Public lamentation over the dangers to American children from too much sex, violence and repetitious fare on television has been around almost as long as television itself. But today, alongside the hue and cry lies a quieter appraisal.
In the last three years, children's television has undergone an explosive growth spurt, with new cable channels, new program blocks on broadcast channels and scores of new shows, many instructive if not downright instructional.From the "Dear America" historical dramas on HBO to "Sports Illustrated for Kids" on Nickelodeon, children's shows range across almost as wide a spectrum as adult shows do. And at a time when adult TV is loaded with crude humor and vulgarity, children are spending less time watching adult television and more time watching their own shows.
The new programs -- many of the shows for very young children are directly linked to toys and other products -- have been generated more by the marketplace than by government and special interest groups pushing for better programming through regulations.
A federal rule requiring three hours a week of educational programs has been in effect for two years. But the key reasons behind the upsurge lie in two principles, first proved by the cable network Nickelodeon: Children are a diverse audience, and children have greater influence over family purchasing decisions than ever before.
Advertisers took notice. For the last three years, money spent for commercials on children's television has grown at a double-digit rate annually, and it exceeded $1 billion for the 1998-99 season.
Producers now tailor programs to specific age groups -- preschool, young elementary, older elementary and adolescent -- instead of churning out lowest-common-denominator cartoons. Formulaic cartoons still exist, but they face more competition from shows that are nonviolent, nonpatronizing and convey positive messages in ways children find appealing.
"People made money doing good stuff," said Alice Cahn, president of TV, film and video for Children's Television Workshop. "It's harder to get away with doing schlock television for kids now."
Plenty of schlock still exists, but it now gets low Nielsen ratings and, therefore, lower prices for commercials. Children are more discerning about making those choices.
Ten years ago, a typical child watching television on Saturday morning would see three types of shows -- bland and cuddly creatures ("The Pound Puppies" or "The Smurfs"), robots and superheroes ("Transformers" or "Voltron"), or oldies-but-goodies animation, like "Bugs Bunny." Even five years ago, Saturday morning was still dominated by superheroes and harebrained cartoons.
Now, the viewing menu has diversified. Children's television includes game shows, sketch comedy, how-to shows and sports shows; it can be live action as well as animation, and girls can be lead characters as easily as boys.
Animation still dominates, but even among cartoons, the choices are dizzying. Along with "Batman Beyond" and "Spider-Man," channel-surfing children can find female superheroes in "The Power Puff Girls" (Cartoon Network) and "The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, Detective" (Family Channel), and strong-willed real-life girls, like "Pepper Ann" (ABC) or "Daria" (MTV), and even a female judge in a courtroom comedy about science called "Squigglevision" (ABC).
On Nickelodeon, some children live without parents in a multiethnic urban world ("Hey Arnold!"), some travel the world with parents who are anthropologists ("The Wild Thornberrys"), and some cope with divorced parents and a pal who turns out to be an alien in human form ("The Journey of Allen Strange").
Nickelodeon, which started in 1979 and began taking commercials in 1983, was the motor that generated this prolific marketplace. Its very mandate as the first children's network meant providing all kinds of shows for all kinds of children, all day long -- and then proving that children would watch.
"Nickelodeon took kids seriously as a market and did not underestimate the power of kids to relate to good programs," said David Walsh, the president and founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family in Minneapolis. "They showed that you could do a good business without just throwing up dumb cartoons all day."
In so doing, Nickelodeon, owned by Viacom, became one of the three most profitable networks in television (with NBC and ESPN). Fox Kids Network became a profitable unit of Fox Broadcasting. The Cartoon Network, owned by Time Warner, is the fastest-growing network in cable. Now others are clambering on the bandwagon.
Last year, Fox bought the Family Channel, converted its daytime lineup to children's shows and announced plans for two spinoffs, the Boyz Channel and the Girlz Channel. Discovery started a Discovery Kids channel. The Disney Channel spun off Toon Disney a year ago. Nickelodeon just started Noggin, an all-educational channel, and Nickelodeon GAS, a games and sports channel.
Hallmark Entertainment and Jim Henson Co. became partners in the Odyssey Channel, which is adding family fare to its faith-and-values programs. HBO invested about $18 million to start a digital channel called HBO Family, much of it original programs for children and teenagers. PBS plans a digital channel called PBS Kids for the fall.
In the broadcast world, Walt Disney Co. has plowed millions into revitalizing ABC's Saturday-morning lineup, adding educational shows while substantially increasing its audience. Both Fox and WB compete for under-12 viewers on weekday afternoons, as well as with ABC and Nickelodeon on Saturday mornings.
Competition for that $1 billion in advertising money explains this proliferation, but what explains the upsurge in shows of PBS-level quality?
First, with so many choices of channels and programs, producers have to work harder to make programs appealing. Secondly, producers believe that parents are more sensitive to what their children watch and will guide the viewing of younger ones.
And government intervention has had some impact, if only in stirring up public interest. Three issues attracted high-profile attention in the last three years: a requirement that new TV sets have a V-chip enabling parents to block programs; the development of a movie-style labeling system to rate shows by age-appropriateness and content (V for violence, S for sex and even an FV for "fantasy violence" in children's shows); and the Federal Communications Commission's three-hour-a-week educational programming rule.
"There is more educational programming than ever, and it absolutely would not be there if not for that rule," says Kathryn Montgomery, president of the Center for Media Education, a Washington research and advocacy group that led the fight for the rule. "But beyond that, there is a new sensibility, too. It's in vogue to say you're making something educational, to appeal to parents."
How faithfully broadcasters (the only ones subject to the three-hour rule) are complying with the rule is debatable. Fox and WB each found a way to work around the rule a bit, using just one educational program but "stripping" it -- scheduling it for a half-hour each weekday, usually in early morning or early afternoon, to add up to three hours. Fox does this with re-runs of the PBS science program "The Magic School Bus"; WB does it with a frenetically paced song-and-dance cartoon about great events in history called "Histeria!"
ABC has managed to add educational programs and still increase its Saturday-morning audience, but the Disney-owned network is sometimes criticized for calling shows educational if they have "nice little feel-good messages," as one rival put it.
This has led to a debate over what constitutes "educational." Programs labeled educational because of "pro-social messages" far outnumber those with curricular content, according to the Center for Media Education. Pro-social programs are those whose characters and plots teach lessons such as how to get along with others, why you should not lie, or how to resist peer pressure or cope with setbacks in school.
"People's concept of educational TV has changed," said Rick Siggelkow, the executive producer of "Noddy," a new educational program on PBS, and vice president of children's programming for BBC Worldwide Americas. "Not many producers today look to 'Sesame Street' for inspiration. There's a drift toward softer things. But parents are just happy to get lots of shows that don't model violence and antisocial behavior. If it's pro-social, they think that's educational."
TN Media, a company that advises advertisers, in a recent survey reported that children's television viewing overall had declined in the past three years, from about 12.2 hours a week to 11.6, but children's viewing of children's programs had increased from 5.4 hours to 5.8 hours.
"If we said we were a full-service network for kids, we had to be full," said Herb Scannell, Nickelodeon's president. "That's why we did it. That's also why we do a news show. That's why we first did shows starring girls as the main character, and variety shows, and sketch comedy. And it's why we started Nick Jr., too."
Nick Jr. is the network's weekday morning preschool block, praised by academic critics. "Blue's Clues," one of the most innovative shows, uses repetition and visual cues designed for a toddler's developmental level. Nick Jr. executives just purchased two shows, "Maisy" and "Kipper," from British producers, who have a long history of doing high-quality shows for preschoolers.
"The growth area is the preschool audience," said Amy Jordan, senior research analyst at the Annenberg Public Policy Center. "That's partly because people who produce shows realize they can tie products to preschool programs, like computer games or book series."
Of course, PBS was the pioneer for this age group -- even in making money. Plenty of merchandise has been sold based on characters from "Sesame Street," "Barney" and, more recently, "Arthur" and "Teletubbies." By itself, "Teletubbies," a show for children under 3, generated $800 million in product sales in 1998.
Toys, clothing and games tend to be marketed for younger children whose parents make the purchases. But in commercial television, older children are equally important because they influence a wider range of products, from fast food to sneakers to computers.
"There are still certain kinds of programming this prolific marketplace isn't producing for children, with rare exceptions," Charren said. "Two that come to mind are news and drama."
Only Nickelodeon has a regular news program for children, "Nick News," anchored by Linda Ellerbee, who recently won a prestigious George Foster Peabody award for a "Nick News" special.
"But at the very least," Charren said, "most children's shows today are benign. And benign is a lot better than ghastly."