BY MADELINE ULRICH
CHILDREN’S FICTION often belongs to children in name alone. After all, narratives of childhood are largely written by adults, usually to reinforce what Henry Jenkins has called “the myth of childhood innocence”—an ideal that envisions the child as somehow universal, apolitical, and sacred. “Too often,” Jenkins
writes,our culture imagines childhood as a utopian space, separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social divisions, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure, and innocent, and in the end, waiting to be corrupted or protected by adults.
Bound by the contradiction of being vulnerable to politics and at the same time magically beyond its purview, the figure of the child in popular culture does not reflect material realities. Instead, as Lee Edelman says in his 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, the image is of a “fantasmatic Child”: a repository of utopian hopes and dreams but also a battleground of deep-seated and incoherent cultural anxieties.
Two examples of popular media from this year, the viral Max/Investigation Discovery docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV and the A24 sci-fi/horror film I Saw the TV Glow, reveal the limits of the childhood innocence myth. They both also happen to draw attention to two major cultural forces so often blamed for corrupting the innocent child: television and queerness. Interestingly, both texts link these two forces together, albeit in distinct ways and to different ends. In Quiet on Set, viewers witness the toxic treatment of child actors working for the popular kids’ cable network Nickelodeon in the 1990s and early 2000s. The majority of the docuseries attributes the on-set abuses to a handful of “bad apples”—including two queer Nickelodeon employees—and each episode unpacks in detail the specific nature of their transgressions. By compiling and displaying evidence of Nickelodeon’s mishandling of child stars in the making of its shows, Quiet on Set proposes that television for children comes at a significant cost to children. As the title suggests, the making of kids’ TV must involve a “dark side”—one that includes but is not limited to the suppression, abuse, and manipulation of vulnerable young stars by adults who may care more about the business of “kids’ TV” than they do about actual kids.
I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun, also links queerness and television. Rather than present television as threatening in the “bogeyman” sense, the film suggests that TV is a disruptive force to the status quo; in the film, it threatens both the imaginary separateness of kids’ TV from other types of media and the myth that childhood is somehow devoid of or separate from queer and trans ways of life. The film centers on a different kind of youth-focused television that emerged in the same historical moment as Nickelodeon: the meteoric rise of the WB and UPN networks in the year 1995 and the “youth market” that became their demographic targets. The two main characters, teenagers Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), share an obsession with a coming-of-age, supernatural horror series called The Pink Opaque that airs on the “Young Adult Network,” a fictionalized WB/UPN counterpart. When both Owen and Maddy become hyper-identified with the two teen protagonists at center of the program (whose mission is to slay villains sent by the “big bad” Mr. Melancholy week after week), their existence as suburban teenagers—and their desire to eventually lead normal lives as adults—is thrown into doubt.
Described by the director as
an allegory for the experience of coming out as trans, I Saw the TV Glow constructs an analogy between the fantasy worlds that television may provide us and the not-so-distant fantasy of creating a queer life outside of the norms often prescribed for children. The choice between what is queer and what is normative materializes when The Pink Opaque eventually impels one of the teens, Maddy, to reject the reality of suburban life in favor of a different universe, while Owen is left with the choice to remain in his current reality—despite knowing there might be a challenging but fulfilling alternative—or to follow Maddy to an unknown plane of existence.
Both Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow explore anxieties around television, gender, sexuality, and queerness, but both also confront the impossibility of “kids’ TV.” Each text, in its respective style and subject matter, points to the potential hazards of seeing both kids’ media and children themselves as existing in a vacuum, apart from the realities of adulthood. Both texts also suggest the inevitable damage that results from adults’ investment in producing certain ideas of the child—harm that ranges from the literal and physical to the figural and symbolic—and in pushing on children ideas of the good life grounded in financial and commercial success, rather than other metrics of happiness and fulfillment. The medium of television at the center of Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow becomes an interesting zone to challenge the tensions at the heart of what we consider “good” for kids, in part because television itself is so often assumed to be “bad” for them. Quiet on Set and I Saw the TV Glow suggest that it is not television itself that is inherently good or bad; instead, they illustrate how TV becomes imbued with specific values to different and sometimes disparate ends. If both I Saw the TV Glow and Quiet on Set show the figure of the child under threat, the former locates that threat not in television but in the surrounding culture. By contrast, Quiet on Set seems to hold out on the promise of television’s “good” (consumer) influence on children, if only it can be saved from a few “big bad” executives and crew members.
In the opening moments of I Saw the TV Glow, the viewer first meets Owen—a quiet and shy seventh grader—when he stumbles upon the mysterious and brooding ninth grader Maddy hiding in the cafeteria reading an episode guide of The Pink Opaque. “It’s a kids’ show, right?” Owen hesitantly asks when he sees her book. Maddy launches into an annoyed yet cool defense of the show’s narrative merits and sophisticated horrors, claiming that while “technically it’s on the Young Adult Network […] it’s way too scary, and the mythology is way too complicated for most kids.” The film is less interested in answering Owen’s question (is it a kids’ show?) than it is in using such a question as a central refrain: does being a “kids’ show” inherently negate an object’s political, or in this case queer, potential? Or does such a label as “kids’ TV”—with its associations of innocence and simplicity—perpetuate distinctions (such as “real world” versus “kids’ stuff”) that never truly existed in the first place?
Numerous reviews of the film have noted the striking similarities between The Pink Opaque and the WB/UPN television hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003). As Elana Levine and Lisa Parks observe in
a book-length anthology on Buffy, “netlets” such as the WB and UPN catered to millennial adolescents and teens in the 1990s and early 2000s to differentiate themselves from the four major broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox). Just as Nickelodeon revolutionized a formerly niche kids’ network in pursuit of the child consumer, the WB and UPN elevated the importance of young adult content with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek (WB, 1998–2003), Smallville (WB/CW, 2001–11), Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000–07), One Tree Hill (WB/CW, 2003–12), and Veronica Mars (UPN/CW, 2004–07). In the process, as Mary Celeste Kearney has argued, these shows could court a coveted youth market while selling an image of “youthfulness” and “cool” not just to those within the age demographic but also to those outside it. In other words, while seeming to be “about” and “for” adolescents, programs like Buffy and its fictional equivalent, The Pink Opaque, call into question the purity of labels like “teen” or “youth TV,” as well as the issues that may fall into their purview.
The first beat of the film’s narrative is a classic kid problem: Owen must find a way to successfully sneak over to Maddy’s house to catch an episode of The Pink Opaque. (His parents won’t let him stay up late enough to watch it.) As the episode begins, the film abruptly switches from wide-screen into TV’s classic 4:3 aspect ratio, along with a grainy, mid-1990s video feel, launching Owen, Maddy, and filmgoers into the odd and colorful world of The Pink Opaque. The teens are nearly hypnotized by the show, which features the deranged Ice Cream Man (a visual homage to Mr. Tastee from Nickelodeon’s The Adventures of Pete & Pete) as the episode’s villain. When the episode concludes, Owen asks, “Is the Ice Cream Man in every episode?” Maddy grows impatient with his lack of knowledge about the series’ rhythms and narrative structure. “No,” she says with a laugh, “That’s just a Monster of the Week! Mr. Melancholy is the Big Bad.” Maddy continues describing the characters with earnest excitement and intensity, elaborating on Mr. Melancholy:
MADDY: “He’s always messing with time and reality. He wants to rule the world, to trap Isabela and Tara in the Midnight Realm. So each week, he sends a new supernatural foe their way.”
OWEN: “Because they’re part of the Pink Opaque?”
MADDY: “No, because they are the Pink Opaque.”
Owen’s first experience of watching The Pink Opaque leaves him caught somewhere between exasperation at not quite “getting it” and excitement about the possibility of joining a new universe of characters and fellow fans. Owen’s emerging fandom quickly materializes as the film’s central allegory: joining a new world, whether with fictional characters in an imaginary realm or with queer community in real life, often requires leaving the old one, along with the ideologies we have internalized about what it means to live a “happy” or “fulfilled” life. When The Pink Opaque is canceled in 1998 after its fifth season, during Maddy’s final year of high school, Owen learns that his friend has vanished without a trace, apart from a burning TV left in the backyard of her family home. Only when the two are reunited 10 years later does Owen discover the reason for the abrupt disappearance: in an ode to the death of the main characters in The Pink Opaque’s series finale, Maddy too wanted to be buried alive, an act that would supposedly allow the show to continue forever. The unbelievable catch to Maddy’s plan, and the reason for her return, is that Owen, too, must bury himself alive in order for the show to go on. Owen is understandably disturbed and dumbfounded by Maddy’s story. “This is insane,” he stutters, as he tries to debunk Maddy’s theory that all along they, like the main characters, had been stuck in the Midnight Realm, and that his only way out is to do as she says. He begins recounting pleasant childhood memories: “I remember playing in the snow. Driving to baseball games with my dad. Cooking with my mom. […] This isn’t the Midnight Realm, Maddy. It’s just the suburbs.”
I Saw the TV Glow presents the loss of self that Maddy undergoes—even through something as seemingly innocuous as a kids’ show—as inherently alienating and violent. But even in connecting such loss to the experience of coming out as trans, as Schoenbrun does so convincingly, the film does not suggest that burying oneself alive—or the experience of coming to terms with one’s trans identity—is necessarily any more violent than the process of denying oneself the opportunity to live authentically. In the film, Owen experiences this denial of the self as death by a thousand cuts, both in the aftermath of Maddy’s disappearance and again when he rejects Maddy’s proposed plan, opting instead to continue on with “normal” life.
The film signposts the supposed pleasures of such a life through the progression of Owen’s adulthood: working at the movie theater and then at “the Fun Center,” and eventually buying his childhood home and having a family of his own. (Owen describes his life to the viewer, Pete & Pete–style, while looking directly into the camera as he picks up the brand-new LG flat-screen TV delivered to his porch.) Despite seeming to have made peace with his choices, he secretly ponders the what-if, divulging his insecurity in a voiceover narration:
I found myself wondering: What if she was right? What if she had been telling the truth? What if I really was someone else? Someone beautiful and powerful? Someone buried alive and suffocating to death? Very far away, on the other side of the television screen? But I know that’s not true. That’s just fantasy. Kids’ stuff.
“Kids’ stuff.” The phrase is a stand-in for a variety of affects, from describing what is simple, silly, and frivolous to anything deemed inherently innocuous and innocent. But the point of I Saw the TV Glow, as well as Quiet on Set, is that both this conception of “kids’ stuff” and the idea that it is somehow “over there” in kiddie land—in children’s TV, books, cartoons, comics, video games, and toys—but not “here,” in the real, “adult” world, is the actual fantasy. Rather than classifying the desire to find oneself as “kids’ stuff,” I Saw the TV Glow instead insists that it’s never too late (or too early) to take that desire seriously. As Maddy writes in chalk on the pavement outside of Owen’s house: “There is still time.”
In the last act of the film, Owen experiences a final, torturous cut, revealing the TV’s glow inside of himself. In opening himself up—literally—to the TV’s glowing light within, the film seems to propose that the true horror is not that media might make your kid queer or trans (if they weren’t already). Rather, as the viewer sees when Owen opens and closes himself back up, the danger is that, as adults, we might deny the truths that will certainly unsettle what we are told makes a happy life but that also make life worth living.
In I Saw the TV Glow, adults serve less as the film’s “Big Bad” than as a continuous reminder that harm to kids can take many guises. Like many kids’ and teen shows of the 1990s, in which parents are largely absent, most of the adults in I Saw the TV Glow—aside from Owen’s ailing mother—hinder their children through neglect, apathy, and subtle disdain. In one of the film’s early scenes, ninth-grade Owen asks his parents if he can stay up late to watch The Pink Opaque. “Isn’t that a show for girls?” his otherwise silent father dismissively remarks from the driver’s seat. Comments such as these, the film suggests, are all the more powerful in their subtlety.
In Quiet on Set, the harmful impact of adults on children’s lives and culture is made much more explicit. Indeed the “explicit” nature of this impact—on kid stars put into “comedic” situations that include pornographic references, or who are subjected to molestation and sexual abuse—is the docuseries’ main revelation and the primary source of its shock value. These revelations are presented as especially shocking given Nickelodeon’s reputation as a place where “kids rule” (doubly implying both kids’ self-governance and their superiority). As Sarah Banet-Weiser argues in her 2007 book Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship, far from imagining children as innocent or unsophisticated spectators, Nickelodeon differentiated itself in the late 20th-century cable marketplace by instead identifying its kid audience as “empowered citizen consumers”; it addressed its young demographic as technologically savvy, cool, and socially aware, yet irreverent towards “grown-up” virtues and tastes. The network’s “kids only” programming highlights children’s empowerment as a matter of choice and consumption. A lineup of kid-hosted late-night and variety shows spoofing Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show, televised award ceremonies like the Kids’ Choice Awards, and cartoons and sitcoms focused on issues facing children and teens gesture toward the genres and conventions of “grown-up” TV while suggesting a better attunement to kid viewers through a “by kids, for kids” trademark.
Indeed, the opening moments of Quiet on Set feature former child actors praising Nickelodeon and its shows for minimizing parents’ roles in the stories and on the set. Kids’ entertainment, viewers in the 1990s were told, was the first and foremost concern of the network. But the assembled evidence—taped and behind-the-scenes footage, alongside talking heads–style interviews with former Nickelodeon cast members, their parents, and crew members—suggests that working for Nickelodeon did not exactly align with this kids-first experience sold by the network. Instead, Quiet on Set showcases horrifying tales of mistreatment: child stars were subject to microaggressions due to their race or gender and made to perform abject physical stunts (getting drenched in the infamous Nickelodeon “slime,” for example, but also being forced to swallow insects and submerge themselves in tanks of live animals, part of an effort to imitate adult game shows like Fear Factor). “It was a house of horrors. House of horrors!” recalls the mom of child star Bryan Christopher Hearne. The docuseries suggests that Hearne was fired from the sketch comedy show All That (1994–2005) because his mother complained about the behavior she saw from adults on set. Then, in a jump scare–like fashion, the show cuts to the story of Jason Michael Handy, a Nickelodeon crew member and one of a handful of men accused of inappropriate behavior (in Handy’s case, child pornography and lewd acts). A later episode tells the story of Brian Peck, a Nickelodeon dialogue coach charged with the sexual abuse of a child star. (The docuseries makes a big deal out of revealing the identity of the survivor, actor Drake Bell.) The details of both cases are incredibly unsettling, and somewhat predictably, Nickelodeon brushed Handy’s case under the rug. Peck, meanwhile, continued to work on children’s shows for Disney after his conviction, though he was terminated when Disney discovered his history.
No one would deny that the acts of pedophilia that occurred on set at Nickelodeon are deeply upsetting. Yet a central question that goes unanswered throughout Quiet on Set is its goal in revisiting these traumas. Is it to problematically reinforce the stereotypical association between pedophilia and homosexuality, an association that comes up repeatedly in the tale of Brian Peck (who is gay)? Or to imply that the women on set, those in the writer’s room as well as the mothers of these child actors, are to blame for the harm that came to these children, just as much as or even more so than the TV executives at the helm when these abuses occurred?
What the series fails to question, in other words, is the very ideal of “children’s TV” itself—or rather, the impossibility of kids’ TV. As the feminist critic Jacqueline Rose
once put it regarding the children’s novel Peter Pan:
Children’s fiction is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot be written (that would be nonsense), but in that it hangs on an impossibility, one which it rarely ventures to speak. This is the impossible relation between adult and child. Children’s fiction is clearly about that relation, but it has the remarkable characteristic of being about something which it hardly ever talks of. Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between. To say that the child is inside the book—children’s books are after all as often as not about children—is to fall straight into a trap. It is to confuse the adult’s intention to get at the child with the child it portrays. If children’s fiction builds an image of the child inside the book, it does so in order to secure the child who is outside the book, the one who does not come so easily within its grasp.
To put it differently, if children’s television is always already impossible—not in the sense that it doesn’t exist as an industrial category (Nickelodeon proved otherwise), but that it is indeed a misnomer. What gets lost when we insist on the label “children’s television,” rather than calling the form what it actually is—namely, “television written for kids by adults”? (Or is that too clunky for marketing campaigns?)
Unlike Quiet on Set, I Saw the TV Glow faces the impossibility of children’s television head-on by insisting that the contradictions of media designed for kids need not be resolved so much as explored, acknowledged, or even embraced. If both children’s television and childhood itself hinge upon the impossible relation between adult and child, as Rose proposes, it is worth wondering what is to be done about this impossibility. Quiet on Set serves as a cautionary tale about the desire to collapse the distinction between adult and child when it describes a kind of television that claims to address kids “as kids” but really intends to transform them into mini-adults. I Saw the TV Glow, on the other hand, imagines a kind of television that addresses young adults as such, while doing what Rose claims can never be done: it is in fact about that very relation between child and adult. Schoenbrun’s film does not suggest that this impossibility can be resolved but rather that acknowledging it is perhaps the best we can do for kids—including the ones inside all of us.
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