I host Ankler Agenda and covered the DGA v. WGA fight over directors’ new pilot credit and how to finance an indie TV series now, and I’ve interviewed California AG Rob Bonta about the fight to stop the Paramount merger.
There’s a TV ratings chart that still haunts one former Disney Channel executive a decade after leaving the House of Mouse: a top 10 list of the most popular shows among 6- to 11-year-olds.
On the chart were the usual suspects, like Disney Channel’s Jessie and Dog With a Blog… but then alongside them were very not-for-kids shows like Empire and The Walking Dead. Flash forward to last June, when school was out for summer, and the Nielsen top 10 among 6- to 17-year-olds was similarly punctuated by gorier fare: Right behind leaders Ginny & Georgia and Bluey was the violent dystopian series Squid Game, which had just released its third and final season on Netflix.
“Six-year-olds should not be watching The Walking Dead. They shouldn’t be watching Squid Game,” laments this longtime family programming exec, concluding that the disconnect isn’t necessarily the fault of parents but of the TV executives programming for their kids. “There’s less for them. We’ve given up [as an industry]. They’re gravitating toward adult fare.”
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That can have a particularly profound impact on young male audiences. In a world where tween and teen boys have already shifted much of their screentime to gaming and online videos, and nearly three-quarters of boys routinely run into content from “masculinity influencers” — as dramatized in Netflix’s Adolescence, to great effect — what’s on TV isn’t just a matter of racking up viewers, it’s a matter of shaping the next gen.
“For many young men who are in these high-octane game spaces or in these Manosphere spaces, they’re not being given proper frameworks to learn how to build relationships and how to talk about and even express their feelings,” says Kareem Edouard, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Drexel University School of Education and the creative producer of PBS’ Work It Out Wombats!
“It feels like we’ve surrendered boys to video games, Marvel movies, Twitch and YouTube in particular, and [they’re] getting indoctrinated into toxic masculinity,” echoes the former Disney Channel exec. “That’s where all of these boys are going down the rabbit hole.”
And that vacuum doesn’t stay empty. Boys are forming intense relationships with the personalities they encounter elsewhere — on YouTube and Twitch, in podcasts, gaming and other male-dominated corners of online culture — where the models of masculinity can look very different from anything traditional kids’ television once provided.
Along with the Disney Channel exec and Edouard, I spoke to several producers and academics about why the market is so resistant to young male protagonists who aren’t caped crusaders — and what the research says boys and young men actually want to watch. The answers cut sharply against Hollywood’s conventional wisdom.
Today, I’ll share with you:
- Surprising research about the stories boys really want to see onscreen — about themselves, girls and men
- Why kids keep “watching up,” and what they take away from shows made for older audiences
- The “missing middle” programming gap once kids get too old for Bluey
- Why buyers turn away from shows for boys, especially tweens, even though they’re an audience “target”
- Why Hollywood’s addiction to superheroes and IP goes double when it comes to programming for young males
- Two hit kids’ shows that give boy characters a wider range of emotions — but still have to give them superpowers
- Why boys form such strong bonds with onscreen characters, and how shows can help them build community IRL
Don’t stop here
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Comments
The article diagnoses boys as broken and prescribes therapy-flavored television – vulnerability lessons, friendship tutorials, introspection training – when the actual deficit is stories of competence, risk, and merit, which boys have always sought out and which the industry has systematically censored.
The survey is nothing more than marketing material; the entire empirical case rests on one research center’s survey work, interpreted by that center’s own founder, whose organization exists for the stated purpose of steering studios toward the “authentic and inclusive” content that alienated young men in the first place.
The boys themselves ranked superheroes and action at the top of their own list; the vulnerability-and-friendship framing is interpretation the adults layered on afterward – and appears nowhere in the survey data. The premise that boys need to be taught “how to make a friend” by a writers’ room treats normal male development as a pathology to be corrected – and it’s the same infantilizing instinct these boys already rejected.
As usual, this is H’wood surveying the wreckage and concluding the audience is the problem. We don’t need another “generation of men raised by women.”
I am disappointed that this article names the One Piece live action series, but does not actually mention anime even once.
Why do we think One Piece’s global popularity came about? It certainly didn’t sprout in a field like a Cabbage Patch Kid, and it isn’t some ratings or cultural one-off. The larger context is that Japan for decades was the only market that consistently developed an IP ecosystem for YA boys action content –> and they have the secret sauce for integrating friendship themes and emotional stakes (aka the “vulnerability”) with the battle action.
Once this content became widely accessible online, that’s where the kids vanished. Now 10 years later they are the widely-reported anime-loving Gen Z….but those viewing habits and tastes started in the schoolyard.
I love The Ankler’s reporting, but this article is missing links and narrowly biased to US entertainment dogma in a globalized entertainment market. This is unfortunately why Kidscreen is dead.
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