It's not necessarily about shock value, it can be just about realism. In real life, people smoke, have sex, pick their nose, throw up, swear etc. LOTR can work

It's not necessarily about shock value, it can be just about realism. In real life, people smoke, have sex, pick their nose, throw up, swear etc. LOTR can work without this as it's an epic fairy tale that doesn't need deep and developed characters. But if you want to make something like Breaking bad, you're seriously artistically limited by arbitrary ratings. I don't think it's fair to reduce this "sex and violence are unnecessary".