How Kids' TV Got Way Too Normal

Summary

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. My son Levi, much to my frustration, has never been a big TV kid. For years, I’d put on an episode of Paw Patrol or a newish Disney movie, but nothing seemed to stick. Either he’d come to me halfway through to report he was bored or he’d be entertained enough to finish but would never request a second viewing or talk about it afterward. I attributed this to a personality quirk or insufficient attention span, until the day, when he was 7, that I showed him Gene Wilder’s 1971 Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Now this “family movie” he loved. Same thing with The Wizard of Oz (1939). And then with an old children’s TV show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse (1986–90). They say three is a trend, the rate of occurrence upon which one moves past the threshold of randomness and into the realm of fixed preference that we often identify as “taste.” Levi seemed to like older movies and TV. Levi seemed to dislike newer movies and TV. I sat down to watch an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse with him, and a hypothesis about why this is the case took shape. All the movies and TV shows Levi is drawn to have a psychological ambiguity mixed with a psychedelic silliness that seemed hard to find in much of today’s popular kids’ content. Comfort alloyed with discomfort. Connection alloyed with loneliness. Heavy alloyed with light. Or, more succinctly, they were an accurate reflection of a day in the life of an average kid’s mind. This made for a sharp contrast with much of the popular kids’ content I had earlier suggested and he had refused, entertainment that prioritized delivering easy moral lessons over observations on the eternal messiness of being human. And fair enough. It’s hard to teach right and wrong while also conceding how genuinely strange life is as a thinking, feeling human in relationship with other such humans. While this is the case for all of us, the veil ...