Life's Pleasures Quote by Aaron Spelling

Spelling’s voice here is the sound of mainstream TV trying to grow a conscience without losing its time slot. He opens with a telling hedge: he “hasn’t done” the drug problem faced by cops and border communities. It’s a producer’s admission of both novelty and lateness, as if the medium he helped define had skirted the ugliest parts of American life until now. The phrasing is clunky, almost defensive, and that’s the point: it signals a man known for glossy, escapist hits stepping into a subject that threatens the comfort contract between network television and its audience.

The subtext is reputational triage. “It’s a hard show to do” doubles as a badge of seriousness and a preemptive excuse for backlash. By framing the material as difficult, Spelling casts himself and his team as responsible adults, not sensationalists. Then comes the carefully calibrated promise: the show will “say a lot,” but he doesn’t specify what. That vagueness keeps the project politically flexible in an era when “drugs” could mean public health, crime, immigration, or moral panic depending on who’s watching.

His final line - “I just hope people can watch it” - is less about bravery than about ratings. “Strong” becomes a marketing adjective and a moral shield. The context is late-20th-century TV discovering the “very special episode” posture: social issue as content, empathy as spectacle, and the producer as mediator between discomfort and consumption.