• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 17, 2023

A viewer warning on the new Netflix series “The Fall of the House of Usher” alerts the unsuspecting that the show carries a TV-MA rating due to “language, sex, smoking, substances, suicide [and] violence.”

For some, a list of character deficits like these might still serve as reasons to avoid a show like this one.

But the TV Blog suspects that this is not the case with most people. Otherwise, many TV shows would be unsuccessful if TV’s warnings were actually heeded.

Let’s unpack the above inventory for a moment here. “Language” is about good old-fashioned profanity, which in this show includes the usual torrent of f-words, but also sexual words and phrases that are unusually graphic even for the anything-goes world of 21st-century television.

Having said that, does anyone get offended anymore by language to the degree that warnings are even necessary today? 

In addition, the mere word “language” does nothing to prepare anyone for the language in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

In this show, warnings about “language” and “sex” are intertwined, kind of like the bodies of the participants in the show’s orgies.

And now we get to the “smoking” warning. The TV Blog has no idea why warnings about scenes of cigarette smoking are seen on so many TV shows.

Perhaps it is believed that some impressionable viewers might be inspired to take up this unhealthy habit simply because they see TV characters conversing coolly with cigarettes tucked between their index and middle fingers.

As an older person, this warning seems ridiculous. So someone is smoking in a TV show. So what?

Moreover, in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as in other TV shows and movies with scenes set in the cigarette-smoking past, the young actors assigned to smoke cigarettes are obvious amateurs who have no idea how to smoke. So uncool!

Along the same lines, the “substances” warning seems like a very late entry in the vocabulary of TV and movie ratings. 

People have been shooting up, snorting white powders, popping pills and smoking joints in movies and TV shows since at least the 1960s. 

Smoking joints probably shouldn’t be included in this litany because pot is legal now and smoking it everywhere is sanctioned and encouraged by governments nationwide. So who cares if some kids try it after seeing it in a TV show? 

Perhaps, like the “smoking” warning, it is feared that the harder drug scenes in “The Fall of the House of Usher” will give encouragement to the “substance-curious” who have tried weed (as the kids call it today) and now seek to move on to something more. 

The TV Blog questions the necessity of the “smoking” and “substances” warnings. Plus, “The Fall of the House of Usher” carries a separate warning about the sudden appearance of strobe lights in the show.

If memory serves, this warning has shown up in the past decade or more in response to the emergence of a syndrome in which some people have negative reactions -- physical and/or emotional -- to sudden, sharp light.

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” this kind of lighting comes up in scenes depicting media frenzies around the members of the Usher family -- a super-rich clan that runs a sprawling, family-owned pharmaceutical company.

The show is named after a famous Edgar Allan Poe story and may or may not be based on it. I’m not a Poe scholar.

The final two warnings in the above list, “suicide [and] violence,” are the most puzzling in this sense: Of all the warnings on TV shows and movies, these would seem to be the least likely to serve as barriers to viewership.

Warnings against violence? That ship sailed so long ago that it was probably captained by Columbus himself.

Where “The Fall of the House of Usher” is concerned, the warnings are at least accurate. 

The show has all these things, although the sex and language categories are by far the most conspicuous. Soon into Episode Two, I had had enough of this whole unhappy show and bailed.