Terrible Teen Television by Traci Garling retrieved June 21, 2010 from: http://www.newuniversity.org/2010/01/features/terrible-tween-television/
Traci Garling takes us on a tour or tween television since the early 1980s. She makes the argument that tween television has changed drastically. Gone are the days of TGIF on Friday nights. Also gone are “The Rugrats” and “The Mickey Mouse Club” We have come a long ways from those days. Newer offerings include “The Suite Life on Deck”, a comedy in which twin boys live on a cruise ship. True, I haven’t seen the show but the hidden message might be that luxury is something to yearn for.
Disney Television started to make their switch from family entertainment to shows about real teens and preteens with “Lizzie McGuire” around ten years ago. Lizzie got into the ordinary teen mischief, but she always learned something in the end.
The next shift was The Era of The Tween. Along with the television shows such as “Hanna Montana” came the merchandising. Hanna Montana notebooks have been omnipresent. For $63.17 you can get a Jonas Brothers comforter and pillow. So, if you have the money you can have your idols with you all the time.
The Era of the Tween morphed some more featuring such shows as “The Secret Life of the American Teenager” and “The Geek”, which author Traci Garling writes are less family oriented and more TV 14.
The exposure of teen stars and there doings go beyond TV. Internet gossip blogs keep tweens informed with the “secret lives” of their teen idols.
This whole trend is troubling. I don’t think it is healthy to have teens idols as role models, especially when the merchandisers are on the sidelines ready to sell you something that will make you look just like your idol. The only checks and balances in this whole process are the parents, but that is not a given when the parents have an opportunity to buy something for their child that will make her/him happy and just like her/his friends.
It is a given that TV for tweens has changed, and I haven’t seen many arguments that it is a change for the better.
There was an interesting article in PopMatters recently suggesting some teen shows are actually for adults - http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/125181-the-non-judging-breakfast-club-gossip-girl-and-the-pretend-teenager
ReplyDeleteI think movies like Juno fall in this category as well.
I am pretty sure Disney is the evil empire but I can't help but be impressed by their marketing skills in a twisted, sort of Lookie-lou kind of way.