Racy Programs Creeping Into Family Hour

When David Nemer sat down with his 12-year-old daughter one night recently to watch a television sitcom--a treat for finishing her homework early--he was shocked by the behavior he saw in his living room. Two young adults on their first date were groveling on the couch, tearing each other’s clothes off, in the 8:30 p.m. season premiere of a CBS series called “Can’t Hurry Love.”

“I turned to her and said, ‘We really can’t watch this anymore. I have to turn this off now,’ ” said Nemer, 46, who lives in Glendale. And he did.

“That’s unusual,” he recounted later. “But I find that information to be counter to what we’re trying to teach our child. It’s not the kind of thing you want to see in what’s called ‘the family viewing hour.’ ”

Nemer is one of many parents across America who no longer feel comfortable letting their children watch network television unsupervised from 8 to 9 p.m., an hour that broadcasters once set aside as a safe haven for family programming--populated over the years by the wide-eyed siblings in “The Brady Bunch,” the wholesome teen-agers in “Happy Days,” the idealized Huxtables in “The Cosby Show” and the cherubic Olsen twins in “Full House.”

This fall, family hour viewers have been confronted with a twice-divorced actress and her martini-swilling best friend in “Cybill,” the trials of a young married couple in “Mad About You,” and the loose-living singles in “Friends,” “The Single Guy,” “Living Single,” “Almost Perfect,” “The Drew Carey Show,” “The Crew,” “Ellen,” “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills 90210.”

ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox have virtually abandoned prime-time programs with appeal to children in their rush to compete for the age group advertisers are clamoring to reach: young adults. The traditional family viewing hour--which on Sundays starts at 7 p.m. and stretches two hours--is now rife with explicit sexual references, off-color language and mature themes.

The programming trend has raised red flags from child advocates and special interest groups, which argue that children pattern their attitudes, behavior and even language after what they see on television.

“We have to increasingly realize we have a troubled popular culture that has to be brought under control,” said David Popenoe, co-chairman of the New York-based Council on Families in America. “You get the feeling that no holds are barred on television. There’s very little discussion of anyone getting AIDS or sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted children, except occasionally, because those things aren’t funny.”

And children are watching: According to Nielsen Media Research, the national audience of youngsters 2 to 11 viewing one of the four major broadcast networks between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. during the week of Sept. 25-Oct. 1 ranged from a low of 4.8 million on Wednesday and Saturday to a high of 7 million on Sunday.

Network executives defend their actions as sound business judgment. They say they used to be able to count on parents watching family programming with their children, but no longer. With the profusion of TV sets and viewing alternatives in the home, network executives say a significant number of children move to other rooms to watch Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network on cable, to re-watch their favorite videotape or to play video games.

“I’ll tell you, I don’t think you’ll ever find a successful schedule where 8 p.m. was geared toward children,” said NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield. “It’s just not the case, historically. You can find schedules geared for audiences of all ages, which includes family audiences. But I can assure you that when ‘All in the Family’ or ‘MASH’ played at 8 p.m., and they did, there was something in those shows for everyone.”

Littlefield concedes that the networks are allowing more adult content into the 8 p.m. hour, but he doesn’t think it’s the problem that critics do. “Families are forever changing,” he said, “and what was considered family entertainment a decade ago is slightly different today.”

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The move away from family programming began in the late 1980s, when the upstart Fox network carved out a profitable slice of the Big Three viewing audience by countering them with racy programming for young adults, such as “Married . . . With Children,” “In Living Color” and “Martin.” The trend was influenced by economics and changing social values.

“You had a breakdown of the nuclear family, coinciding with a growing number of television sets in homes,” said Doug Binzak, senior vice president of scheduling and marketing strategy for Fox. “So you’re looking at a much different society now. There are many TV sets and many viewing choices to go with them. In the olden days, the three networks could be all things to all people, and by default all people watched. Today, it’s harder to program a show that can reach many people and bring them together.”

The networks have narrowed their target viewing audience to adults, primarily between the ages of 18 and 49, because advertisers believe they are the key consumers in America. As a result, parents have to stay alert as they sift through the heavy adult content in shows such as “The Crew,” a sitcom about airline flight attendants that Fox broadcasts Thursdays at 8:30 p.m.

In a recent episode--watched by nearly 1 million children between the ages of 2 and 5--two male flight attendants mentioned drugs to a pilot who had flown in Vietnam. The pilot said he had never used drugs there because he thought it was wrong.

Good wholesome message, right? Think again. “I was saving my money for hookers,” the pilot explained.

Does such a sexual reference soar over the heads of young children, as the networks claim, or does it hit them right between the eyes?

“Granted, a lot of that humor goes right over their heads,” said Dr. George Comerci, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “But, certainly, a child is able to see what’s going on in terms of the action itself. The research is abundant that children do learn from TV, and they learn good as well as bad.”

A report on “Sex and the Mass Media,” funded by the Kaiser Family Foundation and released in September, concluded that the media’s “love affair with sex and romance” contributes to irresponsible sexual behavior among young people, including unplanned and unwanted pregnancies.

The report cited one study that found that 40% of the sexual behaviors recorded in prime time--and often accompanied by a laugh track--fit the legal definition of sexual harassment. Another study examined “sex talk” in prime time, concluding that many family hour shows, including Fox’s “Martin,” talked about sex 50% of the time. Some of the messages conveyed were that male sexuality equates to masculinity, women’s bodies are sexual objects and sex is recreational, often involving games and competition.

“In terms of modeling behavior, the older child particularly will repeat what he or she sees on TV,” Comerci said, “while the adolescent develops a personal attitude about the life and world he or she lives in as a result of what they’re seeing on television. So if you’re seeing a lot of sexually active shows, the younger or middle adolescent gets the idea that’s the way the world is.”

Language on television also is getting coarser. Barbara K. Kaye, a professor at Southern Illinois University, studied two weeks of prime time on the four networks in 1990 and again last year. She found that objectionable language--defined as profanity, epithets and scatological words--increased 45% during that period, and 94% in the traditional family hour.

“Younger viewers were just as likely to hear offensive or indecent words in the first hour of prime time as older viewers tuning into the later hour of prime time,” Kaye said.

“What’s happening,” she said, “is that language once banned from the airwaves is being delivered and no one’s noticing. Television viewers are becoming so desensitized to language, so accustomed to hearing it, words just don’t have the impact they used to. But cussing is a form of verbal assault or verbal violence. When they hear that on television, the TV audience, especially young children, may come to believe cussing or verbally assaulting others is an acceptable way to express anger or disappointment.”

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The broadcast networks have always recognized that children are a big part of the audience during the early evening. For that reason, the concept of the family viewing hour was always honored, at least informally.

It briefly became an official industry policy in 1975, when ABC, CBS and NBC agreed not to schedule programs involving sexual situations, adult language and violence in the first hour of prime time. But a federal judge struck down the rule on 1st Amendment grounds, declaring that the networks had only agreed to it under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission.

But the policy continued informally into the 1980s, when things began to unravel in the 8 p.m. hour with the titillation in “Charlie’s Angels,” the sexy halter tops and moonshine in “The Dukes of Hazzard” and the excessive body count in “The A-Team.” Then came Fox.

Still, many viewers may only be noticing the extent of the transformation this fall. ABC, the most family friendly network over the years, still features a children’s lineup on Friday nights, but gone is its long-running, child-friendly “Full House,” replaced on Tuesday nights by “Roseanne,” which previously ran at 9 p.m. Similar adult fare is found across the board.

Network executives say they are reacting to marketplace forces and insist that parents must take responsibility for what their children watch. Some acknowledge that the trend toward adult programming may have gone too far, but they are not optimistic about its changing in the near future.

ABC Entertainment President Ted Harbert got another lesson in the power of television when he came home early one recent night to find his two children, ages 2 and 6, mesmerized by an hour of syndicated repeats of “Full House” and “Family Matters.” He wonders what children are making of all the adult subject matter that they’re exposed to today.

“Parents are a much more powerful force than any television show,” Harbert said. “If the parent cannot or chooses not to be that powerful force, then television’s power grows exponentially. That leaves me in the extremely challenging--bordering on precarious--position of furthering the economic health of this company by delivering the audiences that our sales department can sell to advertisers, while at the same time trying extremely hard to take seriously my responsibility as a parent and a broadcaster.”

Harbert has strong words for parents or critics who expect network television to take responsibility for rearing America’s children. He understands that families today face tough economic situations, with more working parents and unsupervised children, but says that does not shift the burden onto television.

“In crystal-clear terms, the reason ‘Ellen’ is now on Wednesdays at 8 p.m., and not a show like ‘Sister, Sister’ or ‘Thunder Alley,’ is because millions of mothers went to another room to watch ‘Beverly Hills 90210,’ instead of watching a family-oriented show with kids in it,” he says. “It’s just true. Nobody can deny it. Frankly, it’s not about parents having to work, or not being able to monitor their kids. It’s about adults wanting to see a sexy show aimed for them, so they leave their kids in another room to watch it alone.”

ABC has not given up on families, he said, but it has shifted the emphasis away from family programs driven by kids, such as “Full House” and “Family Matters,” to family programs driven by adult humor, such as “Home Improvement” and “Roseanne.”

Sadly, Harbert said, using family as a promotional tool, while once a sign of prestige, now often sounds the death knell for a program. This fall, ABC shifted its “Family Movie” from 8 to 9 p.m. on Saturday nights and renamed it “Saturday Night at the Movies” because people didn’t tune in to the family fare last season.

“I figured, why disqualify myself from millions of viewers by using family in the title?” Harbert said.

Next year, when Disney presumably will have taken ownership of ABC, he hopes to make family programs “cool” again by changing Saturday nights to “The Disney Family Movie.”

At CBS, Entertainment President Leslie Moonves also sees a need to make changes in the 8-9 p.m. programming block. “We’re going to need to address the family issue more in the coming year, or we’re going to lose more and more viewers to cable and other sources,” he said, citing the fact that basic cable ratings are up this season while the broadcast networks are collectively down.

His own three children, ages 7 to 11, watch Nickelodeon more than anything else, Moonves said.

But with advertisers placing a premium value on adults 18 to 49, and with Fox airing the sexy “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Melrose Place” in 8 p.m. time slots, Moonves said the marketplace is too cutthroat for him to try to build a children’s audience right now.

NBC says there isn’t really a problem--at least not on its network. Even though such NBC comedies as “Friends,” “Single Guy” and “NewsRadio” trade heavily in sexual humor, programming chief Littlefield maintains that each one carries a moral message as well.

NBC’s philosophy remains to attract the broadest audience possible at all hours of the evening, albeit with programs that focus primarily on young adults. Littlefield cited “Friends” as a prototype show for the network.

“It’s just a flat-out hit with everyone,” Littlefield said. “In my household, we often are watching the Thursday night lineup with three generations sitting together: our kids and my in-laws. That’s truly what a broadcast network wants to do. We’re not cable. We’re not a niche service. We’re broadcasters, and that’s our goal. At 8 p.m., our goal is not to alienate anybody. But at the same time, it’s foolish to target one narrow band of audience, only kids.”

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