The Children of Sunset Boulevard
Stein, Benjamin J.
Benjamin J. Stein
THE CHILDREN OF SUNSET BOULEVARD
Who's watching the kids?
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Lunch last week at the commissary at MGM with W., a woman television producer who...
...What's your favorite kind of date...
...When the crusty old widower father has a romantic problem, the daughters give him the Bronx cheer and the back of their teenage hands...
...I love Pizza Hut," he adds...
...Often, as in "Facts of Life," "Powers of Matthew Star," or "Fame," we see them completely removed from their parents...
...I wish I could tell you that the scene in the sound stage at MGM was just the working out of a pedophiliac fantasy by a powerful TV producer...
...Why has America suddenly decided that it wants to see children on TV complain about not having dates or about having acne before a dance or about not being able to go on a ski trip or not having the "Vector" video game cartridge instead of shows about car chases or shootouts on city streets or invaders from outer space or wife-swapping or getting rich quick...
...he asks the girls after their "audition...
...That is the part that confuses me...
...10 p.m.-ABC-"20-20"-Major segment on how to prevent adolescent acne...
...That's why producers who would rather drive a Ford than eat at the Pizza' Hut gossip with fifteen-year-olds about the girls' dream dates...
...The girls were reading an audition scene which the television producer had written...
...The synthetic child, after all, may be a little self-obsessed creep, but he does not ever come home at age fifteen reeking of gin and marijuana...
...9 p.m.-NBC-"Facts of Life"- Purely by chance, a fifteen-year-old girl learns that her favorite teacher is leaving school...
...Child TV watchers in prime time are not a large group and are utterly unimportant to advertisers...
...The TV child can be unsympathetic to Mom's problems, but he will never show up with a boyfriend in dreadlocks...
...In fact, the great majority of the viewers of the kids' shows are men and women between the ages of 25 and 49...
...What were her views on the subject...
...She gave me the only answer I expected...
...On every studio lot, in every casting office, on every day of the week, the lines of children, boys and girls, equally fetching, equally fevered with ambition, reach out the door, and the next day the casting calls go out again...
...The TV child can be arrogant and self-centered, but he never refuses to clean up his room, certainly never needs to be changed...
...Little Jason and Lisbeth are there in the rec room waiting to be played with, but the parents prefer to spend time with Gary Coleman and Amy Linker...
...Waiting outside in the January sunshine was a group of terrifying-looking mothers reading Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Casting Call, and the Drama-Logue...
...Prime-time shows with kiddies as major players have increased from almost none ten years ago to close to half of all regularly scheduled prime-time shows today...
...9:30 p.m.-NBC-"Family Ties" -Two small children taunt an FBI agent while their parents look on admiring the kids' effrontery...
...9 p.m.-NBC-"Gimme a Break" -Chaos ensues when the young teenage girl of the family may have posed for a dirty magazine...
...o Should I laugh or cry...
...Ratings demographics tell us that tens of millions of Americans are watching those TV kids even while their own children are right there in the home...
...After all, there are plenty of nice kids on TV, too, and TV producers are only showing children as they know them...
...There are a lot of shows on television about children from preteen to upper teens...
...But the evidence is indisputable that tens of millions of Mommies and Daddies who could be spending their time playing or talking with their own kiddies-who are right there in the home-are instead watching children on TV...
...If a parent ever does begin punishment, as when Archie Bunkei sends his niece to her room for giving him the raspberry at the dinner table, the parent (Archie) will be up in the niece's room literally on hands and knees, pleading for her forgiveness before the end of the show...
...Thursday: 8 p.m.-NBC-"Fame"-Two fifteen-year-olds fall in love, chaos ensues when a teenage boy may have posed for a dirty magazine...
...I have something to show you, boychick," she said...
...The parents of America, in large numbers, are choosing the synthetic child of television in preference to the real children in their own lives...
...There will always be enough dissatisfied, frustrated stage mothers in Los Angeles shoving their children out to auditions...
...That's the part that makes me wonder whether to laugh or cry...
...You want to see the direction of the media...
...Lunch last week at the commissary at MGM with W., a woman television producer who makes as much money as the Emir of Kuwait on a good day...
...They had anxiety written on their faces as clearly as on a man on death row...
...Why shouldn't we have synthetic children...
...Nor is the amazing part the fact that so many children on TV are spoiled little brats who show only the most snickering contempt for anyone's problems but theirs...
...The modal parent/child relationship is that of "Gimme a Break...
...Come with me, kid...
...Is it because there are so many children in the audience...
...As dialogue, all three of them discuss what "totally radical" boys go to their junior high school...
...The kids are gone somewhere...
...Jesus Christ," says the producer under his breath...
...Yes, we all remember "Father Knows Best," "The Partridge Family," "Ozzie and Harriet," "Leave It To Beaver...
...To some extent, an extent that could never be measured precisely in any event, the TV child, the synthetic child, has won a large niche in adult America's heart, replacing, to some extent, the affection and attraction of real children...
...Yes, there have always been shows with children...
...In the scene, one of the girls does push-ups while another does chin-ups on a steel bar, while the third does her nails...
...Benjy," she said, "let me put you on hold...
...It is as if all the kid shows of the past were on, multiplied by five, right this minute...
...But the size of today's phenomenon dwarfs the past...
...Of the new sitcoms that aired last season, more than seventy percent centered on children...
...More time was spent watching children's shows on prime time than in manufacturing all the automobiles, steel, and chemicals in the United States in 1982...
...Behind those girls was a line of other fifteen-year-old girls reaching so far into the darkness that I literally could not see the end of the line...
...Wednesday: 9 p.m.-CBS-"Running Out"- The story of the efforts of a runaway mother and a strict father to compete for the attention of a twelve-year-old giri...
...The amazing part, the part that leaves me in a daze within a daze, is that the American people have suffered, even invited, the juveniliza-tion of the television medium to a degree that would have struck me as inconceivable only five years ago...
...I like the idea of a date with Richard Gere where he shows up in a black Ferrari 308, takes me to the movies, then we get pizza," says a winsome child from Burbank with braces...
...The further evidence is that millions of childless couples spend part of every evening with their synthetic children on TV...
...Today's family is different," he says...
...Today's TV children are almost always independent of their parents...
...Little Brad and Page have out their dollies and their Donkey Kong, but Mom and Pop are watching "Square Pegs" and "Little House on the Prairie...
...We walked past a long line of women dressed in chicken suits to a huge sound stage...
...In front of him were three little girls, about fifteen years old at most...
...Alas, it is something much more...
...We can live with mail-order politics, and with TV religion, and certainly with Big Macs...
...They wore tight shorts, T-shirts that said MGM, and little sandals...
...It is his own way of filling the maw of demand for TV shows with children as stars...
...It is a staple of television thai children are never punished on the air...
...Today's family doesn't have the kids around the hearth, going to church together, going to the movies together...
...To give some idea of the phenomenon's size, twice as many person-hours were spent watching Gary Coleman in 1982 as in manufacturing all the steel and iron in the United States...
...I thought about that for a few days, then I called W., the powerhouse woman producer...
...Hike the Pizza Hut myself...
...This was unavoidable, some might say, since we now have synthetic politicians, synthetic religion', and synthetic food...
...Today's TV kids do not care about their parents' censure...
...More person-hours are spent watching children's shows on prime time than are spent by all the employees of the federal government at work in the present era...
...Me, too," says the girl...
...But how do we continue as a nation with synthetic children little by little supplanting real children...
...Inside the sound stage, in the cool darkness lit by klieg lights in a corner, a television producer with a little beard and tennis shoes sat in a canvas director's chair...
...These are not Ricky and David Nelson-type children or Beaver Cleaver-type children, living in good-natured awe of their parents, rotating like satellites around their parents' lives...
...The daughters need not fear punishment...
...In other words, we h.ave the electronic child around the electronic hearth...
...As Richard Nixon said to John Dean when he was asked for a million dollars for Howard Hunt, it would be easy to say yes, but it would be wrong, that's for sure...
...A o gauge the need for these kids, take a peek at two typical evenings' network schedules...
...Most important of all, when the real life parent is tired of the synthetic child, he can just turn the TV off...
...Benjamin J. Stein THE CHILDREN OF SUNSET BOULEVARD Who's watching the kids...
...But I am afraid that Al Burton does not go far enough...
...Good," says the producer...
...The producer is a man who can make or break a governor's campaign with his contributions...
...My pal, Al Burton, who made a great many of those children's shows and showed us some of the better kids on TV through Norman Lear's company, Embassy, goes part of the way toward the answer...
...Why is all America absorbed with the rites of passage of teenagers and pre-teenagers...
...9 p.m.-ABC-"Too Close for Comfort"-Reminiscences and confusion around the subject of the teenage daughter's new beau...
...I love children and I think most parents work hard to be good Mommies and Daddies...
...Jesus H. Christ...
...Please do not get me wrong...
...Then why...
...But the supply/demand ratio of child actors is not what astonishes me...
...He has his own.table at Chasen's...
...The ABC "20-20" segment used only real people, of course, but you get the picture...
...These shows need actors...
...So the TV children take the place of the real children...
...You want to talk major televison trends...
Vol. 16 • September 1983 • No. 9
