How ACT Helped Kill Adolescent Entertainment

What are kids watching these days? Gen Y's nostalgic myopia for Saturday morning cartoons and PG-13 horror flicks can leave them blinkered when it comes to how their now-adolescent children are entertaining themselves.This piece, wherein Variety indulges in handwringing over teens rejecting smut in movies and TV shows, seems like a positive sign. But left unexamined is the pressing question of why kids are watching adult-oriented entertainment product to begin with.One overlooked answer has been championed by author JD Cowan for a while now. He attributed the death of kids' entertainment and the rising pornification of adult fare back before the Corona-chan lockdowns.The erosion of entertainment for adolescents, coupled with the rise of increasingly explicit adult content, represents one of the most underexamined phenomena in modern media. While many factors contribute to this trend, myopic media activism—exemplified by Peggy Charren’s Action for Children’s Television—played a pivotal role.By pushing for sweeping regulations that reshaped children's programming without offering concrete alternatives, ACT inadvertently narrowed the entertainment pipeline for teens. The resulting vacuum forced adolescents into a media funnel where adult content became their primary option, even as it became more sexually explicit. This feedback loop has led to a growing disengagement from media by younger audiences, whose needs continue to be neglected.Peggy Charren founded ACT in the late 1960s to advocate for higher-quality children's programming. The movement gained significant momentum, leading to Congressional hearings and legislation like the Children’s Television Act of 1990. The act imposed strict guidelines on broadcasters, requiring them to air a certain number of hours of educational programming for children and discouraging excessive commercialism in kids’ shows.While these initiatives aimed to protect children, they ignored the transitional phase of adolescence. The post-regulation landscape saw the collapse of many once-thriving teen-oriented shows, with networks shifting focus to comply with these mandates. Shows catering to "in-betweeners"—those too old for educational content but too young for adult themes—dwindled.At the same time, deregulation in other areas of media incentivized content creators to sleaze up adult programming. The profusion of sex in movies and TV skyrocketed during the same period, with shows like Sex and the City and Game of Thrones becoming cultural juggernauts. This sharp entertainment dichotomy left teens stranded. Their age-appropriate content was gone, and what remained was increasingly alienating.Related: The Last of the Third PlacesTeenagers, caught in the aftermath of ACT, found themselves with few media choices that reflected their developmental stage. Once, films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off provided relatable stories for adolescents. Today, much of what’s marketed as “teen entertainment” skews either toward sanitized Disneyesque slop or low-key pornography.As a result, teens are turning away from traditional media. A 2023 Pew Research study noted a sharp decline in adolescent viewership of scripted television and feature films, with platforms like TikTok and YouTube dominating their media consumption. These platforms fill the void with user-generated screen candy that, while engaging, lacks the craft and heart of 1980s coming-of-age films.Which is more an indictment of YouTube than praise for 80s films.Related: Ferris Bueller's Day OffAt the other end of the spectrum, adult entertainment continues its slide into the Second Circle of Hell. Major TV studios have doubled down on smut, ostensibly to attract older audiences. Yet the alienation effect is pronounced for teens, who are neither emotionally invested in nor comfortable having porn shoved in their faces.What's kind of ironic is that the cliché of a group of young teens huddling together in lurid awe at the Playboy one of them stole from his dad's sock drawer was a mainstay of 80s teen flicks. So consider how much worse ordinary adult programming on cable and streaming is now if it has teens rushing for the exits.The convergence of these two effects has created a vicious cycle: Fewer teens watching adult-targeted films and TV shows leads studios to further cater to their core adult audience, which further alienates adolescents. And the lack of age-appropriate options deprives teens of formative cultural experience, which detaches them from mainstream entertainment.So those who might object "What about MCU movies?" miss the point that the medium is the message. Teens aren't just shunning adult-themed shows and films. They're dropping out of TV and movies altogether in favor of the media that give them the entertainment they want. Which means that the studios who keep ratcheting up their products' smut content are probably ruining the industry for everyone else.In other words, series like Game of Thrones might counterintuitively be killing TV and streaming, while 50 Shades of Grey was another nail in Hollywood's coffin.Related: "Hollywood Is in Shambles"The dual forces of myopic media activism and the hypersexualizing of entertainment have created a perfect storm for TV, streaming, and Hollywood. By effectively erasing the middle ground between children’s programming and adult-oriented content, meddling activists and greedy studios have left teens to fall through the cracks.Stopping the adolescent exodus would require the entertainment industry to acknowledge the long-term damage caused by underserving kids. In crass marketing terms studio heads might understand, teenagers are a vital audience segment; not just for their immediate market value but as the foundation for lifelong media engagement. By pandering only to adults, studios and networks are eating the seed corn.Related: Why People Are Fleeing Streaming Services in DrovesThe takeaway is that short-sighted media activism of the kind typified by Peggy Charren’s ACT led the entertainment industry to neglect teenage audiences. Combined with the increasing explicitness of adult content, teens find themselves increasingly alienated from both ends of the media spectrum. And Hollywood and the networks face an untenable situation.If the entertainment industry wants to regain the loyalty of younger audiences, it must learn from the mistakes of the past. Judging by Hollywood's and the networks' track record, betting that they'll have a road to Damascus moment is a longshot.

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