In 1959 the National Association of Broadcasters introduced a ban on TV ads depicting bras on live models. The same organization's TV Code kept ads for birth-control products off America's screens until 1978. And from 1969 the Federal Communications Commission strove to ensure that broadcast television remained uncontaminated by the rash of X-rated movies that followed the demise of the film industry's Production Code. But the regulatory effort to keep sex out of America's living rooms in the aftermath of the 1960s sexual revolution was, as Elana Levine's lively discussion shows, largely futile. Sex was everywhere on TV in the 1970s for reasons both commercial and cultural. Sexy programming most effectively delivered younger, hipper viewers to advertisers looking to reach beyond the traditional family audience, but it also enabled Americans collectively to explore and come to terms with “the monumental changes in sexual identities, practices, mores, and beliefs” (4) precipitated by the sexual revolution.

Levine adeptly attends to the impact of economic, industrial and cultural forces in shaping the new sexual culture of 1970s television. She shows how ABC pulled itself from a poor third into pole position in the battle of the networks through the calculated deployment of sexual content, themes and imagery, profoundly influencing NBC and CBS as it did so. And she concludes that ABC's victory was a triumph for the three-network system, with total television advertising revenues tripling over the decade. The bulk of the book, though, describes how television's new appetite for sex was manifested in specific entertainment formats. Denounced as “kid porn” and “jiggle TV” by its rivals, ABC's strategy nonetheless profoundly altered both daytime and primetime programming across the board. Soaps, made-for-TV movies, sitcoms, action–adventure series and even quiz shows were sexed up in ways that were – often simultaneously – exploitative, recuperative and thoughtfully exploratory. Unsurprisingly, the “oligopolistic and ideologically limited” (45) context of network television meant that the tube's sexual revolution “supported the dominance of heterosexuality over other sexual orientations and the subordination of women as objects of male sexual desire” (5). But it is to Levine's credit that her detailed analysis of the prevalence of rape plots in soaps and television movies, of “sex-coms” such as Three's Company, and of such icons of the new “liberated” femininity as Charlie's Angels, Wonder Woman and Christie Love shows how complex the dominant ideology's negotiations with the more radical aspects of the sexual revolution actually were.