This wasn't exactly the "first post of the decade" that I really had in mind. Really, I just wanted to continue with evaluating the shows of the past decade (which if I really wanted to get off my ass would've been done before the year was over) but Mike is actually working on the 2011-14 section and, spoiler alert, what he's done is brilliant and I really want him to finish up with that because he's really spot-on with that. I've also wanted to move into more Netflix reviews, since Netflix is (was?) a hotbed of tween/teen entertainment right now, not to mention Insatiable and (me completely dead set on binging) Bojack Horseman, but I didn't just want to open up a whole new decade on just another review, especially since we just got done closing out arguably the most important decade in all of human history as far as tween and teen entertainment is concerned.
Then again since I had intended to finish my lookback at the 2010s last year I guess I really don't know what kind of post I had been intending in the first place. I guess I'll go with yet another post on why this type of storytelling matters, and a general look at least as far as why the last decade wasn't just so important but the most important (beyond just television, since the lookback series is covering that in more detail).
But as to why this particular decade is the most important...let's look back at the very beginning of tween/teen entertainment....
...which is more recent than you think.
The concept of tweens/teens didn't even exist until last century at the latest, and really "tween" as a concept wasn't invented until this one, more as a response to describe just what the hell Disney Channel and Nickelodeon were marketing in the first place, incidentally. The concept of a "teenager" really grew out of a rapidly growing middle class at the beginning of the 20th century and even then, really referred to a particularly privileged type of teenager (the concept of a middle class itself was pretty brand-new and...it's hard to really define within strictly the cultural context of that particular time period and divorced from its context now. Basically, it meant your kids were actually going to school instead of demonstrating why this era also gave birth to child labor laws). Many of the things we associate as being teen and even tween entertainment - fairy tales; Dickens, Twain, Alcott and the Bronte sisters; hell even cartoons - were strictly for adults up to that time. Hell literacy among the adult population was still in at best a plurality, let alone for teens. The "Downton Abbey era" was the first where you actually did have books published specifically for teens and tweens and...well, it's more of a fucked-up era than you realize because these books were the direct immediate ancestor for the "Tijuana Bibles" of the 20s and 30s (yes the back-then equivalent of 50 Shades of Grey actually was one of the first books intended specifically for tweens. We're very literally talking about tween smut here. True story, folks). Needless to say these operations tended to be quite underground.
And tween and teen entertainment would for the large part continue to be underground and...shockingly smutty...until the late 30s and really the end of WWII. Sure, you did have a few books written for literate (and highly privileged) teens, and yes you had children's books, but for the most part entertainment and culture as a whole existed almost exclusively in an adult world. Between child and adult, again that really wasn't a concept. Television made for an explosion of children's programming (which was still live-action - cartoons at best or worst depending on how you look at it were still about a 50/50 split adult/kid) but still, nothing tween or teen-specific. Yes, you still had adult-specific shows - I don't think The Honeymooners can really be called "family entertainment" under any real context regardless what decade it is and I think we've all seen Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble hock cigarettes by now. Really at best you had "family shows" that tweens and teens can watch along with the rest of the family.
You really have to go all the way to the 1980s to find teens (or tweens, although they really weren't marketed to as such) as an actual demo, and even then it would be a pretty slow trickle for years. In the 60s you started to have some entertainment marketed towards teens including a few books (well, one book - The Outsiders - and arguably to the close of that decade S.E. Hinton would be one of the few authors writing to teens, with her mixing it up with a good number of very much adult-demo books in the process - and really not until the mid 70s with Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War which, trust me, is way way more cynical than The Outsiders) and especially movies (Bonnie and Clyde being almost the ur-example with "New Hollywood," up to and very much including everything pre-Star Wars George Lucas did, especially American Graffiti which if anything one-upped The Outsiders).
But nope, other than that not really anything. Aside from movies which, again, really were the vanguard of defining teens as a demo on their own - The Outsiders and The Chocolate War being adapted into movies, The Wave on TV and really an entire artistic movement, that aforementioned "New Hollywood" which again includes at least very early George Lucas. But most books were, well...pretty kiddie, to put it one way, and TV was dominated by family sitcoms and dramas outside of Saturday morning and afterschool. Even The Wonder Years...well, that was as much feeding off adult nostalgia as it was appealing to viewers the actual age of the characters (trust me I know a thing or two about adult nostalgia). In 1985 racist homophobic asshole Orson Scott Card (yes I will keep referring to him quite specifically as this until something comes along to show me he's changed) came out with Ender's Game - today it would be so totally a YA novel and even its movie adaptation(s) have been marketed as such, but back then it was just another pulp sci-fi book.
And then Britney and N*SYNC happened.
Really, even moreso than movies, it was the music industry that was rapidly defining the teen marketing demo. Families were now giving their children, particularly tweens and teens, enough allowance to let them make regular purchases, or even just giving into their purchasing demands outright. Now all of a sudden kids 11-17 were a group that was worth bothering to market too. And I'd be remiss to forget video games, which largely pushed tweens and teens as a demo for boys.
But I'd be equally remiss in not mentioning Nickelodeon's and Disney Channel's direct role in all this. After all, Nickelodeon started pushing kids TV "upmarket" back in the 90s and even 80s with Clarissa Explains it All, Salute Your Shorts and Hey Dude for live action and Ren and Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life in animation. And as I mentioned, it was Disney Channel that practically invented the concept of "tween" in the first place
But the tween and teen demos really blew up last decade, and we have the rest of media and the industry trying to inevitably play catch-up with Nickelodeon and especially Disney Channel to thank for that. Well, and Twilight and Hunger Games but not quite to the degree I think people give credit for (remember, I went to graduate school for this so I'm an expert!) Those books gave greater attention to an already defined demo and showed that it wasn't all just what had been narrowly defined up to that point (although ironically coming to dominate so thoroughly it merely changed what that narrow definition was instead of expanding upon it) but from a wider cultural standpoint it really was Nickelodeon and Disney Channel that did the heavy lifting in the 2000s, and it just leaking more into the wider culture in the 2010s.
I guess this kinda contradicts my point about the 2010s being the most important decade in tween and teen entertainment, but there is a huge distinction between doing the heavy lifting and when the fruits of that heavy lifting actually bear out, especially when much of that fruit is just a lot of people playing catch-up or just trying to join in on the cashing in. Towards the very beginning of the 2010s (or the very end of the 2000s, when Twilight and Hunger Games came out) the young adult genre really exploded as a major, dominant genre - if not the major dominant book genre. YA/teen and tween movies weren't just a niche thing that existed or even pushed for but, again, was a pretty dominant genre filling the whole spectrum of budgets and studios aside from the absolute stratosphere a superhero or major franchise sci-fi movie dictates (and even then, you can argue the MCU Spider-Man movies are pretty dang YA-ish, to say nothing of Into the Spider-Verse. Hell you had what's basically a half-assed attempt at a YA Star Wars movie with Solo). You had everything from major studios to independents pumping out YA/teen movies - some being more successful than others (to put it one way, a whole bunch just come off like the directors and/or producers were listening to Nirvana desperately trying to recapture their own teen years way too hard, way too many times). And of course Nickelodeon and Disney Channel were at their height - sure, Hannah Montana hung up her mic for the last time and High School Musical may have been so 2000s but their influence was still a major presence through the 2010s.
And that is why, through volume and numbers if nothing else, the 2010s were the most important decade for teen and tween entertainment.
Other Thoughts
- I know I promised I'd talk about why stories matter and, umm...I definitely dropped the ball on that. I've just been watching a lot of Bojack Horseman (a lot of Bojack Horseman) and I'm just struck by what Princess Caroline says about people being just a collection of stories, or something more. But moreover, I think stories are important for conveying and capturing something that's hard to do in a single sentence, paragraph, or even entire conversation, and the show itself does a great job doing that.
And umm...I've got nothing beyond that. Which is why it's just being shoved into a paragraph in what's essentially the afterthought section.
- speaking of which, Bojack Horseman is pretty freakin' incredible and probably the best show on Netflix period so far. I'll be writing a review of it soon but...it's not exactly perfect either God I hate Todd but it's absolutely fantastic in the exact messages and emotions it wants to convey.
- I've also been watching Insatiable which got recently canceled and...Good God this might be the worst show on Netflix so far. Ugh. Just...wall-to-wall awful. Considering this and Sing It! I just really don't think Debby has what it takes to stay on television post-Jessie, sorry.
