she had done this, right. She planned it, orchestrated it, like whatever stereotypes he had in his head. And so he went out of his way to cancel everything that was happening. He was the one that blacklisted her from the Grammys. And a really important aspect of this is media consolidation because CBS, MTV, VH1 are all owned by Viacom. So if CBS was just this random company with this random CEO who doesn't like Janet Jackson, who cares if the head of CBS doesn't like Janet Jackson.
Sarah: Doesn’t mean MTV can't do what they want. And they take a chainsaw to TVs.
Mike: I want to be very clear that like, we don't know exactly what happened behind the scenes. These are anonymous leaks, so we don't exactly know.
Sarah: May cause anal leakage.
Mike: Well, we don't, I mean, to me, it's like, there are things that people do that are controversial that do not destroy their careers. Right? So you can imagine a scenario in which Janet Jackson did this.
Sarah: Yes. Mel Gibson has done 50 of them.
Mike: And Les Moonves has done 50 of them too. Right? Like there, this is not something, it's not inevitable that this had to kill her career. The one that really gets to me is seven years after the Super Bowl, Simon and Schuster tries to publish a memoir of Janet Jackson. Guess who Simon and Schuster is owned by? It comes out that Les Moonves tries to have the editor fired for printing a book. And one of the quotes in the article with all these leaks is “How the fuck did this get through?” That everyone knew Janet was off [inaudible].
Sarah: Don’t they know I'm king of media?
Mike: And so this is one of the things that actually explains it. This didn't have to kill her career, necessarily, but someone killed it.
Sarah: It was engineered, it's like we had, because he got this false narrative. It's like, well, you know, she was a bad lady. And then naturally everyone stopped wanting to listen to her music or see her on TV, and she evaporated. Because that was a law of nature. And it's like, no, this one guy.
Mike: This one, I don't want to say that word, but like this one doody head.
Sarah: This one crumb bum.
Mike: And so I think, I mean, I think it's worth thinking about, because no one had sort of put this theory forward. Like, it sounds like a Baroque conspiracy theory, right. Of like there's one man and like the corporate parents and blah, blah, blah. And then it’s like, you get to the details in this. And you're like, holy shit, this actually happened.
Sarah: It doesn't sound that weird, because I think what we've also realized is these serial sexual harassers and assaulters have been, you know, unmasked over and over again, is that people who go to great lengths to conceal their crime are also able to kind of manipulate situations and often do and all sorts of other ways. And that this kind of like, you know, and that we have this kind of romance and glamor of like. It used to be that America was run by eight men and they were all bastards, but they were geniuses, and it was a great one of them was John Hamm or something. And now it’s like, you know, being manipulative and having no sense of ethics, like actually might affect your behavior outside of business. And the fact that we're finding all these puppeteers at this stage, like, I don't know what the thing is.
Mike: And the same misogyny that directs you to sexually assault someone in an elevator also directs you to do other things that are not as obvious as that.
Sarah: To destroy a woman's career out of spite because she didn't apologize to you, or she did apologize to you but she did grovel.
Mike: Yeah. She didn’t really apologize. Yeah. But this is not, this is only the first half of the year wrong about, so the second thing that explains this, the aftermath.
Sarah: This is the sauce that it comes with.
Mike: Yes. Because this didn't just affect Janet Jackson, right? This affected lots of other things. So after the Super Bowl halftime show there are 540,000 complaints to the FCC. This is one of the numbers that always bounces around about this event. It’s the most complained about event in US history, like the year before they had gotten something like 3.
Sarah: Dear FCC, my family will never be the same.
Mike: I mean what we find out later is that 99% of those complaints came via the Parents Television Council. So this is one of these right wing organizations that figured out in the late 1990s, a loophole in the FCCs mandate. So the way that most government agencies work, I feel like people don't know this, but like OSHA and stuff, is the FCC doesn't watch TV and be like, that's problematic. And like, I'm going to go give you a fine. They respond to complaints. So every single time that somebody complains about something.
Sarah: They’re controlled by the public.
Mike: Exactly. And so it's like, it's nice to sort of have this kind of like everything you complain about gets an investigation, right? Like this is a good thing. However, the loophole is that, what have you just complained about stupid shit all the time, right? Like you can hijack an organization by just sending them the same complaints over stupid stuff.
Sarah: What if you complained about stuff that wasn't actually offensive or profane but was suggesting an immoral lifestyle.
Mike: I mean, that's never happened. Don't worry. It's all production. That is great. So basically at the beginning of the 2000s, the Parents Television Council, Moral Majority, all these other Christian right groups, start getting really good at working the FCC to up its fines. And so once George W. Bush comes in 2000, the first year of the Bush administration, the FCC gives out $48,000 in fines. By 2004 they're giving out $8 million in fines. So the FCC completely transformed during this period into the smut police, right? Janet Jackson, to the Parents Television Council and these other far right groups, was a gift, right? Because she gets people really mobilized. You can say, look at how the country is falling apart. Look at how our morals are changing.
Sarah: She’s the Al Capone to their Elliot Ness.
Mike: Exactly. So the year after this happens, the minimum fine…
Sarah: Thank you for laughing.
Mike: You got one. The year after this happens, the maximum fine for obscenity goes from $30,000 per instance, to $325,000 per instance, 10 times greater. And one of the things we've all completely forgotten about the whole Janet Jackson thing, is that this case was tied up in court until 2012. And the reason why it was tied up in court is because what happened, because the networks were saying we didn't know about this, so it's not fair to give us a $550,000 fine for something we didn't plan, and we didn't know about it in advance. So it's what's called ‘fleeting indecency’. It's quick.
Sarah: That’s going to be my Fleetwood Mac tribute band.
Mike: So basically it makes no sense, right? There's all these other instances of fleeting indecency. There's one where Bono of U2 wins a Grammy and he sort of lifts it up and he says, “This is fucking brilliant.” And it's one of those things where it's like, I guess it's obscene, but it's not like he's not using it in…
Sarah: He's just swearing in a general kind of way.
Mike: It’s just an intensifier. And also, you know, the network didn't know in advance, blah, blah, blah. But so what the Parents Television Council and these other groups are pushing the FCC to do is to fine stations for fleeting indecency. So even if they didn't know, even if it was only on the screen for half a second, even if it doesn't have any particularly moral content, they should still be getting fines for it.
So what happens after the Janet Jackson incident is this huge chilling effect where all of the networks, because of the greater fines, because of these activated Christian right groups, get super nervous. So one of, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff like ER stopped showing butts. ER used to show lots of butts and like, NYPD Blue used to show butts and stopped.
Sarah: I remember wondering, I knew that NYPD Blue had shown butts and I was like, where have all the butts gone?
Mike: That's Janet Jackson.
Sarah: But then the whole point of HBO and the reason people bought it was because it was not TV. We show butts. It's not TV it's butts.
Mike: Another one that I think is really telling is there's an episode of the OC where the FCC will not tell you in advance if it's going to give you a fine. They’re like, that’s censorship. We'll just see if the Christians complain and then they'll fine you afterwards. So all of the networks get really nervous. So Fox has an episode of the OC. Again, things were weird about now.
Sarah: It's a time capsule. We have to love the past, or it controls us.
Mike: There's a scene of two people having sex, and Fox ends up editing out the woman having an orgasm but leaves in the man having an orgasm.
Sarah: Is it teens or is it the grownups?
Mike: I don't know.
Sarah: The teens who are played by 25 year old’s, or the grownups who were played by 35 year old’s.
Mike: All of the time I've been watching that show is blacked out. There's also one, and this is the thing because we're running out of time so I have to end with this one, but the one that I think is super fascinating and shows like the political project that was happening was there's a thing where ABC wanted to show Saving Private Ryan on Veterans Day, right? Like it's our history. They weren't going to edit it. They weren't going to show ads. It was like going to be this big thing. Like we're going to show it in its entirety, 20 ABC stations. This is the same year as the Super Bowl incident. 20 ABC stations refused to run it because they're afraid of FCC fines because of the swearing. So the violence is fine.
Sarah: I remember that the swearing was when they were at D-Day, right? They're like, oh, it's D-Day, everyone I know is being murdered by war.
Mike: Gee willikers.
Sarah: I'm swearing.
Mike: Oh, darn.
Sarah: So Janet Jackson was used as an excuse for stripping away actual content from our media.
Mike: Yes. So terrible men and Christian right-wing organizations use Janet Jackson for things they basically wanted to do anyway. And that's the only time that's ever happened in US history and you should listen to our show.
Sarah: Yeah, we've done no other episodes. This is the only story that we're going to talk about. This theme doesn't occur at any other time. We will be taking no questions and we’re done. Thank you.