I've thought about this, too. The difference is that for most of us, TV shows ended at the top/bottom of the hour. I grew up watching morning cartoons in the 1980s starting at 6am, but the times that the shows ended reminded me that it was time to get dressed, eat, etc.
Now, all the video services have feedback loops where they can determine what keeps people glued and provide more of that. Some "programs" like cocomelon have dialled that up to 11.
The only defence is the terrible parental controls and/or taking devices away. That almost always results in "fights".
> I don't really worry. I watched TV basically my entire childhood growing up in the '80s, in the height of stranger danger where I largely was not allowed to go outside. It was a lot worse than this. I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
For a long time our kid was only allowed to watch Mr. Rogers. That show is very gentle and slow paced (also: people, not brightly colored flashing cartoons), which I read somewhere is great for young kids.
Also, since I watched it as a kid, I kinda know what I'm getting. I don't really have the time to search for and vet TV shows. And I do not trust anything made for streaming economies, after reading about Cocomelon (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon-moonbug-entertainment.html) and seeing the stupid unimaginative wasteland that is Blippi (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/08/the-dead-world-of-blippi):
> In fact, the more I watch Blippi (and boy, have I watched Blippi), the more horrified I am by how thin and dull the Blippiverse is. Blippi does not seem to read books. He does not play make-believe, except to pretend he is doing the thing that the toy or playground object has been built for him to do with it. “Science” means dropping a piece of fruit in the pool and seeing if it floats. The interesting thing about an elephant is that it’s heavy. What about music? Art? History? Theater? The natural world? The wonders of outer space? Mr. Rogers had episodes about grandparents, about not wasting things, about being brave at the emergency room. On any given week he might introduce you to Yo-Yo Ma or Eric Carle of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame. Sesame Street met all the people in your neighborhood and talked about what they do and why it matters, rather than focusing on the trucks they drive.
I really wish someone had put in the effort to digitize the whole run of 321 Contact (all I've been able to find is a smattering of nth-generation re-encodes on YouTube).
Everyone I know who critiques the length of these films agrees we’d literally rather watch an art film like stalker instead of these absolute meandering snooze fests.
Cocomelon is literally memetically designed to make your children demons. Its creators are spiritually/ontologically evil and they will reincarnate either into a cockroach’s or into durian fruit.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.
I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
Some are for sure, but a lot of those shows hold up well for all ages. I don't put much faith in marketers to decide which shows are for what demographics. Better to see what lands for yourself. It helps when you're watching and discussing the shows with your kids too.
Some of them, Adventure time being a great example, can appeal to very young kids but they'll find new meaning in those episodes as they get older.
I think shows like Infinity Train, Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, and Samurai Jack will be better after a kid is old enough that Cocomelon wouldn't hold any appeal, but even at that age Sarah & Duck, Hilda, MLP, Craig of the Creek, etc could still be good. Just about anything that holds their attention and isn't Cocomelon is a huge win. If you'll enjoy it, all the better.
Glad you drew this comparison. I have a 4yo who (TLDR) we didn't really push TV on and started reading on his own when he was two.
Before he was born I put a lot of thought into what he would watch before he was born assuming it would be a huge necessity to address. I torrented Mr Rodgers and Reading Rainbow and Eureka (amazing old science cartoon if anyone's encountered it) and I even started writing a script that would randomly select from these and automatically turn off after 1-3 episodes.
Basically I am shocked at how wrong I was. He had no natural interest in TV beyond a few minutes, even if we were watching something. We didn't have a reason to push it, when he did see newer kids media like Bluey / Cocomelon etc he would zombie out exactly as you described and then have noticeably crappier behavior for a while after we would have to have a minor battle to turn it off. Felt like microwaving his brain and we had no reason to push it on him so we didn't. After a few days he would never miss it. We let him watch stuff at friend's houses and still pop on old stuff that I downloaded once every week or two. Same basic behavior / problems. We always back off for the same reasons.
I grew up on TV and I don't judge parents who legitimately love watching TV with their kids or need it as a babysitter because of demanding schedules or absent child care assistance. It is an incredible tool in a culture that often separates extended families and discourages grandparents from playing active daily supportive roles.
But yeah for whatever reason our kid started reading independently when he was two, got really interested in languages, got his basic operators down while he was 2-3 and has never had any serious behavioral or developmental problems and other parents are always asking us what we did to accelerate his development and make him such a genius.
We didn't do anything unnatural, we just didn't intentionally push him to watch a lot of TV. He still watches stuff, we still watch stuff. It's just on a laptop and ends when he starts turning into a zombie.
With that said Bluey seems fine to me, my kids the one with the weird zombie reaction. And disclaimers all kids are different, I'm incredibly lucky to work from home on a schedule where I get to hang out with him all the time and I'm pretty sure regardless of zombie Cocomelon watching his generations problems are not going to be rooted in them zonking out on TV but who knows.
I have heard many stories of being a Sesame Street zombie once upon a time, so I doubt you were much more resistant to Mr Rogers gentle charms =).
There's a definitely a big gulf between the Mr Rogers / Daniel Tiger / Bluey energy and almost every other show. It's crazy now noticeable it is. Even modern Sesame Street is much more frenetic and lively than old episodes from the 80s and 90s. Which is not to say it's empty junk food like Cocomelon, it's just that those shows have raised the required addictiveness bar overall.
Hey Duggee is lovely. The imagery is on the vivid and trippy side, but the voice acting is top-notch with creative stories. Most importantly, it lacks the deliberate tweaking for engagement Cocomelon does.
At six my son currently has one Bluey episode (in English, simply to emerse him in another language he will pick up in any case later on) and one Shaun the Sheep after school (that's a combined twenty minutes or so). Shaun hits the exact spot in terms of humour for six year olds, and is brilliant with none of the characters actually speaking.
Not an entertaining show to a parent, but Wonderoos is another kids show that has had a positive impact on my 2 children. In each episode a wonderoo identifies a choice has to be made, makes the choice that leads to a worse outcome, and then rewinds to make the right choice. While making the choice they always say, "let's chalk it out", and I've heard my kids say this and then state two choices in their own activities. There is also an episode where a lonely wonderoo at the playground decides between trying to make friends with the other kids or just waiting to see what happens. First they wait, and nothing happens, and then they rewind and go introduce themselves and become friends. One day at the park my shy 4 year old asked me to help her introduce herself to another kiddo. Def she got that from the show!
I don't know about how that show is made, but my guess is that it is more like cocomelon, scientifically tested for efficacy, but with the right intentions set by child development experts.
Well there is always your AI girlfriend and AI friend group with the AI generated podcast breaking down the episode. (jk, sort of)
> Most of the reason people watch TV or movies is for the shared experience that you can discuss with others
I wouldn't say that. Most of the reason people watch TV is to kill time.
To be honest, I find my discussions with friends about TV shows on the decline just because of the fact that everyone is watching there own thing. So many shows and people watch them at their own pace. so most of the discussions go like this "Hey have you seen that new Netlix show X?" "No I haven't, maybe I'll check it out". Or "Oh yeah, i saw that a year ago, Its good but I don't remember the details".
Before Streaming when you had a set schedule for TV, it was way easier to discuss things because people were forced to watch programs on a certain day and there was more limited content. This led to "water cooler" conversations about what the previous nights show.
I bet if you graphed (discussions had about tv shows) / (hours watched of tv shows) that graph would trend down.
Think about little kids. My niece watches cocomelon all day long. She doesn't need to discuss it with anybody. She just wants an unlimited stream.
I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25:
TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED
----- -----------------
Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000
The Night Agent 812,100,000
You 766,300,000
Outer Banks 740,400,000
The Walking Dead 738,600,000
The Glory 622,800,000
La Reina del Sur 616,800,000
CoComelon 601,200,000
Suits (2011) 599,100,000
The Blacklist 596,900,000
Manifest 581,900,000
Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000
Wednesday 507,700,000
Gilmore Girls 505,800,000
Breaking Bad 505,000,000
Queen Charlotte 503,000,000
Friends (1994) 448,500,000
Love Is Blind 439,300,000
Lucifer 434,300,000
The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000
Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000
PAW Patrol 392,300,000
New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000
Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000
Firefly Lane 342,700,000
As a friendly counterpoint, my parents limited the time that I watched TV when I was young (mostly pre-ubiquitous-internet, so it probably implies limiting internet time somewhat). I’m just sharing my experience.
I got to pick what I watched and when; I just got 30 minutes or an hour a day. I mostly tried to catch the latest Dragon Ball Z episode.
The general strictness of my parents lead to severe rebellion, and that got me into all sorts of trouble (so it definitely wasn’t all a good thing). Now that I’ve matured a bit, I enjoy not having much of a TV habit (I find that I self-titrate internet content in a healthy way as well). I’m actually pretty grateful for the limits.
I don’t have kids, and I don’t know what I would do regarding this posted question, but I thought that I would share that I have very positive feelings concerning my parents’ decision to impose a limit on TV consumption time. I filled the rest of my time reading books, and that’s a very fulfilling time-sink to this day.
Also relevant: I think a lot of the streaming-video content available today (Netflix and others) has a lot more intrinsic value than most of the TV content when I was young. There are so many brilliant writers producing theses shows nowadays that my parents’ sentiment may not really apply to all the content. Even something like Cocomelon (we put it on in social settings if someone’s got their kids with them) is just better than Rugrats as far as providing entertaining wholesome/halfway-informative content.
There's PBS kids shows in spirit like Daniel Tiger, Tumble Leaf, Octonauts, Llama llama, Bluey, Puffin Rock, and many more.
I watch an episode first to make sure it is something educational and not too "entertaining". I'm personally in the camp that if something is too entertaining, you aren't learning much. i.e. Cocomelon, Sesame Street, etc.
Hacker Cinema
14 comments on Hacker News
I've thought about this, too. The difference is that for most of us, TV shows ended at the top/bottom of the hour. I grew up watching morning cartoons in the 1980s starting at 6am, but the times that the shows ended reminded me that it was time to get dressed, eat, etc.
Now, all the video services have feedback loops where they can determine what keeps people glued and provide more of that. Some "programs" like cocomelon have dialled that up to 11.
The only defence is the terrible parental controls and/or taking devices away. That almost always results in "fights".
> I don't really worry. I watched TV basically my entire childhood growing up in the '80s, in the height of stranger danger where I largely was not allowed to go outside. It was a lot worse than this. I watched game shows, Hogans Heroes, Night Court. She's watching Ms. Rachel, Meekah, and Sesame Street.
For a long time our kid was only allowed to watch Mr. Rogers. That show is very gentle and slow paced (also: people, not brightly colored flashing cartoons), which I read somewhere is great for young kids.
Also, since I watched it as a kid, I kinda know what I'm getting. I don't really have the time to search for and vet TV shows. And I do not trust anything made for streaming economies, after reading about Cocomelon (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon-moonbug-entertainment.html) and seeing the stupid unimaginative wasteland that is Blippi (https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/08/the-dead-world-of-blippi):
> In fact, the more I watch Blippi (and boy, have I watched Blippi), the more horrified I am by how thin and dull the Blippiverse is. Blippi does not seem to read books. He does not play make-believe, except to pretend he is doing the thing that the toy or playground object has been built for him to do with it. “Science” means dropping a piece of fruit in the pool and seeing if it floats. The interesting thing about an elephant is that it’s heavy. What about music? Art? History? Theater? The natural world? The wonders of outer space? Mr. Rogers had episodes about grandparents, about not wasting things, about being brave at the emergency room. On any given week he might introduce you to Yo-Yo Ma or Eric Carle of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame. Sesame Street met all the people in your neighborhood and talked about what they do and why it matters, rather than focusing on the trucks they drive.
I really wish someone had put in the effort to digitize the whole run of 321 Contact (all I've been able to find is a smattering of nth-generation re-encodes on YouTube).
Everyone I know who critiques the length of these films agrees we’d literally rather watch an art film like stalker instead of these absolute meandering snooze fests.
Cocomelon is literally memetically designed to make your children demons. Its creators are spiritually/ontologically evil and they will reincarnate either into a cockroach’s or into durian fruit.
On the other hand, it depends on what kind of movie you're making and who the target group is.
Say you're making children's videos like Cocomelon or Bluey in 3D, you don't need all these nice things.
At the end, movies are about the stories, not just pretty graphics.
> Some shows and movies seem harmless, initially, but then we noticed in so many kids movies (e.g., Zootopia, Sing), they're always yelling at each other, expressing anger, frustration, and hostility towards one another.
My kids are similar. Years ago I actually just unplugged the TV and put it behind some furniture for 3 months because I was so fed up. It calmed them down a lot (this was after Covid lockdowns, when we'd just given them too much TV) but still - it flares up.
I do think a lot of kids tv is either straight addictive (e.g. Cocomelon) or depicts how kids would like to behave, e.g. in how they talk to adults rudely (e.g. how they talk to the dad in Peppa Pig), or they're always right and the adults are wrong (too may examples to name). Bluey is the saving grace there, as it depicts healthy and respectful relationships, but it's very unusual.
Some are for sure, but a lot of those shows hold up well for all ages. I don't put much faith in marketers to decide which shows are for what demographics. Better to see what lands for yourself. It helps when you're watching and discussing the shows with your kids too.
Some of them, Adventure time being a great example, can appeal to very young kids but they'll find new meaning in those episodes as they get older.
I think shows like Infinity Train, Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, and Samurai Jack will be better after a kid is old enough that Cocomelon wouldn't hold any appeal, but even at that age Sarah & Duck, Hilda, MLP, Craig of the Creek, etc could still be good. Just about anything that holds their attention and isn't Cocomelon is a huge win. If you'll enjoy it, all the better.
Glad you drew this comparison. I have a 4yo who (TLDR) we didn't really push TV on and started reading on his own when he was two.
Before he was born I put a lot of thought into what he would watch before he was born assuming it would be a huge necessity to address. I torrented Mr Rodgers and Reading Rainbow and Eureka (amazing old science cartoon if anyone's encountered it) and I even started writing a script that would randomly select from these and automatically turn off after 1-3 episodes.
Basically I am shocked at how wrong I was. He had no natural interest in TV beyond a few minutes, even if we were watching something. We didn't have a reason to push it, when he did see newer kids media like Bluey / Cocomelon etc he would zombie out exactly as you described and then have noticeably crappier behavior for a while after we would have to have a minor battle to turn it off. Felt like microwaving his brain and we had no reason to push it on him so we didn't. After a few days he would never miss it. We let him watch stuff at friend's houses and still pop on old stuff that I downloaded once every week or two. Same basic behavior / problems. We always back off for the same reasons.
I grew up on TV and I don't judge parents who legitimately love watching TV with their kids or need it as a babysitter because of demanding schedules or absent child care assistance. It is an incredible tool in a culture that often separates extended families and discourages grandparents from playing active daily supportive roles.
But yeah for whatever reason our kid started reading independently when he was two, got really interested in languages, got his basic operators down while he was 2-3 and has never had any serious behavioral or developmental problems and other parents are always asking us what we did to accelerate his development and make him such a genius.
We didn't do anything unnatural, we just didn't intentionally push him to watch a lot of TV. He still watches stuff, we still watch stuff. It's just on a laptop and ends when he starts turning into a zombie.
With that said Bluey seems fine to me, my kids the one with the weird zombie reaction. And disclaimers all kids are different, I'm incredibly lucky to work from home on a schedule where I get to hang out with him all the time and I'm pretty sure regardless of zombie Cocomelon watching his generations problems are not going to be rooted in them zonking out on TV but who knows.
I have heard many stories of being a Sesame Street zombie once upon a time, so I doubt you were much more resistant to Mr Rogers gentle charms =).
There's a definitely a big gulf between the Mr Rogers / Daniel Tiger / Bluey energy and almost every other show. It's crazy now noticeable it is. Even modern Sesame Street is much more frenetic and lively than old episodes from the 80s and 90s. Which is not to say it's empty junk food like Cocomelon, it's just that those shows have raised the required addictiveness bar overall.
Hey Duggee is lovely. The imagery is on the vivid and trippy side, but the voice acting is top-notch with creative stories. Most importantly, it lacks the deliberate tweaking for engagement Cocomelon does.
At six my son currently has one Bluey episode (in English, simply to emerse him in another language he will pick up in any case later on) and one Shaun the Sheep after school (that's a combined twenty minutes or so). Shaun hits the exact spot in terms of humour for six year olds, and is brilliant with none of the characters actually speaking.
Not an entertaining show to a parent, but Wonderoos is another kids show that has had a positive impact on my 2 children. In each episode a wonderoo identifies a choice has to be made, makes the choice that leads to a worse outcome, and then rewinds to make the right choice. While making the choice they always say, "let's chalk it out", and I've heard my kids say this and then state two choices in their own activities. There is also an episode where a lonely wonderoo at the playground decides between trying to make friends with the other kids or just waiting to see what happens. First they wait, and nothing happens, and then they rewind and go introduce themselves and become friends. One day at the park my shy 4 year old asked me to help her introduce herself to another kiddo. Def she got that from the show!
I don't know about how that show is made, but my guess is that it is more like cocomelon, scientifically tested for efficacy, but with the right intentions set by child development experts.
Well there is always your AI girlfriend and AI friend group with the AI generated podcast breaking down the episode. (jk, sort of)
> Most of the reason people watch TV or movies is for the shared experience that you can discuss with others
I wouldn't say that. Most of the reason people watch TV is to kill time.
To be honest, I find my discussions with friends about TV shows on the decline just because of the fact that everyone is watching there own thing. So many shows and people watch them at their own pace. so most of the discussions go like this "Hey have you seen that new Netlix show X?" "No I haven't, maybe I'll check it out". Or "Oh yeah, i saw that a year ago, Its good but I don't remember the details".
Before Streaming when you had a set schedule for TV, it was way easier to discuss things because people were forced to watch programs on a certain day and there was more limited content. This led to "water cooler" conversations about what the previous nights show.
I bet if you graphed (discussions had about tv shows) / (hours watched of tv shows) that graph would trend down.
Think about little kids. My niece watches cocomelon all day long. She doesn't need to discuss it with anybody. She just wants an unlimited stream.
I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25:
TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,800,000 CoComelon 601,200,000 Suits (2011) 599,100,000 The Blacklist 596,900,000 Manifest 581,900,000 Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000 Wednesday 507,700,000 Gilmore Girls 505,800,000 Breaking Bad 505,000,000 Queen Charlotte 503,000,000 Friends (1994) 448,500,000 Love Is Blind 439,300,000 Lucifer 434,300,000 The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000 PAW Patrol 392,300,000 New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000 Firefly Lane 342,700,000
As a friendly counterpoint, my parents limited the time that I watched TV when I was young (mostly pre-ubiquitous-internet, so it probably implies limiting internet time somewhat). I’m just sharing my experience.
I got to pick what I watched and when; I just got 30 minutes or an hour a day. I mostly tried to catch the latest Dragon Ball Z episode.
The general strictness of my parents lead to severe rebellion, and that got me into all sorts of trouble (so it definitely wasn’t all a good thing). Now that I’ve matured a bit, I enjoy not having much of a TV habit (I find that I self-titrate internet content in a healthy way as well). I’m actually pretty grateful for the limits.
I don’t have kids, and I don’t know what I would do regarding this posted question, but I thought that I would share that I have very positive feelings concerning my parents’ decision to impose a limit on TV consumption time. I filled the rest of my time reading books, and that’s a very fulfilling time-sink to this day.
Also relevant: I think a lot of the streaming-video content available today (Netflix and others) has a lot more intrinsic value than most of the TV content when I was young. There are so many brilliant writers producing theses shows nowadays that my parents’ sentiment may not really apply to all the content. Even something like Cocomelon (we put it on in social settings if someone’s got their kids with them) is just better than Rugrats as far as providing entertaining wholesome/halfway-informative content.
Make your own.
There's PBS kids shows in spirit like Daniel Tiger, Tumble Leaf, Octonauts, Llama llama, Bluey, Puffin Rock, and many more.
I watch an episode first to make sure it is something educational and not too "entertaining". I'm personally in the camp that if something is too entertaining, you aren't learning much. i.e. Cocomelon, Sesame Street, etc.