The usual caveats apply, but I was interested to read through this study out of Indiana University which tracked children’s television viewing habits over a year and found that both white and African-American girls and African-American boys’ saw their self esteem take a television-related hit, while white boys felt better about themselves.

The study’s based on a couple of central ideas, all of which I found to be useful clarifications of ideas I use to explain the impact of media on people of all ages. First, there’s a homogenizing effect of television, which establishes common expectations for which jobs, bodies, and standards of living: “common features of the television landscape pervade all forms of program- ming. Cultivation theory offers an explanation for how white collar jobs, the thin ideal, power, and wealth may come to be perceived as commonplace and easily achievable.” In other words, the fact that television characters have what seem like the same three or four occupations creates a kind of closure. There’s a tricky balance to be achieved here: “research demonstrates that upward comparisons can actually be beneficial to people when they are led to believe that attainment of the depicted achievements is possible.” But if it’s actually harder than portrayed to achieve any of the conditions portrayed on television in real life, that could produce poor self-esteem if someone thinks the failure is theirs, not the media’s. And boys, more than girls, are the beneficiaries of positive messages about what to aspire to. Finally, “Milkie (1999) argues that viewers struggle to avoid self-evaluations with media messages because the mass media alter societal ideas about what is normative. If children believe that others (e.g., peers, family) use such mes- sages to evaluate them, White girls and Black children cannot simply ignore mass media messages as a comparative referent.”
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By Zack Beauchamp

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, given the fraught political debate, that the most interesting televised take on inequality is snuck in through metaphor. More surprising, though, is that the vehicle is a kids show airing on Nickelodeon. Yet it’s true: The Legend of Korra (the more-than-worthy sequel to the beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender) has been directly channeling the some of most philosophically sophisticated arguments on the morality and politics of redistributing wealth. It’s both a valuable public service and a joy to watch.

Korra is set in a world where some people, referred to as benders, have the ability to manipulate the four elements (water, earth, fire, and air). Benders have huge natural advantages over non-benders: being able to shoot fire out of your hands or freeze people in blocks of ice clearly gives you a decent leg up in a fight. But the show digs a layer deeper than that obvious use, creating a 1920s-esque industrial millieu wherein the social order constructed and maintained on bending abilities. Electricity is generated by firebenders who can manipulate lightning, the main professional sport is a sort of bending boxing, and so on.

The main thematic arc of Korra comes from a clear implication of that premise: benders and non-benders are not each others’ social equals. Because so many important roles are open only to benders, non-benders are systematically disadvantaged, denied access to important sectors of government and the economy. The police force, for example, is made up of specialized earthbenders who can manipulate metal. This state of affairs raises a basic moral question: is it acceptable to structure a society where the luck of being born a bender plays such a huge role in shaping your life chances?
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Luther creator Neil Cross, in an interview in which he confirmed that the four-episode third season would be the end of the character’s run on television, also had some interesting things to say about white writers trying to create characters who are specifically intended to be black (the casting for Luther proceeded on a race-neutral basis, as I reported last year):

It was cast as a character, purely and simply, which is one of the aspects that attracted Idris to the role. I have no knowledge or expertise or right to try to tackle in some way the experience of being a black man in modern Britain. It would have been an act of tremendous arrogance for me to try to write – and you have to try to imagine the quote marks around the words – a black character because I don’t know what a black character is and we would have ended up with a slightly embarrassed, ignorant, middle-class, white writer’s idea of a black character, which would have been an embarrassment for everybody concerned. I suspect that there’s a dearth of decent roles for black actors because most writers are white and they try to write their idea of black and it’s an embarrassment.

In theory, I appreciate this kind of humility and think it’s important. But I also think it’s the kind of thinking that can easily feed the continuing dominance of white characters unless you’re deeply committed to race-neutral casting, and to the idea idea that the actors you cast may contribute substantially to shaping the backstories and motivations of the characters you created. If you can do that, and leave for a black, Hispanic, or Asian actor to come in and bring new accents, physicality, and insight into the characters’ decisions that might not fit cleanly with white defaults, than I’m all for the idea that white writers shouldn’t try to specifically write black characters out of respect for the points where their insight ends. But if you’re not in a position where casting is race-neutral, where the default will always be white, then I’d rather have actors flagging some characters as non-white. Otherwise, the palatte’s in danger of staying depressingly, dully monochromatic.

The big news out of this New York Times story about changes in measuring the ratings is that Modern Family has finally dethroned American Idol to become truly the most-watched show on American television. But to my mind, the most fascinating tidbit, particularly given the conversation that’s been going on about is this one:

Those competition shows also tend to be recorded and viewed later much less frequently, so the DVR has been a special enhancement to scripted shows. Among the prime-time hits that get a 40 percent or higher lift among 18- to 49-year-olds because of time-shifting: Fox’s “House,” “Glee,” “New Girl,” and “Alcatraz”; ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Private Practice” and “Revenge”; and NBC’s “The Office” and “Up All Night.” “It used to be that you figured even the most ardent fans of a show saw only two of every four episodes,” Mr. Levitan said. “I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think with DVR and other ways people can catch up more and more, people actually see the entire season of a show.”

I’d be curious to know if that’s actually true—I’ve been looking through a bunch of studies of viewership and haven’t been able to find relevant survey questions to that effect, and if you have them, I would be delighted to see them. But Nielsen has found that younger viewers (and by that, I mean viewers 6-11) in particular tend to rewatch shows that they’ve DVRed multiple times. Now, if people are actually making more of an effort to catch every episode of their favorite shows, where previously they dipped in and out, and if we’re raising a generation of kids who watch episodes over and over again, that could be a response to shows that have become more progressively serialized over time. But if those shifts are driven by technology and the culture that’s grown up around television viewing, then it would make a lot of sense that creators are responding to that trend with a move towards serialized narratives that are seeded with conversational details and easter eggs and comedies that are packed with mile-a-minute-jokes. If your viewers, or at least a chunk of them, are going to look at you in a very different way, it makes sense that you would respond to those signals and imperatives.

The awesome Feminist Frequency presents the latest in their Tropes vs. Women series, a look at Straw Feminists in popular culture, characters whose feminism is presented as so extreme or irrational that their presentation discredits feminists and feminism:

Getting so upset over a name feels silly sometimes, but if you can get people to reject membership in a group, you’re a step closer to getting them to not make more substantive gestures of membership, like, say, donating time and money to Planned Parenthood. Of course, it doesn’t help that awesome feminist creators may put strong women on screen, or situations that explore the systematic oppression of women, but neglect to (or carefully avoid to) name feminism for what it is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but does anyone ever explicitly label themselves a feminist or call sexism by its name in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Though I will say, hearing Anya, talking through her wedding vows, declare that “I, Anya, promise to… love you, to cherish you, to honor you, but not to obey you, of course, because that’s anachronistic and misogynistic and who do you think you are, like a sea captain or something?” is awesome.

A new study from the University of Virginia suggests that fast-paced television, defined by the researchers in the following way — “To quantify pacing, the 2 television episodes were viewed for the number of times a complete scene change occurred (eg, from swimming pool to bedroom). For the fast-paced show, the scene completely changed on average every 11 seconds; even within the scene, characters were almost constantly rapidly moving through space. The educational television show had a
complete scene change every 34 seconds on average” — has a negative impact on children’s self-control and attention span. I’d be curious to know, though, how much that has to do on whether the information conveyed from scene to scene builds on information you’ve received previously. If the Ghostwriter kids are bopping from the community garden to the bodega to Lenni’s studio to Jamal’s townhouse because they’re putting together clues in a case, wouldn’t that make viewers tune out distractions and focus on what the kids are learning along the way? I guess Ghostwriter and Sponge Bob, which the study used as a test show, are aimed at different ages when kids have different levels of cognition. But I’d be curious to know at which age kids start to be able to follow a narrative, and what kinds of narratives are a reach that help them learn versus which sort of narratives are just too complicated for them.

In between my Breaking Bad binges, I’ve been revisiting a bit of X-Men: The Animated Series, of which I saw a few episodes in my largely TV-less childhood. Aside from the fact that the creators clearly don’t trust public-private collaborations very much (I would love to see a Government Accountability Office audit of the Mutant Control Agency), and the extent to which the show clearly tries to balance out the fact that Magneto is right and Professor X is wrong by surrounding Magneto with morons like Sabertooth and giving Professor X cooler henchmen, the thing that’s striking me most is how the animation seems to impact the storytelling.

By contemporary standards, the animation’s really just passable. Things like wildly distorted body proportions, which have never really been comics’ strong suit especially when it comes to women, don’t bother me that much. But it is clear that to keep things simple, most of the motions that are animated are necessary to drive events forward rather than to establish character, and the show isn’t wasting a lot of time animating, say, chit-chat. As a result, a lot of the dialogue can sound a little bit portentous. Jean Grey and Wolverine don’t spend a lot of time flirting before he’s very seriously declaring his affections for her. People don’t spend a lot of time discussing tactics: they boil down to the core question of whether it’s right or wrong to leave Beast and Morph behind at the Mutant Control Agency. When Storm beats Callista and has her rule over the Morlocks in Storm’s place, they don’t discuss the condition of that new regime: Storm pretty much does a lightsaber drop and walks out. We may be walking into an established universe along with Jubilee, but we have to take a lot of things on faith rather than on evidence.

I understand it’s also a kids’ show, and thus intended to be simpler. We don’t actually need Wire-level of complexity here, or First Class-level debate. The show’s still quite entertaining, and quite good at laying out issues of governance, morality, and politics. But if this was in production today, my guess is that it might be a somewhat chattier show (and folks who have seen the whole thing, maybe it does during the run?). And man, would Jubilee have lost that outfit.

Our conversation about the FCC’s attempts to regulate children’s television earlier this week and Peter Suderman’s post expressing skepticism of the whole enterprise (with which I largely agree) have made me realize I don’t have a very good sense of how the market for children’s television works. Obviously, FCC limitations means there’s less potential for advertising in any given hour of television, but it seems like that advertising’s more likely to be effective because the content of the show narrows the audience down to advertisers’ preferred market. You don’t have to worry that you’re going to get a good overall audience but that the ratings won’t be high enough in the demo. I have no idea if the Children’s Programming Emmy Awards actually drive viewership at all. Mainstream publications like the New York Times don’t really appear to review children’s programming, and a quick jaunt through Parenting and Family Circle magazines suggests that they do a lot of list-like guides, but don’t provide a regular stream of comprehensive reviews of new shows.

So it seems we have a couple of problems. It’s not really clear that networks want to produce children’s programs, even as pay channels do, but the government feels there’s got to be some children’s programming available to people who don’t have pay cable. And Peter’s right to say that parents should make informed decisions about what their children watch, but it doesn’t really seem like there’s great information available without a major search that goes beyond ratings and plot summaries.

I can rattle off the names of dozens of television critics in a heartbeat, but I can’t think of one influential critic who regularly writes about programming for children in a way that’s aimed at helping parents decide what shows their children might enjoy from those they benefit from, rather than addressing children’s television as a matter of nostalgia. I’ll admit that I am not the target demographic for such criticism, but there does seem to be an odd gap between the amount of attention that we give children’s and young adult fiction in book form and the amount of critical attention to children’s and young adult television. Part of the problem may be that there isn’t really much in the way of young adult television at all — one of the complaints from parents in the GAO report I wrote about in that original post was that there aren’t many programs that are targeted at children over the age of 8. And so perhaps rather than seeing children’s television as part of a continuum with the programming we’ll watch as adults, we see them as entirely different animals: television for kids is instruction, while television for the rest of us is culture (and some commenters suggested this is actually what parents want, but it still seems like better information about what achieves that would be useful).

I don’t know what the fix is here, but it does seem like we have a scenario where a lot of people are unhappy, or feel like the market isn’t shaking out right. If we want a mix of network programming that includes Dora the Explorer, and The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Arthur and Ghostwriter, uses of the medium that help children learn both educational basics and how to be consumers of more sophisticated culture, something has to change. I don’t think regulation’s going to magically produce this regime, but I don’t know that the market, as it currently exists, is helping parents become informed consumers either.