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JUST TWEEN YOU AND ME
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JUST TWEEN YOU AND ME
by Daren Foster
OK, OK, stop me if this has happened to you, like, a million times. You go out for a couple after-work drinks with friends and wind up at an industry sponsored kids’ show screening but not before stumbling through a cocktail reception for some Atom Egoyan event.
Yeah, anyway, there’d be a much better payoff to that set-up if Atom Egoyan and the kids’ show screening were connected by anything other than sharing the same building on the same evening but, like life itself, it was nothing more than random happenstance resulting in a slight whiff of disappointment. In fact, technically, it wasn’t even a kids’ show. It was, to use the accepted parlance, a show for the ‘tweens’. Tweens, you say? Wha-wha-what?! If you want me to keep reading, mister, stop using your insider lingo and talk understandable English.
‘Tweens’ is short for ‘betweens’; that nebulous age where children are no longer kids but are not yet teenagers. We’re talking the pre-adolescent age anywhere between 8 and 14. In more concrete terms, it’s the stage where kids have stopped finding Sponge Bob Square Pants de rigueur but aren’t yet ready for The Simpsons. The oeuvre of Atom Egoyan is still years away.
The concept would be much less sinister if marketers’ fingerprints weren’t all over it. A quick Google search of the word reveals a wall of tips and suggestions linked to the seller of products with a minor pushback from those alerting oblivious parents to the sensory assault their children experience at the hands of the purveyors of consumerism. This niche pigeonholing succeeds by dividing and conquering, wooing its very susceptible targets by arbitrarily and very overtly labelling them and then selling them the goods and services that define them as that particular group. Profitably circular, if you ask me.
Yes, I have one gigantic burr up my backside when it comes to marketers, marketing, focus groups and anything and everything to do with the intrusive practices of those selling nothing other than an image, especially when the targets are highly impressionable children. Adults should know better although we often don’t. I am still convinced I get a closer shave and look 10 years younger when I use a Mach V Fusion razor. That’s on me but leave the kids alone.
And yes, my avid distaste for the whole marketing business may also be tinged with a fair degree of personal umbrage. As I creep ever closer to the end of my fourth decade, my status as a key demographic wanes. Don’t hate me because I’m middle-aged. More to the point, as a tail-end baby boomer, I spent my 20s and 30s feeling ten years too young and now, I’m 10 to 20 years too old. Why has no one ever niched me? Rendered thusly asunder, I’ve wandered aimlessly in the desert, not knowing who I was, how to feel, what to buy. How did I ever make it to be this ripe old age without the steady, guiding hand of marketers?
Where were these shapers of citizens when I was a tween in need of someone to tell me what stuff to like and what I needed to buy in order to be the cool guy everyone would surely think me to be if I bought the right stuff? Sure, we weren’t left completely alone in the wilderness. Great minds were hard at work, trying to figure out the best way to make me want to smoke. Sugar coated cereal ads bombarded me every Saturday morning. But nobody was overtly attempting to define who I was and what I wanted to be. How could I possibly be a good tween, an upstanding tween, a consumer driven tween with no shows directed at me, instructing me?
Casting a glance back, way back, to the late-60s, early-70s, during my tween years (before we knew we were tweens), kids’ programming was kids’ programming, consisting of cartoons and puppet driven live action. There was a rough grouping of shows for younger children like Romper Room, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Messrs. Rogers and Dressup. Outside of that, the field was wide open. Newer kids on the animated block, The Flintstones, Spiderman and Scoobydoo battled it out with the old school Looney Tunes for our attention. More freaky fare came in the form of non-cartoons like The Banana Splits and HR Pufnstuf. On Sunday mornings, my sister and I would wake up early to watch old Abbott and Costello movies that a local ABC affiliate ran. Ominously, the carefully audience tested Sesame Street -- perhaps the mother of kids niche programming -- was slowly emerging as a force in children’s television.
Until recently, there was also early primetime that was labelled as family viewing. From 7-9pm, wholesome entertainment reigned, epitomized best by the iconic The Brady Bunch. Over the decades this was a timeslot for the long gone variety programs like The Ed Sullivan Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Carol Burnett Show as well as the less edgy but not necessarily less funny Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters, Happy Days and The Cosby Show.
That was back then when you could count the number of television channels on one hand. Programming was done in broad strokes. As the number of channels increased, the audience was divvied up into smaller and smaller portions. Children’s TV went plural, segmented into pre-schoolers, grade schoolers, tweens, and teens. I have it from an inside source that marketers and TV execs are now eying the untapped infant demographic. You know, the ones who still surprise themselves when their own fist appears in front of their face. Audience fragmentation may have proven to be a headache for the networks but it’s been a boon for advertisers.
So, what is the newly minted tween market watching these days? Judging from the screening and follow-up discussion I sat through, tweens like to watch shows featuring characters a couple years older than they are, your basic zit-free and hormonally uncharged full-fledged teenagers. It is a highly-sanitized, laugh track filled world where everyone’s cute and quick with the comeback. No one utters words like ‘idiot’ and even the most chaste of kisses is argued over and orchestrated to be rendered nearly meaningless. You know, exactly how life and high school isn’t.
Not that anyone’s ever looked to television for a realistic portrayal of life, warts and all. No one I knew growing up wanted to be just like Greg Brady although there were those who had a crush on Marsha. Shaggy was cool but, hey, he was only a cartoon character and only much later did we find out that he and Scooby were high all the time. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that dropping an anvil on somebody’s head would cause serious injury. Television was television. Life was life.With advertiser and marketing driven products, the idealized world is to be emulated, not enjoyed from a distance. Look this way and you’ll be popular. Talk like this and the opposite sex will swoon (but not in that kind of way). Selfless behaviour is not its own reward but gets you tickets to the hottest concert in town. It’s like watching the Gap mannequins come to life and put on a show. No, not a show but a twenty-two minute commercial for a lifestyle very few kids will ever attain and shouldn’t want to even if they could.
**sigh**
Life would be so much simpler and I’d be whole lot happier if I didn’t love TV so much.
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