My childhood (metaphorically speaking) ended in the early 2000s, when traditional, kid-focused, Saturday morning broadcast television was fading away. Being in my thirties at the time, it was probably overdue. Even so, the misguided government regulations that helped end a rite of youth now form a case study in the futility that often results when bureaucrats wedge themselves between producers and consumers.
The story begins in 1961, with a hectoring speech by attorney Newton N. Minow to a group of television executives. He had been appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by President John F. Kennedy. Minow wasted no time challenging the executives sitting in front of him to stomach a full day of their own content.
“I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland,” he said, calling out “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.”
To me, it just sounds like art. But something about the term “vast wasteland” caught the popular imagination and entered the cultural lexicon like a situation comedy catchphrase. Not that everyone agreed with Minow’s assessment of the still relatively new entertainment medium. Many considered him out of touch and even elitist. Three years later, when the comedy Gilligan’s Island debuted, the boat by which the characters became shipwrecked on a deserted island was named the SS Minnow in the chairman’s honor.
Though I wasn’t born until after Gilligan’s Island was canceled, its reruns were a favorite of mine growing up. But they played on weekday afternoons. The truly magical television time was Saturday morning. In the 1970s, my favorite shows included Scooby-Doo, Super Friends, and the live-action series Isis. Even in Waldo, Arkansas, where my television habit began, the latest episodes were beamed free of charge from broadcasting towers in Shreveport, Louisiana.
As I grew up, the Saturday morning lineup evolved to include everything from Captain Caveman to Hong Kong Phooey to Fat Albert, broken up by Schoolhouse Rock educational shorts. It was an inversion of what kids experienced five days a week (six if you went to Sunday school), when learning came first and fun second.
But little did I know that all this time, an activist group named Action for Children’s Television (ACT) was not happy about the situation and meant to change it.
ACT had formed, ironically enough, in the town of Newton, Massachusetts, in 1968. The group opposed kids’ shows they deemed shallow or at all violent. They also villainized advertisers. Failing to ban advertising altogether, they pressured the National Association of Broadcasters to institute a variety of advertising rules on kids’ shows in the 1970s. But ACT achieved its crowning success in 1990, with the passage of the Children’s Television Act (CTA) by Congress. Among other directions, CTA mandated that stations begin reporting their steps to air programming that “furthers the positive development of children 16 years of age and under…including the child’s intellectual/cognitive or social/emotional needs.” Just like that, broadcasters and creators became part-time pediatric shrinks.
Six years later, without additional legislation, the FCC expanded on the original CTA by requiring even more stringent reporting, forcing broadcasters to air at least three hours of content specifically geared to “educate and inform” children each week. This became known as “E/I” programming.
The 1990s was the era of popular Saturday-morning cartoons such as Doug and live-action series such as Saved by the Bell and Goosebumps. And I could still frequently be found sitting in front of the screen watching them, usually while eating cereal. It was some combination of nostalgia, bachelorhood, and just being immature for my age. At any rate, it allowed me to experience firsthand the continuing evolution of Saturday morning entertainment.
As the millennium turned over, there were still a few popular Saturday morning broadcast cartoons, such as Recess. But the CTA regulations were helping remake the television landscape. Entertainment-focused programming was being squeezed out of the airwaves, often replaced by documentary nature and travel shows such as Sea Rescue and Born to Explore, with little “E/I” badges on the lower right of the screen. Some of these had award-winning runs. But kids voted with their eyes, many migrating to the less-regulated environment of cable to watch Kim Possible or SpongeBob SquarePants, increasingly at any day and time they wished. The cultural relevance of Saturday mornings was draining away.
I’m proud to say I didn’t make the transition to these new shows in on-demand environments. I was finally outgrowing cartoons. But today I feel bad for kids who will never experience the once-a-week cultural touchstone my generation had.
For the sake of argument, let’s say nothing would have played out differently in the absence of CTA rules. The rise of cable and streaming was bound to disrupt childhood viewing habits, after all. But there remains the question of what all the resources and efforts expended on the regulations accomplished. Are kids more intelligent or better adjusted today because of them?
On a recent Saturday morning, I turned on the television to see what the major network broadcasts had become. What I found were branded-but-remarkably-similar news programs offering a mix of headlines, service journalism, and celebrity gossip. Just like during the week.
But some aspects of the old era survive. Each year, all broadcast stations still have to file compliance reports for children’s programming with the FCC, which last summer settled multiple cases of CTA violations going back to 2018. Though Saturday morning television is gone, the regulatory complex it spawned remains, part of the unmappable, ever-growing land of rulings, interpretations, and government-empowered bureaucrats involved in American life.
It makes you wonder what the real vast wasteland is.
