These days my kids don't know where to to look.

My husband and I do. While the teenagers avert their eyes to some distant point on the wall or floor, he and I turn toward each other, eyes bugging and mouths agape at the embarrassing stupidity flooding the room.

We have only one television in our house, so watching it is usually a group activity. And no, this isn't a diatribe against the "idiot box." If it were, I'd sound too much like my parents.

Their other favorite name for this great technological advance is "boob tube," a term invented almost as soon as the television set was. It was supposed to refer to the person foolish enough to watch. But these days there are more boobs than television's pioneers ever could have imagined.

Like those Viagra guys. Are there any bigger doofuses on TV?

A decade ago, early ads for the drug featured -- oh, the shame -- World War II hero and former presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole. My kids weren't the only ones looking away from this spectacle.

But competitor Levitra upped the ante by casting a beautiful woman with a come-hither voice, so Mr. Dole was once again history.

The male-product wars were on, but they had to pierce the commercial fog of adult diapers, herpes treatments and steamy gropes in night-time soaps. In an age of way too much information, getting your message through to a stunned viewing audience is no easy task.

Maybe mind-boggling ickiness helps. Viagra's latest ad features a group of baby boomer men so thrilled by this solution to erectile dysfunction that they gather in a recording studio with banjos and guitars and joyfully sing, "Viva Viagra!" They're having such a thigh-slappin' good time that even their African-American sound engineer is grooving to their hoe-down twangs.

It's so preposterous a premise that the first time my husband and I saw it together, we gaped at one another in disbelief. Meanwhile, my daughter, poised on the cusp of her teen years, is learning about erectile dysfunction.

It would be easy at this point to fail to make a distinction between what's immoral and what's merely tasteless. It would be easy to do because the two quickly become entangled.

In the early days of television, on-air married couples had to sleep in twin beds -- a silly excess of prudery -- and nothing more risque than Geritol was advertised.

By my teens, TV couples were frolicking in and out of wedlock on "Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island," and ads had women asking each other what to use when they didn't feel "fresh." That's when people started going "Ewww" and asking: "Isn't there anything too personal, too private, for broadcasting?"

Apparently not. In my adulthood, there's no product or activity too intimate for prime-time television. We've gone quickly from pretending people have no private parts to hearing jingles about those very same parts' working condition.

What happened in those two or three decades? The baby boomers became both the bulk of the audience and the suits setting standards for the rest of us. I'm happy to blame the "let-it-all-hang-out" leaders of my generation -- especially now that they're hanging out in recording studios singing about their failing bodies.

This is not a paean to the good old days of television supposedly created by the boomers' parents. For every gem starring Bob Newhart or Mary Tyler Moore, there was far more forgettable dreck.

Today's vast cable and satellite markets require many more hours of programming, which means, given human nature and the laws of the marketplace, the amount of dreck has vastly increased.

So has the challenge of standing out in such a huge sea of choices. Shows -- and the product advertising that pays for them -- can attract more attention by pushing boundaries and shattering taboos.

But what boundaries of taste and propriety are left to fall? How much worse can it get?

This is not a diatribe against television. Old fogey that I am, it's a diatribe against our culture, as expressed on television, our culture's most ubiquitous conduit.

Sometimes its excesses are evil and destructive -- celebrations of crime and violent death, of hedonism and mindless consumerism that leave you feeling anxious or empty.

Occasionally these excesses are so gross, so aggressively obnoxious, that you just have to laugh in amazement. And you look away.