As the head of an advocacy group that focuses on holding Hollywood accountable for the products it markets to children, I’m often surprised at how different the standards are between what Hollywood deems OK for children and what most parents think is appropriate.
Nowhere have I seen this chasm more than on Netflix’s streaming platform.
For years, Netflix marketed the graphic teenage suicide drama 13 Reasons Why to teenagers, with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings callously saying, “13 Reasons Why has been enormously popular and successful. It’s engaging content. It is controversial. But nobody has to watch it.”
But people and children, in particular, did watch. Research from the National Institutes of Health found that suicides of children ages 10 to 17 increased in the month after the release of 13 Reasons Why.
Netflix resisted calls to pull the program from the Parents Television Council, other pro-family organizations, suicide prevention experts, members of the medical community, members of the academic community, schools all over the United States, and millions of parents.
After several years and after each board member heard from us personally, the streaming service finally listened. It removed the graphic suicide scene of the program’s main teenage character. Better late than never.
Recently, Netflix announced that it has improved parental controls, something we had advocated, and those changes certainly make the platform much safer for children. But those improvements do not and cannot protect children from explicit adult content if Netflix is circumventing its own system by marketing adult content to children in its “Teen” categories.
A new Parents Television Council study reveals that nearly half of all programming designated as “Teen” by Netflix was rated either TV-MA (104 titles, or 40.8%) or R (23 titles, or 9.0%), and every single program that carried a TV-14 moniker included harsh profanities.
Of the 11 Netflix Original program titles rated TV-14 that were examined by PTC, every single program contained multiple uses of the S-word, and all but two included the F-word.
These findings clearly demonstrate that Netflix is marketing explicit content to children. This fact alone destroys any narrative that Netflix is safe for children and teenagers, deeply troubling news for families given that Netflix use has surged with the coronavirus quarantine.
When explicit profanity like the F-word and S-word are nearly ubiquitous on Netflix’s “Teen” programming, this further reveals the disconnect between what Netflix deems appropriate for teenage viewers and what the average parent might consider appropriate.
I can only surmise that either the content is being rated inaccurately, or there has been considerable “ratings creep” with the criteria used to determine an age-based rating. Neither option allows parents to do their job effectively.
More importantly, this reveals huge problems with the ratings systems, since parents are told to rely on the content ratings to protect their children from explicit content. There must be wholesale reform to the entertainment industry-controlled ratings systems and their oversight.
It is ridiculous that a TV-14 rating doesn’t mean the same thing on Netflix as it does on CBS, for example. The ratings systems are supposed to serve parents, not those who might directly profit from exposing children to explicit, adult-themed content.
Netflix must stop deceptively marketing adult content to children and teenagers. It’s a simple fix. Hastings should immediately ensure that programming rated for teenagers is actually suitable for teenage viewers.
A former NBC and MGM executive, Tim Winter is the president of the Parents Television Council (www.ParentsTV.org).
