Every Saturday Morning While You're Asleep: Notes of a TV Watcher

Abstract

Every Saturday Morning While You're Asleep:Notes of a TV Watcher Perry Nodelman (bio) Everybody knows that Saturday morning TV is bad for children; everybody I talk to about it. And there's no question that long Saturday morning sessions have sometimes turned Joshua, just seven, Asa, four and a half, and Alice, not quite three, into touchy gorgons, for whom getting dressed is an unbearable chore and being asked whether they'd prefer Cheerios or Corn Flakes is the occasion for tantrums in the grand opera tradition. Then, last August, there was a cartoon in The New Yorker captioned "Every Saturday Morning While You're Asleep." It showed a kid sitting alone watching a leering doggie on TV, who says, "Hey, kid, guess what! I never went to school. And yet here I sit with my own TV show!" Well. I decided I'd better find out what was really going on. On Saturday, September 12, 1981, the start of the new season, I began to watch. In the weeks that followed, I saw every Saturday morning show on the three networks at least once. I planned to record both my own impressions and my children's. But I gave up on the children after I asked Asa what he liked about a program, and we had this conversation: [End Page 21] Asa: I'm not telling. Me: Why? Asa: Because it's a secret. I suspect it was a secret at least partly because of the surprising thing I soon discovered: my children don't watch all that much TV on Saturday mornings. The TV is on; they do glance at it now and then, and they do watch the occasional program. But mostly it's just noise in the background of their play. They'll leave the TV right in the middle of Zorro's exciting escape from a cave-in, and build something with Lego; but they'll come back for the commercials just about every time. One morning, they all did sit and watch consistently. It was after a particularly tiring and difficult week, and it was the one morning they all turned into gorgons. I suspect watching TV was less a cause of that problem than evidence of another problem. And it's hard to imagine that the content of the programs I watched could hurt children even if they did watch: these shows have nothing to do with real life, nothing at all. They are all cartoons, distanced from life as it is and quite uninvolving; I suspect my children find the commercials so enthralling partly because they contain just about the only real live human beings you can see on Saturday morning. And the cartoons are so patently ridiculous that to assume children learn anything about life from them is merely to express tremendous disrespect for the good sense of children. If anything is to be learned on Saturday morning, it's something everybody should learn: the conventions of popular entertainment, the codes and clichés that always operate in popular literature and TV and movies, and that we must learn precisely because they are so unlike life as even very young children quickly come to know it. For many children today, Saturday morning cartoons fulfill the function once performed by folk tales: introduction to the pleasures of wishfulfillment fantasy. It teaches those patterns of unquestionable good triumphing over undeniable evil, of good but weak companions finding strength together, of magical superpowers that always save the day. If we come to understand these conventions properly, they have the magic ability to purge, at least momentarily, our lust for the impossible, and allow us to put up with the limited possibilities of our real lives. But only if the impossible is clearly impossible; and the impossibilities of Saturday morning are well over the edge of absurdity. What follows records my awed response to this utterly inane world that transpires, every Saturday morning while you're alseep. Some Notes on Commercials They come in regular patterns. Every break has three, and they make a cereal sandwich. The first commercial is for toys or gum, the middle one for cereal, the last one for...