by Ben Shapiro
Perhaps Disney Channel isn’t concerned about what these stars do because Disney Channel’s older sister, ABC Family, openly promotes such behavior. That channel started off as a mild network featuring old family sitcoms like Boy Meets World and Sister, Sister. Then it transitioned, like Disney Channel, into a vehicle for older viewers. That meant more sex, drugs, and drinking on the network. Sweeney, now the president of Disney-ABC Television Group, defended the decision using the old tried-and-true “realism” argument. “The best way to resonate with your audience is to be authentic,” she said. “You’re only authentic if you are holding up a mirror to your audience and saying, ‘I see you.’ ”
Sweeney disowned the traditional family values of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and The Mickey Mouse Club, explaining, “We’ve continued to evolve our [stories] because we want to maintain a strong connection with our audience.” The programming shift drew audiences and advertisers. “I’d love for these shows to be ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ ” said Pat Gentile, Procter & Gamble buyer and chairman of the Alliance for Family Entertainment. “But that isn’t going to happen. Family programming is all about bringing families together to watch shows so that they can dialogue about these sensitive topics.”50
Some of the ways in which ABC Family has addressed those “sensitive topics”: teenage lesbians making out on Pretty Little Liars, pregnant teenagers considering abortion on The Secret Life of the American Teenager, college students getting drunk and having sex while parroting leftist anti-Christian rhetoric on Greek, and straight girls kissing each other in a bid to forward gay rights on Kyle XY.
To place these programs on a channel called ABC Family is an exercise in cognitive dissonance. To reconcile the world of antitraditional primetime television with the label “family programming” requires a change in the definition of family. And that’s precisely what the creators and executives do. Paul Lee, president of ABC Family, was crystal clear on this: “When we came in, one of the key things we wanted to achieve [was] to reclaim that word ‘family’ for what it really means in real families across America. And when you talk to 14–28-year-olds,” he told gay men’s website AfterElton.com, “one of my shocking realizations early on—unlike my generation, who were not talking to their parents at all—this is a generation that is really interested in and passionate about families. But they define families in a very, very different way. It is not Ozzie and Harriet, ‘two parents, two and a half kids living in a farmhouse’ family. . . . [Teenagers define family as] you know, ‘it’s my stepmom, and it’s my friend Julie and it’s my dog, and it’s my best friend.’ The modern American family is a very fluid, very important, very passionate unit, defined in a very different way.”51
MYTHICAL GAY CHARACTERS
The most controversial topic that could be tackled on children’s television is gay rights. Because there are gay parents, and because parenting plays a large role in the thematics of most children’s television, there’s certainly a temptation to take on the issue in many corners—and it’s been tackled from time to time. Nonetheless, this is such a hot-button issue that even the liberals who control children’s television don’t want to touch it for fear of blowback.
That’s why it’s generally ridiculous for those on the right to find gay rights messaging where none exists in children’s television. Very often, the right is responding not to the shows themselves, but to the gay reaction to the shows.
The most famous example of such misdirection came in 1999, when Jerry Falwell went after the Teletubbies. Teletubbies was a BBC children’s production imported in 1998 by PBS. It featured four characters in bizarre outfits of various colors. One of those characters was the notorious Tinky-Winky, a purple character who carried a handbag and had an inverted triangle on the top of his head. “He is purple—the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle—the gay-pride symbol,” wrote Falwell.
The press, naturally, thought he was nuts and lambasted him. Steven Rice, a spokesman for Itsy Bitsy Entertainment, the U.S. licensing company for the Teletubbies, guffawed, “It’s a children’s show, folks. To think we would be putting sexual innuendo in a children’s show is kind of outlandish. To out a Teletubby in a preschool show is kind of sad on his part. I really find it absurd and kind of offensive.”52 Using Falwell’s ill-advised and rather silly critique as a club to wield against the cultural right, the media concurred.
There was a reason Falwell made the comments, though: he was responding in knee-jerk fashion to the gay left’s usurpation of Tinky Winky as an icon. Hijacking pop culture icons is something the gay left does frequently—just ask Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe. Two years before Falwell’s comments, CNN reported, “Tinky Winky . . . has become something of a gay icon.”53 Similarly, Joyce Millman of Salon .com reported a year before Falwell’s statements, “to the BBC’s dismay, gay groups in Britain hailed Tinky Winky (the purple one with the coat hanger coming out of his head) as the first queer hero of children’s TV because he often carries around a big red purse.”54 Michael Colton followed that up with a piece in the Washington Post in which he jokingly declared Tinky Winky “in” as a gay icon, while declaring Ellen DeGeneres “out.”55 Falwell made the mistake of conflating the gay community’s embrace of Tinky Winky as actual evidence that Tinky Winky was gay and dangerous for kids.
Unfortunately, this is a mistake those on the right seem to make with some frequency. Some on the right have taken on SpongeBob SquarePants of Nickelodeon, stating that he and Patrick, a starfish who is SpongeBob’s best friend, represent a homosexual couple. Like the fallacious Tinky Winky criticism, this perspective is misinformed and bizarre. Creator of the show Stephen Hillenberg told the Wall Street Journal that SpongeBob wasn’t gay: “I always think of them as being somewhat asexual,” he said. That’s backed up by the fact that SpongeBob reproduces as a sea sponge would. At the same time, Hillenberg acknowledged SpongeBob’s popularity with the gay population, explaining, “Everybody is different, and the show embraces that. The character SpongeBob is an oddball. He’s kind of weird, but he’s kind of special.”56 Hillenberg added, “It doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re trying to do.”57
Similar hubbub has surrounded Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street, for similar reasons; the gay left has embraced Bert and Ernie as gay icons, and misguided members of the right have taken the bait. Saturday Night Live, Glee, Friends, American Dad!, The Mentalist, and Family Guy, among others, have all joked about the possibility that Bert and Ernie are gay. And certain conservatives, in response, have commented about Bert and Ernie’s supposed sexuality. When the right legitimates the left’s hijacking of characters as “gay icons,” it makes the right appear ignorant and bigoted, as though they’re looking for homosexuality in every nook and cranny.
YES, VIRGINIA, THERE’S POLITICS IN CHILDREN’S TELEVISION
Whenever conservatives talk about political messaging on children’s television, the media pooh-poohs it. Even the most obvious attempts at infusing liberal messages into kids’ TV—incidents like the Buster episode in Vermont or the Nick News installment on gay parents—are considered completely legitimate by the leftists who cover television. Those leftists gain credibility every time the right launches a misguided attack on SpongeBob or the Teletubbies.
But children’s television, as we’ve seen, is hardly immune to the siren’s call of liberal messaging. Even the most innocent programs are often chock-full of leftism.
Take, for example, Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Captain Planet was a cartoon show created by Ted Turner for TBS and produced by Andy Heyward, creator of Inspector Gadget, The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sabrina: The Animated Series, and Speed Racer X, among others. On the surface, it was a simple adventure tale. Slightly below the surface—but only very, very slightly—it was a tale of environmentalist triumph. “Captain Planet was an idea that Ted Turner had to create a super hero that would be an environme
ntally based show,” Heyward told me. They tackled “the ozone layer . . . global warming . . . the idea was to educate a generation of kids who would later become adults regarding issues surrounding the environment. There is no doubt in my mind that much of the awareness today about the environment and the issues surrounding it are a result of what people saw in Captain Planet.”
Heyward told me that the messages he tried to get across to children didn’t have much to do with “the classical reading and writing and stuff you would see in a lot of shows on PBS.” Instead, “they could be social lessons that had to do with ethical values,” presumably liberal values. The point of the entertainment, Heyward said, was to “have educational themes embedded in the entertainment. It’s very important that it’s embedded in there, because if it’s just educational and tutorial, the kids aren’t interested in that stuff. You have to have something they would actually want to watch—the stories.”
When I asked Heyward whether Captain Planet promoted a politicized point of view, a leftist point of view, he responded, “Well, what would the other point of view be?”58
Unfortunately, that’s the state of the debate in children’s television. There is no true right-wing perspective. Whether it’s environmentalism or the extreme diversity and tolerance movement, whether it’s self-esteem or sexuality, children’s television is a one-sided political machine in the same way the rest of television is. Unlike the rest of television, though, children’s television does have the obligation to respect parental authority; the market should not be the decider, even if the market argument worked perfectly.
From cradle to grave, then, television promotes liberal values.
The End of Television?
How to Fix TV
The gods of television have controlled our minds and hearts for too long.
We might be able to accept their reign if they were benevolent, impartial gods. But in many cases, as we’ve seen, they’re politically motivated gods who worship idols of their own: big government, multiculturalism, moral relativism. They live in a wealthy and privileged bubble, believing that their politics reflect America, when in fact they mainly reflect their own parochial beliefs. They hide behind the mask of “social realism” when they’re truly shaping social attitudes and mores. And they discriminate, often proudly, against those who disagree.
We might be able to kowtow to the gods of television if they were merely catering to our whims. But as we’ve seen, they aren’t. They’ve created a fantasy market that allows them to cater to liberal viewers and ignore others who are conservative, to cater to the young while neglecting the old. They’ve bamboozled advertisers into believing that twenty-one-year-olds with $100,000 in college debt are more valuable as consumers than fifty-five-year-olds who own their houses and are on the verge of retirement. They’ve manipulated the market to fit their own creative ends rather than adjusting their programming to fit the wants and needs of the actual market.
It would be one thing if the gods of television didn’t rely on government to maintain their ideological monopoly. It would be different if they could compete in an open market free of government sponsorship. But they can’t. Without government’s thumb on the scale, buttressing their profit margins, the television industry can’t sustain its current levels.
The gods still rule our airwaves. But they have one problem government can’t help them with. Olympus is crumbling.
For the first time since Sarnoff, Paley, and Goldenson stepped into the field of television, the industry itself is on the verge of total transformation. Satellite technology has exponentially increased our ability to choose our own programming. The Internet, as it has already done to the old broadcast news media, is in the process of destroying television’s central value proposition; we can now watch television whenever we want to, and only the copyright lawyers are preventing the Internet from simply ripping the commercials out of programming altogether. TiVo has overridden the notion of television as a time-bound medium—no longer do millions watch television shows simultaneously. Now they watch it on demand.
It’s terrific for the television consumer. It’s the death of the television industry as we know it. Every single person I talked to, without variation, recognized that the traditional television model had one foot in the grave.
“The networks are struggling to find an identity,” said Carlton Cuse, co-creator of Lost. “The audience has been provided with technological tools that makes the traditional network model obsolete. . . . I don’t think the network business will exist in its current form for much longer.”1
“I have no idea where [television] will be in twenty years,” said Susan Harris, creator of Soap. “With cable, who knows if there will even be TV as we know it. I have no idea.”2 “I believe that network television will be also paid subscriber fees,” said Mark Burnett, creator of Survivor. “Because clearly nobody watches television except on cable.”3
Some were excited about television’s potential metamorphosis. “We’re in the twenty-first century; it’s not the century of M*A*S*H,” explained John Langley, creator of Cops. “It’s probably not the century of Cops, either. We’re going to see hybrid shows, all forms of new admixtures of the Internet and television.”4 Gene Reynolds of Room 222, M*A*S*H, and Lou Grant agreed. “There’s going to be such enormous changes. The variety will be very great, the different platforms will be amazing.”5
“It makes for an exciting and interesting period of time,” Carlton Cuse said.6 That sentiment was seconded by Michael Nankin of Chicago Hope and Picket Fences: “I think [television] will be unrecognizable in ten years. . . . Internet and television and movies are going to merge; there’s not going to be such a delineation between them.”7 Don Bellisario, creator of NCIS and JAG, suggested that television would press the bounds of our imaginations. “It’s developing technically so rapidly, you know, it wouldn’t surprise me if we had holographic television, you sat in your living room and the whole thing was there as a hologram.”8
Others were downbeat in the extreme, suggesting that the future of television was grim. “I don’t think we’ll recognize TV in twenty years,” said George Schlatter of Laugh-In in his inimitable, colorfully vulgar style. “I think that the inmates will definitely be in charge of the asylum. Today, the Writers Guild, the necessity for skilled, honed, articulate writers, has been replaced by a thing called Twitter. The only [reason] Twitter is amusing is because it’s so close to twat.”9
“It’s still there for the snake oil and next year’s model car,” Larry Gelbart poignantly observed. Then he stopped himself: “But that’s not a certainty anymore, is it. I don’t know, but thankfully I won’t be around to see it.”10
Fred Silverman said he was already seeing the effects of the transformation. “I think you’re seeing television change dramatically . . . I question whether in five years the networks [will exist].”11 Allan Burns echoed Silverman’s suggestion: “I don’t think there are going to be any networks left in twenty years. It will all be cable stuff,” he said.12
Michael Brandman, formerly of HBO, thought that the new television model would lead to increasing fractionalization of the viewing audience. “Lee [Rich, former head of Lorimar] says, his belief, and I tend to agree with it, is you see the structure changing and collapsing in front of us. There won’t be any more network television. . . . No one growing up today understands the difference between NBC and TNT. So there’s this great smorgasbord of specialty networks, all of them sort of fighting for a niche.” Even that smorgasbord, though, will eventually come up short, Brandman said. Television will continue to splinter.13
Technology is one reason the industry is fragmenting. Then there’s the fragmentation of the television business overall, a result of collusion and governmental intervention preventing competition. Now if you want drama, you visit TNT (“We Know Drama”). If you want comedy, hit TBS (“Very Funny”). For edgy content, FX is your channel (�
�There Is No Box”). Showtime is where you go for sexy, racy, and dirty pay cable content you can’t get anywhere else (“The Best Shit on Television”). The list goes on and on.
The networks have fragmented as well. CBS has done the best job of programming mainstream, which is why they have routinely led the ratings for the last decade or so, but even CBS skews old. NBC is stuck in 1998, and they can’t get out; their audiences are urban elites under the age of fifty. ABC is all over the map. And Fox imitates cable by gobbling up racy fare that the other networks won’t, a model copied by CW.
There’s not a single influential entertainment network that can be said to provide consistently family-friendly programming. There’s not a single entertainment network that can be said to appeal apolitically or even-handedly to viewers on a regular basis. Even the networks that want to broadcast are narrowcasting.
That’s largely due to the historic bias that exists in the television industry. It’s a bias that springs from business manipulation, personal predilections, conservative apathy, and liberal activism. The left embraced narrowcasting because it pushed America to the left. Whereas Dad used to identify with TV fathers like Bill Cosby, narrowcasting programs shows for Dad that cater to his teenage frat boy tendencies, promoting an endless adolescence; whereas Mom used to identify with Donna Reed, she now identifies with Samantha from Sex and the City. The problem is that when we all watch individually, it’s difficult to create television hits that we all want to watch together. Television’s liberalism is killing television.