tawdry

He called that meeting "the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy".

The writer Morrow Mayo seldom minced words, especially when his subject was the gaudy, tawdry city where he made his home in the 1920s and 1930s.

“She hasn’t turned sleazy, hasn’t become part of a ‘12-fanged monster’ determined to do nothing but titillate and trash up the airwaves with its tawdry yarns,” staff writer Steve Weinstein wrote.

Her last two years were obviously very difficult, what with drugs, depression and dermatomyositis, all of which come across as tawdry in “Maria.”

Instead of a fixation on the tawdry side of life, you see works that explore the things that bind all people together: family, love, politics, complex emotions and sensual memories.