No kidding

Locally produced children's shows have all but vanished -- the unintended victims of good intentions

Television by Andy Levinsky

Which is the better definition of informational programming for children: (a) a roundtable discussion among peers focusing on young-people's issues in the community, or (b) an episode of the NBC sitcom Saved by the Bell: The New Class? If you selected (b), your idea of educational television is probably the Brady Bunch episode in which Greg gets caught smoking and is reprimanded by his parents. If you chose (a), you may be sorry to hear that the kids' shows your local TV station used to produce have probably been squeezed out by programs like (b), generic entertainment shows injected with simplistic "pro-social" messages in order to appear educational. And you may be surprised to learn that the culprit behind this change is one of the best-intentioned and most potentially beneficial laws in broadcast history.

I was surprised. The year before the Children's Television Act of 1990 became law, I became the producer of a community-oriented teen talk show for WBZ-TV (Channel 4) in Boston, a station with a long history of doing its own programming for young people, from Boomtown to Superkids (sort of a junior Evening Magazine) to the talk show I produced, Rap Around. Because the Children's Television Act makes each station's most valuable asset -- its license -- partially contingent upon service to children, I fully expected an expanding commitment to shows such as ours, even from stations that hadn't traditionally been so active.

But the wording of the act, other than providing a mechanism for limiting the number of ads per hour of children's programming, was vague and subjective. Even after it became law, individual stations interpreted their responsibility differently. Some made a genuine effort, buying new educational shows from syndicators or producing their own, but others tried to palm off shows like The Jetsons as fulfilling their requirements for license renewal.

As a result, in 1996 CTA proponents such as US Representative Edward Markey (D-Malden) and Peggy Charren, founder of the now-disbanded Newton-based national parents' advocacy group Action for Children's Television, helped pass the "Three Hour Rule," which requires local stations either to air at least three hours a week of educational programming or to submit to more-thorough scrutiny at license-renewal time. The vast majority of stations chose the first option. So far, so good.

But shortly after the Three Hour Rule was enacted, I got a call from the children's producer at our sister station in Philadelphia. Their show had just been canceled. "We had to drop production on the program . . . and pick up all children's programming from the network," a station representative explained in a survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center in 1997. And three days before the first anniversary of the new rule's implementation, Rap Around was gone as well.

Almost as soon as the Three Hour Rule went into effect, the networks decided to provide their affiliates with the entire three hours of required educational programming, which eliminated the incentive -- and, in many cases, the available time slots -- for stations to do shows of their own. Almost immediately, the number of local children's programs began to decline. A study by Dale Kunkel, an associate professor of communications at the University of California at Santa Barbara, on the effects of the Children's Television Act found that "only nine of the 48 stations examined presented any locally produced children's programming, and those that did provided relatively little of it." This year alone, the National Association of Broadcasters saw a 29.2 percent decrease in applications for its annual Service to Children Awards, presumably reflecting the dwindling number of stations that have any shows of their own left to submit.

The Annenberg survey found that "local broadcasters believe that their communities do not care about their children's-educational-programming efforts." Researcher Amy B. Jordan, who conducted the study, said the loss of local shows has "become more and more endemic to children's programming since the Three Hour Rule," adding, "I think it's a shame."

Why does it matter whether the show a child is watching was made in your hometown or in Hollywood? As the report suggests, locally produced programs help stations "stay in touch with the needs and interests of the children and parents in the community."

Then there's the question of just how educational those network shows really are. According to a report issued this year by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the number of network children's shows labeled "highly educational" has fallen from 43 percent to 29 percent since the implementation of the Three Hour Rule. Within that category, teen shows defined as "high quality" plummeted from 80.6 percent to just 28.3 percent. After viewing the new season of Saturday-morning shows on CBS, NBC, and Fox, Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education told Variety, "We have real concerns that networks are not committing significant resources to quality educational programming."

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The architects of the rule were reluctant to specify the type or the origin of shows that would qualify as educational, citing concerns about content regulation. That's understandable; what's unfortunate is their failure to anticipate the effect their legislation would have on local programming and to come up with a solution. Under the new rules, broadcasters have no motivation to do anything more than air the three hours of programs their network feeds them.

Representative Markey insists that broadcasters should make the extra effort anyway because "it's good for the children in [their] viewing area . . . and that is the reward in and of itself." But if most stations gave up network air time and revenues out of the goodness of their hearts, the new laws wouldn't have been necessary in the first place. Critics suggest it's time to consider giving stations some type of "extra credit" for going above and beyond -- for example, by exceeding the three-hour minimum or investing in children's shows of their own.

Local programming is not the only issue, however. Amy Jordan sees "less creativity in children's programming [among network shows] than there has been in years past" because the networks are now drawing from just one or two production companies for their whole lineup. "Hang Time looks like Saved by the Bell, which looks like City Guys [on NBC]," Jordan says, while "Pepper Ann looks like Recess [on ABC]." CBS, for the first time, has turned its entire slate of six half-hour shows over to a single supplier. It presents a familiar paradox: more shows, less diversity.

Markey, nevertheless, defends the CTA. "On the balance," he says, "I know the Children's Television Act is a much better deal than the situation we had before." And he's not wrong -- the law has limited commercial time and increased the amount of children's programming on most stations, two significant achievements. But if this law is to live up to its enormous potential, everyone must be willing to address issues not only of quantity but of quality as well. Otherwise, the new-and-improved educational lineups may turn out to be little more than the usual cartoons and sitcoms with "Just Say No" messages tacked on, and children's-television advocates will be left wondering what the whole fight was for.

Andy Levinsky is an independent children's-television producer and freelance writer based in Newton.