Let me get this straight. NBC asked ER to remove a two-second shot of an 80-year-old woman’s breast even though it fits within the context of the show just because Janet Jackson showed us her boob on live tv? This must be a joke. I completely agree with what ER’s executive producer John Wells said in an excerpt from this Yahoo article:

“It’s really not about this,” Wells said. “We could’ve easily cut the small piece of the breast and it does no damage to the show whatsoever. But the chilling effect of having this one incident now affect programming content across all the networks, that’s what I’m concerned about.”

Wells added that he felt a certain obligation as the steward of a hit network show to take a stand on the matter.

“It makes you ask those questions about other things that might be perceived to be controversial,” Wells said. “Should you talk about sexually transmitted disease among teenagers? Should you be dealing with certain types of violence and the effects of that violence? And while on a show like ‘ER,’ where we have the success to not bow to too much of that pressure, (for) pilots and newer shows that don’t feel as confident in their future, it will be very difficult for them to stand up to questions from the studio or their network about them.”