US television looks set for a shake-up, following a US court's ruling that the Federal Communications Commission's new "indecency" policy - the tightest for three decades, instituted shortly after Bono uttered the phrase "fucking brilliant" during the 2003 Golden Globes telecast - was potentially in violation of the First Amendment.

The FCC had maintained that the "F-word" - as they called it - "inherently has a sexual connotation"; the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals responded by declaring the FCC's beliefs "divorced from reality." It was, in short, an exclamation, not an exhortation.

In rejecting the appeal, the court acknowledged that times have changed. So much so, that even the Commander-in-Chief worked blue occasionally - telling "Blair", for example, that the UN needed to "get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit." (Though one could argue that it was Dick Cheney, audibly telling Senator Pat Leahy in June 2004 to "go fuck yourself", which turned the tide.) This particular decision relates specifically to "accidentally-aired" expletives, but it will almost certainly herald a sea-change among the networks, regarding what is considered permissible language.

Like many shifts in public taste, this will be both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, it's necessary as well as reassuring to see television more closely reflecting the standards of the general community. A medium dominated by "reality-programming", after all, can hardly seem unreal in its prudish refusal to acknowledge the way people - particularly the kind of people who inhabit reality-TV shows - actually speak. And it will doubtless liberate the makers of television drama, where HBO, freed from the nervy caution of advertisers, have already blazed a trail. Hopefully the major US networks will follow suit. It's unlikely that we shall soon see Roger Mellie alongside Katie Couric on the NBC Evening News, but shows like CSI: Miami and Lost might soon gain an added frisson of realism.

Nevertheless, I must confess to mixed feelings - if only because of its potential for misuse. A similar thing happened about a decade ago in the equally conservative world of comic books. Long regulated by the Comics Code Authority - a shadowy cabal founded in the wake of the EC scandals of the 1950s to protect the precious bodily fluids of teenage boys, and modeled largely on Hollywood's Hays Code - the industry gradually abandoned its watchdog, as society changed and it did not. Today it is a toothless tiger, with only Archie Comics routinely bothering to seek CCA approval.

All well and good, you might think. But as the floodgates opened, and writers rushed to avail themselves of the New Candour, some potentially worthwhile titles - Garth Ennis's Preacher, for example - were rendered well-nigh unreadable by their insistence on potty-mouthed talk, which displayed little more than a childish desire to trample over taboos that had, by that time, already been largely overturned. After endless pages of cursing, most of which advanced neither plot nor characterisation one inch, one positively yearned for the gosh-wow innocence of Jimmy Olsen and Captain Marvel.

Personally, I feel the same way about HBO's Deadwood, perhaps the sweariest show on TV, which many friends assure me is a compelling and rewarding drama, but whose insistence on profanity - specifically, the word "cocksucker" - reduces me first to giggles, and then to weary exasperation. I've got nothing against the word per se; indeed, some of my best friends are cocksuckers. But for all its supposed historical verisimilitude (the word, series creator David Milch maintains, was part of the argot of the Old West), it just doesn't work for me.

Used so liberally, it should become meaningless, a verbal tic. But instead it takes me out of the narrative, making me all too aware of the performances and the scriptwriting. When it becomes reflexive, a substitute for actual wit and invention, it also becomes tedious - all mouth and no trousers.

Repetition robs swearing of its force. Hence the devalued status of the word "fuck", which is today little more than a slightly stronger sigh. It's better - more shocking, and therefore more powerful - when used sparingly. By way of evidence, consider Martin Scorsese, whose films deliver whole libretti of profanity, soaring arias to which his heirs can merely aspire. And like a good showman, he knows how to build to his crescendos. In 1995's Casino, the F-word is deployed, in various conjugations, on 352 separate occasions. But when Robert De Niro calls Sharon Stone a "cunt", after she's tied their daughter to the bed while she goes out to party - the one and only time that word is used in the whole film - it sounds devastating. Like a bomb exploding in a busy street.

And loath though we are to admit it, sometimes censorship is actually useful. The Osbournes, I'm prepared to wager, would not have seemed half so funny had you actually heard Ozzy and his kin calling each other a bunch of shit-for-brains fuckwits. The bleeps made it hilarious. My friend David Stubbs, who used to write the Mr Agreeable column in Melody Maker, understood this instinctively, and wielded rows of asterixes ("Christ on a f***ing wankstick, you boring little c***") with the virtuosity and authority of a Von Karajan. In the same way, the new Battlestar Galactica is currently having fun with its invented expletive "frack" ( i.e., "Frack this!" "Why, you frackin' ..."), which not only communicates the desired sentiment, but offers some great merchandising possibilities.

But times are changing, and so, inevitably, must our entertainment. Still, part of me can't help but think it's a f***ing shame. It really fracking is.