Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/HBO
HBO has always been known for pushing the envelope, and there’s one grotesque fascination that, though we wish they would, they just can’t seem to resist. No, I don’t mean greenlighting shows from David E. Kelley; we’re talking about incest.
Get the pearl-clutching out of the way now, because we’re about to go full tilt into the premium cable’s obsession with the forbidden fornication. That is, if your hand even moves toward your pearls anymore—incest might be considered one of the last taboos, but you wouldn’t know it by its prevalence as a subplot on television dramas.
Case in point: This week’s episode of Gossip Girl, which joins a long list of HBO series fascinated with family-on-family fucking with its plotline about a sister and brother going at it at a New York hotel. It’s certainly juicy. It’s definitely gross. And, let’s face it, it is a bizarre obsession. How is this still so prevalent?