What are kids watching these days? Gen Y’s nostalgic myopia for Saturday morning cartoons and PG-13 horror flicks can leave them blinkered when it comes to how their now-adolescent children are entertaining themselves.
This piece, wherein Variety indulges in handwringing over teens rejecting smut in movies and TV shows, seems like a positive sign. But left unexamined is the pressing question of why kids are watching adult-oriented entertainment product to begin with.
One overlooked answer has been championed by author JD Cowan for a while now. He attributed the death of kids’ entertainment and the rising pornification of adult fare back before the Corona-chan lockdowns.
The erosion of entertainment for adolescents, coupled with the rise of increasingly explicit adult content, represents one of the most underexamined phenomena in modern media. While many factors contribute to this trend, myopic media activism—exemplified by Peggy Charren’s Action for Children’s Television—played a pivotal role.
By pushing for sweeping regulations that reshaped children’s programming without offering concrete alternatives, ACT inadvertently narrowed the entertainment pipeline for teens. The resulting vacuum forced adolescents into a media funnel where adult content became their primary option, even as it became more sexually explicit. This feedback loop has led to a growing disengagement from media by younger audiences, whose needs continue to be neglected.
Peggy Charren founded ACT in the late 1960s to advocate for higher-quality children’s programming. The movement gained significant momentum, leading to Congressional hearings and legislation like the Children’s Television Act of 1990. The act imposed strict guidelines on broadcasters, requiring them to air a certain number of hours of educational programming for children and discouraging excessive commercialism in kids’ shows.
While these initiatives aimed to protect children, they ignored the transitional phase of adolescence. The post-regulation landscape saw the collapse of many once-thriving teen-oriented shows, with networks shifting focus to comply with these mandates. Shows catering to “in-betweeners”—those too old for educational content but too young for adult themes—dwindled.
At the same time, deregulation in other areas of media incentivized content creators to sleaze up adult programming. The profusion of sex in movies and TV skyrocketed during the same period, with shows like Sex and the City and Game of Thrones becoming cultural juggernauts. This sharp entertainment dichotomy left teens stranded. Their age-appropriate content was gone, and what remained was increasingly alienating.
Related: The Last of the Third Places
Teenagers, caught in the aftermath of ACT, found themselves with few media choices that reflected their developmental stage. Once, films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off provided relatable stories for adolescents. Today, much of what’s marketed as “teen entertainment” skews either toward sanitized Disneyesque slop or low-key pornography.
As a result, teens are turning away from traditional media. A 2023 Pew Research study noted a sharp decline in adolescent viewership of scripted television and feature films, with platforms like TikTok and YouTube dominating their media consumption. These platforms fill the void with user-generated screen candy that, while engaging, lacks the craft and heart of 1980s coming-of-age films.
Which is more an indictment of YouTube than praise for 80s films.
Related: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
At the other end of the spectrum, adult entertainment continues its slide into the Second Circle of Hell. Major TV studios have doubled down on smut, ostensibly to attract older audiences. Yet the alienation effect is pronounced for teens, who are neither emotionally invested in nor comfortable having porn shoved in their faces.
What’s kind of ironic is that the clichĂ© of a group of young teens huddling together in lurid awe at the Playboy one of them stole from his dad’s sock drawer was a mainstay of 80s teen flicks. So consider how much worse ordinary adult programming on cable and streaming is now if it has teens rushing for the exits.
The convergence of these two effects has created a vicious cycle: Fewer teens watching adult-targeted films and TV shows leads studios to further cater to their core adult audience, which further alienates adolescents. And the lack of age-appropriate options deprives teens of formative cultural experience, which detaches them from mainstream entertainment.
So those who might object “What about MCU movies?” miss the point that the medium is the message. Teens aren’t just shunning adult-themed shows and films. They’re dropping out of TV and movies altogether in favor of the media that give them the entertainment they want. Which means that the studios who keep ratcheting up their products’ smut content are probably ruining the industry for everyone else.
In other words, series like Game of Thrones might counterintuitively be killing TV and streaming, while 50 Shades of Grey was another nail in Hollywood’s coffin.
Related: “Hollywood Is in Shambles”
The dual forces of myopic media activism and the hypersexualizing of entertainment have created a perfect storm for TV, streaming, and Hollywood. By effectively erasing the middle ground between children’s programming and adult-oriented content, meddling activists and greedy studios have left teens to fall through the cracks.
Stopping the adolescent exodus would require the entertainment industry to acknowledge the long-term damage caused by underserving kids. In crass marketing terms studio heads might understand, teenagers are a vital audience segment; not just for their immediate market value but as the foundation for lifelong media engagement. By pandering only to adults, studios and networks are eating the seed corn.
Related: Why People Are Fleeing Streaming Services in Droves
The takeaway is that short-sighted media activism of the kind typified by Peggy Charren’s ACT led the entertainment industry to neglect teenage audiences. Combined with the increasing explicitness of adult content, teens find themselves increasingly alienated from both ends of the media spectrum. And Hollywood and the networks face an untenable situation.
If the entertainment industry wants to regain the loyalty of younger audiences, it must learn from the mistakes of the past. Judging by Hollywood’s and the networks’ track record, betting that they’ll have a road to Damascus moment is a longshot.
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Dark fantasy minus the grim plus heroes you can root for battling overwhelming odds
Coming to reflect on my own consumer habits when I was in my pre-teen to teenage youth, I would consider myself lucky that I found anime and manga.
For most of my life, I was watching cartoons on Cartoon Network, back when the cartoons’ main demographic were boys my age. For a time, you could entertain a child with Loony Tunes or kick it up a notch with shows like Teen Titans or Samurai Jack. However, when those shows weren’t on, I had to fill the void with something else because overly grotesque or adult themed content turned me off.
This is where anime and manga came in. There was a little something for everyone and it kept me entertained for years until I reached my 20’s. To give a specific example, Yu Yu Hakusho was the anime I latched onto. The protagonist was my age, suffered many of the pains I did, but also it was a fight anime and the characters had cool powers. It could be lighthearted, it could be serious, but more importantly, it was a coming of age story for a young teenage boy – this I didn’t realize until a rewatching of the anime about a year or so ago.
With the recent discussion of anime, you could make an argument that’s why it gained popularity and had some staying power because of people like me who consumed it during a time when there wasn’t anything for my age demographic.
You make a strong argument for anime filling the void left by Western studios. And it ties into Anime Ground Zero. Mangaka Yoshikaru Yasuhiko famously left the industry in 1990, in part because he saw the 18+ification of the industry coming.
A post by Cartoon Network floated around earlier this year admitting that the studio has been dead for 10+ years. The approx date was when we started seeing the emergence of the bean mouth/new Cal Arts cartoons like Chowder, Adventure time, and the like.
Sure some good shows were still around, but the key point to make is that they were concluding and nothing new like it was taking its place. Instead we got this quasi adult family of cartoons but it was marketed towards kids.
The average age of Cartoon Network viewers was revealed to be 29, I believe. When you factor in that Adult Swim is the only thing on the network that gets viewership that means there is no young audience. TV and movies are doing what books already have and throwing out younger audiences.
What no one seems to care about is the level of damage this will do to these mediums in the future. Much like comics, no mass audience means death, but not after an influx of weird adults makes it poison to normal people first.
Oh wait, looks like we’re already there.
So in the future when things like Tik Tok or YouTube are gone, what will these people do? Again, no one seems to care about any of this, and it’s a dangerous game we’re playing to sacrifice art and entertainment for no long term gain.
If memory serves, it was St. Teresa of Calcutta who said that a culture which kills its own children has no future. What seems to have befallen mainstream entertainment is the Boomers’ collective “After me, the deluge!” mentality.
I think we’ve all seen the meme of how Pokemon was made for young kids but adults play it while Call of Duty was made for adults but played by kids.
Can’t imagine a more accurate meme to describe the entertainment industry as it is now and has been for over a decade, haha.
Chowder wasn’t bad, though.
Huh, I have noticed someone else that I watch talking about how “weird” it is that kids keep coming into online spaces and asking for things to be made less sexually explicit. While it’s good that they’re rejecting porn, the fact that they’re even in these spaces to begin with is concerning. It’s strange to see others notice the same phenomenon. I also wonder if the rise of things like Five Night’s At Freddy’s was part of this phenomenon. The average age for a FNAF fan back in the day was probably about that range of 7-15, which is a little on the young side but mostly fits with the inbetweener demographic. The series is also dark and unnerving without being too graphic or explicit – there’s no profanity, not even a hint of sex, and no explicit gore. It also fits with the “enjoyed mostly on Youtube” trend, too.
You nailed it. FNAF is a perfect example.
It’s also something we should be grateful for, in the sense that the creator is a convinced Christian that infuses his works with a Christian spirit, however subtle. Most notably, the serial child murderer main antagonist manages to evade justice for a time, but eventually ends by being burned alive in a locked building and going to Hell (the person who’s caught him even taunts him by telling him “not to keep the Devil waiting”. There’s even a spinoff game where you get to play through his ironic torment, which is being forced to perpetually endure the wrath of all those he’s wronged.
Oddly enough, the oversexualuzation kills sexiness and usually bespeaks the taste of a jaded and corrupt adult more than the reality of a teenager. Even for the non religious, most of the time sex was a big and reasonably scary deal despite the hormones. Only the real problem kids were casual about it. Buffy and Angel were interesting in that they actually took sex seriously. It had consequences and most often not terribly happy ones. Paradoxically the young have to be actively taught to think of sex as casual and not a big deal, the complete opposite of what the culture tells us to expect from the young who are supposedly ruled by their hormones. They’re also young enough that love seems real to them and even for the much maligned masculine sex, there’s a desire for it to mean something.
St. Paul VI tried to warn us.
Where did he warn us? Genuinely asking, like which document?
I was referring to Humane vitae in general.
Great, thank you.
What medium do these in-betweeners have? Cartoons? Comics? Video games? Books? Movies? TV shows? No, these are increasingly being made for weird adults and prepubescent children to be funneled into the former group only.
I was wondering a few years back why so many zoomers I come across these days have such an interest in older things, and little to none in Current Year crap, and now it’s been made much clearer. They’re going back to old things made for their demographic from before they were even born. I guess it proves how strong what we group with was, but it also shows why those IPs are still getting milked even beyond Gen Y’s nostalgia. The people in charge are just throwing things at the wall. Zoomers don’t have nostalgia for this stuff, they just want good things they can enjoy.
And I think that’s the case with the kids today. They aren’t watching the mainstream, and they definitely aren’t watching endless 30 second loop videos if they want an engaging story, so where are they going? Anime and old things. And that’s how it’s going to be until an industry that isn’t an absolute joke rises from the ashes.
Let me paint you a picture …
BOOMERS: They who die with the most toys win!
GEN Y: If only we could make the world a perpetual loop of TMNT in the mornings, Batman the Animated Series in the afternoons, and The Simpsons monorail episode every night.
Millennials: Everything made before 1995 is anathema.
I used to think I knew how those dynamics would play out. But I didn’t count on the TV conditioning Boomers to confuse Gen Y with Millennials. So Ys are actually being handed the reins of power, meaning we are in for a different bad ending.
Just like American comics in the 80s.
Heavy standards “for the children” pretentious smut for the “adults”.
Inevitable collapse in readership, then in relevance. Followed by cult takeover.
To think it hinged on the assassination of RFK and Hanna Barbera’s Birdman.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-scooby-doos-origins-are-related-robert-kennedys-death-180974856/
And now his son will atone by ridding us of seed oils.
The World is healing.
The libertarian in me notes two things:
(1) Once again, stupid activists and the State ruin everything.
(2) THERE’S AN UNTAPPED MARKET! LET’S GO, GO ,GO!
Their aim was not to protect kids but to protect horrible single mothers from their kids asking them to buy the latest toy they saw in a commercial.
I see this exact phenomenon with my own teens. They don’t watch TV or movies, they watch youtube commentary on TV and movies. They tell me what to rent and what to skip. (They are very skeptical of the Minecraft movie, for instance, and told me not to rent it until they’ve watched commentaries. They told me that Encanto was a good movie, but not to touch Seeing Red, and Wish was never to be allowed in our house.)
Their entertainment is mostly indie stuff on youtube, like you said. Their favorite thing are animated object shows like BFDI. I had no idea they existed until my kids got into them, and it’s this very interesting subculture that is quietly exploding. I expect to start seeing mainstream object shows here in a few years. My teens are busy recording and animating their own. So what we really have are the makers of future culture busy creating the culture they want, and I am all for it. I was a teen in the 90s, and I hated the remakes, the retreads, the sexualization of cartoons that nobody remembers. (Does nobody honestly remember Dreamworks and their adult cartoons? Does nobody remember the sex references in Treasure Planet? Or what about all the crap-past-the-radar in Power Puff Girls? Why am I the only one without rose-colored glasses?) Modern entertainment culture can die in the dumpster fire it created twenty years ago, and about dang time.