TV’s Most Taboo Episodes

Mindy Kaling is making the press rounds in support of The Mindy Project, and her latest round finds her joining the ranks of TV’s most taboo episodes.

While appearing on Conan O’Brien Presents, Kaling confirmed that a recent episode entitled “I Slipped” was about her and her partner pushing the boundaries of traditional lovemaking. Subjects that generally don’t make it to network television like rape, abortion and child abuse have all been addressed on some of the following TV shows.

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Art imitated life when Ellen DeGeneres’ character Ellen Morgan sat down on her shrink’s couch and came out as gay on what has now been dubbed “The Puppy Episode” of her self-titled ABC sitcom.

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Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon took a risk by having Buffy Summers deal with a Sunnydale school shooting and the issue of bullying on the episode “Earshot,” which was scheduled to air a week after the 1999 Columbine High massacre.

A Different World reflected the ignorance of a large portion of society when Tisha Campbell’s character Josie disclosed having the AIDS virus to her Hillman classmates. Gina and Terrence initially refuse to touch her, Ron and Dwayne get tested for HIV and Whitley chooses abstinence in an episode that was way years ahead of its time.

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Are you master of your domain? Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer got some deep laughs from the “touchy” issue of self-gratification on a Seinfeld episode entitled “The Bet.”

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Tom Cruise was most likely not amused when Trey Parker and Matt Stone cast him as a homosexual action star in a South Park episode entitled “Trapped In The Closet.”

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Arnold and the gang from Diff’rent Strokes got too real for TV—especially in 1983. “The Bicycle Man” was a two-part story arc that featured one of Mr. Drummond’s business acquaintances attempting to molest Arnold and his friend Dudley with wine, cartoon porn before (at the very least) taking some skin flicks with Dudley.

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The show Maude continuously pushed boundaries, one of which was the incredibly sensitive issue of rape. With the episode “Maude’s Dilemma,” the titular character is raped at the age of 47 and forced to either have a child at a dangerous age or have an abortion before they are legal nationwide.

Why did the writers of Punky Brewster feel the need to nearly kill off all of Punky’s friends? We’ll never know, but the show took a heavy-handed look at the genocide of Native Americans before strangely veering into a horror show on a two-story arc called “The Perils Of Punky.”

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Bill Cosby generally kept things pretty tame with the Huxtables, but “The Visit” was one of the more memorable serious episodes. Theo is hesitant to visit a friend with cancer, and things are as depressing as advertised until a lesson unfolds.

Before there was Adrian Peterson, Good Times addressed the how some families differentiate between corporal punishment and outright child abuse. Things got so bad for Janet Jackson’s character Penny that she was adopted by Wilona, hence naming the episode “The Evans Get Involved.”

Depending on your level of comfort discussing sex, you may not be able to discuss the episode of The Mindy Project entitled “I Slipped” in mixed company. The most that can be said in a PG-13 context about the episode is that Mindy and her partner have an experience about entering through the rear.