One month into the TV industry’s self-imposed ratings system, parents are just as confused as Nick is about how to protect children from unwanted Tori Spelling encounters. In a study by the Pew media-research center, 42 percent of respondents said the ratings were only “somewhat helpful” and 54 percent hadn’t even noticed them. “Parents don’t feel that this is enough direction,” says Karen Tucker, author of “Stay Tuned! Raising Media Savvy Kids in the Age of the Channel-Surfing Couch Potato.” (Nick appeared in the home-video version of the book.) A common complaint is that the ratings are age-based, not content-based. Media watchdog Kathryn Montgomery complains that “there’s this black-hole category of PG into which just about everything goes.” For instance:
‘Friends’ (NBC). Chandler is depressed because he sees a woman he had broken up with laughing with one of her girlfriends. To which his roommate, Joey, responds, “Yeah, but you ended up having sex with both of them that afternoon.”
‘Life’s Work’ (ABC). A lawyer and her co-workers joke about a case in which a man was caught masturbating against a tree. The dictionary definition of the word penis is read aloud.
‘The X-Files’ (Fox). A story about a lethal fungus includes such gross-out scenes as rotting sheep, a dead man with his face eaten away by the fungus and another corpse covered in the fatal mold.
The list goes on. Sure, PG stands for Parental Guidance. But couldn’t some of this stuff be considered TV-14 (“inappropriate for children under 14”) or even TV-M (“for mature audiences only”)? The post-Super Bowl “X-Files,” the focus of which was a frequently displayed severed head, got a TV-14. But so far no network program has been deemed hard-core enough to be branded M. “M was really designed for cable,” says CBS senior VP Martin Franks. He and other network execs know that, just as an NC-17 rating means death at the box office for a feature film, an M would be the scarlet letter that would scare off advertisers and ratings points for a TV show.
Inconsistencies abound. Why is Letterman PG when Jay Leno is TV-14? (Each network determines its own ratings.) There are other, practical problems, too. The rating icons appear in the corner of the screen for only 15 seconds at the beginning of the program. Blink or channel-surf, and you miss it. “Good” ratings like TV-Y (all children), TV-Y7 (7 and older) or TV-G (all audiences) will be like spinach to kids, says children’s television activist Peggy Charren, a good-for-you turnoff. And what about promos? They often sell the sexiest stuff a show has to offer–rating-free. Industry spokesman Jack Valenti calls this a “shakedown period” for the new system, but says there are plans for improvement, like making the icon bigger and leaving it on the screen for another five seconds. The Los Angeles Times and TV Guide have started rating their TV listings, which should help give parents more advance warning of mature material. But skeptics maintain that not until all TVs are equipped with V-chips to block out unwanted sex and violence will kids’ viewing habits be truly hard-wired with parental discretion. And by then, they’ll be grown-up anyway.
