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Television, History of Children's Programs on
Concern about the quality of children's television has waxed and waned throughout television's history. When children's advocates (usually parents and educators, and occasionally lawmakers) are outspoken about the need for television that nurtures and educates young people, broadcasters create a wider array of programming for them. During periods when this issue goes unaddressed, it is usually accompanied by children's programming that is formulaic and static. Today, the Internet, TiVo, satellite, and various cable options are part of children's television experience. Even in this complex television environment, it is still possible to predict the general landscape of children's programming. A common thread in television's history is that when broadcasters treat children as a unique audience with specific needs and abilities, their programming is more diverse in content, format, and scheduling; when programming is produced for children without this consideration, their shows become increasingly uniform.
The Early Years of Children's Programming
When television was introduced to consumers, one method used by broadcasters to attract people to the new medium was to offer children's programming. During the first years of broadcast television, from 1948 to 1952, a relatively large percentage of television shows were specifically devoted to children and aired during periods when children were most likely to watch, on weekday evenings between 6 and 8 p.m.
As television sets proliferated in homes throughout the 1950s, the hours devoted to children's programming dropped, and its time slot changed from early evenings to Saturday mornings. This development may have resulted in part from economic changes. As television sets increasingly penetrated U.S. homes, broadcasters no longer felt the need to promote television sets to a wary public. Instead, they could attract money from advertising sponsors by competing for the millions of viewers who already had sets. During early evening prime-time hours, broadcasters hoped to maximize the number of viewers by replacing shows specifically for children with family programming designed to appeal to the entire household.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, broadcasters established what became the standard format of a children's show: a 30-minute production appearing once a week, usually on Saturday mornings when adults were least likely to watch and when children were free to view with fewer time constraints.
During this period, the content of children's shows changed from live-action adventures to animated fare. This shift grew out of the newly developed, low-cost animation techniques of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, the exhaustion of the archives of older liveaction films that were broadcast as reruns, and the desire to provide content for the growing numbers of color televisions being sold at low cost.
Diversity in Programming
Given the popularity of low-cost animation, combined with the Saturday morning time slot now staked out exclusively for children, it is not surprising that the 1960s were characterized by a decline in the diversity of formats, content, and scheduling of children's programming. Toward the end of the decade, the percentage of animated shows, shows airing once a week, and shows without child characters increased. There was also a trend toward fantasy and action-adventure themes with mostly male, often superhuman animated characters as the main protagonists.
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