I’ve been pondering our tv habits. For the first 6 years of life I only let the kids watch PBS, but for the past year I’ve allowed the Disney Channel. During that same year, there has been a marked increase in sassiness, preening in front of the mirror, and eye rolling in our house. I was pretty much ready to blame it on Hannah Montana (whom I personally find very entertaining!), when I started thinking about the tv shows of my youth.
Shortly after the Sesame Street, Electric Company and Wild Kingdom era, I remember watching “grown-up shows.” While the Disney channel focuses on tweens, these shows were more for teens and adults. I’m talking Three's Company, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island. We had a pretty steady diet of these at our house throughout the 70’s.
I missed the more wholesome family fare of The Cosby Show, Family Ties and Growing Pains in the 80’s because by that time my parents had put the kibosh on weeknight tv viewing and I was too swamped with homework to put up a fight.
I think of Three's Company with its bedswapping, boob jiggling and gay mocking. I think of The Love Boat with a whole lotta sex and not a whole lotta love. I mean Doc was terribly unattractive, but he had a different woman in his cabin every night!
And Julie McCoy was a coke-head. Ok, I know that was in her off-screen life, but it’s not as if I couldn’t read the National Enquirer headlines for myself in the grocery store line. Fantasy Island? Super sleazy and super creepy (I’m remembering lots of lightning flashes and voodoo). This doesn’t even include the topics of war, drinking, extramarital affairs-- not to mention cross dressing-- on M*A*S*H.
The show we weren’t allowed to watch was Charlie’s Angels. Our way around that was to have our friends, the Joneses, audiotape episodes for us. Yep, they’d hold a cassette player up to the tv and record the show for us and let us listen to it later. Inspired! We had stacks of Charlie’s Angels trading cards and debated the superiority of one Angel to another. Years later we got to watch the repeats during the summer. Pure bliss.
I’m just wondering if letting my kids watch “kids’” shows, and limiting them to that, is causing them to soak in this weird alternate universe of fashion, bubble gum rock, crushes, and idiotic parents. Would it be better to let them watch some adult tv, such as Tom’s and my favorite reality show The Amazing Race or should we throw the tv out the window altogether? It’s not like I became a bedswapping, coke-snorting voodoo queen by watching the shows of my youth. I doubt any of it rubbed off on me at all. On the other hand, I do see some imitation of these tween shows in my kids and I don’t care for it. Hmmmm.
BTW, who was your favorite “Angel?”
