Afterschool Specials
Sarah: So I'll start actually, I'm going to, these are the thinking noises you get to have fun cutting out.
Mike: Do you want to tell me about the first afterschool special you ever saw?
Sarah: The first afterschool special I ever saw in spirit, I don't think was an afterschool special, but I remember when I was about 13 watching a Lifetime movie called 15 and Pregnant, starring Kirsten Dunst. Which I think of as being in the spirit of the afterschool special. Because I really, I loved Lifetime movies when I was a kid, which were often old TV movies that had made their way onto Lifetime in the late nineties. And they also had a lot of Tori Spelling movies that were about issues, like Co-ed Call Girl, was about the issue of being a co-ed call girl. But I don't know if I've ever seen an actual afterschool special. I think of what I think of more as the broad category of TV movies or networks specials about issues that were very ham-handed about that, that I think of as being a big thing in the eighties and early nineties, and then fading away. I remember seeing a Chad Lowe movie, I think, from 1984 where he committed suicide and nobody knows why, and they don't figure it out.
Mike: That might be an afterschool special, actually.
Sarah: So, this is what I'm curious about, did the afterschool special start this trend of the teen issue film? Because it feels like we don't see that now, but that there was a period when that was really everywhere.
Mike: What’s interesting to me about this is that what we remember is this moralistic tone. There are two different versions of the history of the afterschool special. There's the, hey, geographic, aw shucks, how wonderful it is history. And then there's the super cynical, corporate history.
So the aw, shucks history is that at the time, the afterschool special began with ABC Afterschool Special in 1972, which ran until 1997, which is pretty incredible, 25 years. And it was at a time when TV was not really new, but going through it's kind of adolescence, that it was trying to figure out what its business model was going to be. What TV was going to look like as they were expanding more and more hours of programming.
And so the aw, shucks history is that this guy, Martin Tossi, came up with this idea that during the day there was children's programming and during the evening there was family programming, prime-time stuff, game shows, whatever, that the whole family watched together. But nobody was speaking to this huge group of Americans in between, nobody was talking to adolescents. And so what he came up with was this idea of movies by kids, for kids. So he started optioning a bunch of novels that were written, especially ones written by young authors about social problems. He wanted to create this place to talk about what kids were really going through. Not from the perspective of an adult, not from the perspective of the government or these informational public campaign type things, but actual stories of kids about kids. So his one rule as a producer, he ended up producing about 25 of them, his rule as a producer was that all of the problems have to be solved by the kids themselves. So it has to be that kids are faced with a problem, and kids have the authority and the intelligence and their wherewithal to do something about it. They're not waiting for a parent to parachute in and fix everything for them. So he really wanted this to be a place of kind of empowerment and helping kids work through these actual real issues that they were facing. It was the mid-seventies, the gas crisis was going on, the economy was going nuts, politics was heating up, it was Watergate. He wanted to help explain this complicated world to them.
So that's the pure, hey geographic wonderful origin story of the afterschool specials. The cynical explanation is that the networks, first of all they were under huge pressure from the government. Since the government had lifted censorship in the late 50’s, TV had started having a lot more sex on it, had started having a lot more violence. And there was a sense of panic, especially around teenagers that, oh my God, what are our kids watching? They're watching a ton of sex. They're watching violence.
Sarah: They're watching Dragnet all the livelong day.
Mike: Which of course what's funny looking back too, is how extremely tame all this stuff looks to us now, but stuff like Dragnet or whatever the prodo-Law and Order was, like something parents were actually concerned about. And there were literally congressional hearings about violence on TV and how bad TV was for kids. And there was also this idea that TV had this potential for education.
Sarah: We still clung onto that in the seventies, didn't we? Because it wasn't the original dream for TV that everyone would be watching Shakespeare all the time.
Mike: Exactly. And that we'd all learn to read. And that it was like the original moot. It was like a flipped classroom where kids would get all this educational content and it would be like a surrogate parent and it would be, oh, so great. And then of course we ended up with this system that we have now. Like every other invention, we always have these like broad social, good ideas of it. And then in reality, it just becomes shitty with these little, tiny innovations within it that are like, oh, that's good, but everybody's watching TV and it's all violent.
So it's basically in the middle of that period that the TV stations figured out that they needed to do something to counteract this idea that the whole country had, that they were poisoning America's youth. It's like how we think of Mark Zuckerberg now. It was like, okay, everybody hates me. I have to do something.
Sarah: Or like big tobacco just having to be on the defensive and be like, listen, I'm going to keep doing all of these things that I'm doing. That's not going to change, but I will do these token things so you will like me more or feel less bad about liking what I do.
Mike: And I will put these TV shows on in the time slot with the fewest possible number of people are watching. That was another way to do it. It's oh yeah, what are we doing from four to 6:00 PM when everyone is busy getting home from work and eating dinner. Okay. Yeah. We'll give it to the teenagers.
Sarah: When all the people who buy things are on the subway.
Mike: Exactly. So nobody who actually mattered at that time was watching. So furthermore in this cynical explanation is, first of all, they had to burnish their public reputation. Second of all, they did have this marketing segment that they weren't speaking to. That there were these kids who were unsupervised after school. And this was the only time that they could reach them. There were actually a lot of latchkey kids that would come home and watch TV after school, and the TV stations thought instead of doing reruns, why don't we actually hook them in with this content that is about them, and that will get them to watch.
Sarah: The war on homework faces another decisive battle.
Mike: Basically. And what's funny about these two explanations, and I think this is probably the case with all complex social history, is that they're both true. I think it is true that Martin Tossi is just a nice guy and he's this kind of wonderful figure whose parents were alcoholic, and he grew up really lonely, and he made all these specials and he made a lot of them about kids growing up with parents who were alcoholics. And he made them in a very empathic way. And he spoke with a lot of young people. He was very connected to young people. It seems like he did a lot of work to actually make these things relevant. And it's also true that the networks were like, how can we squeeze more ad revenue out of these kids? How can we make the rest of the country think that we're not out to destroy it?
Sarah: I don't know, but I remember growing up, as I think a lot of us do, seeing a lot of slightly dated, instructional, how to be a teen in the world videos in health class. And whenever my school would try and teach us about issues, they would often farm it out to a video. And it often seemed like it was from the eighties. And I wonder how many of those were afterschool specials or the kind of programming that came on as that became popular. And how much of this work, how many schools benefited from the existence of these narratives?
And it's funny because I actually remember watching one, that in retrospect speaking of the empathic nature of them, I found surprising and great because I was used to making fun of them. Because I think there was one that we watched, which I don't know where it came from, but it was called Good Kids Die, Too.
Mike: Jesus Christ.
Sarah: Or something like that. Yeah. It's about a kid who he might actually smoke crack just once and then die. But we watched one about alcoholism. And there was one about this girl with alcoholic parents and her mom comes home and is just falling down drunk, and she puts her to bed and then cleans up the kitchen. And they had this voiceover that said something like, “Susie is being an enabler”.
Mike: Oh, really? That's interesting.
Sarah: Yeah, they delivered it more gently than that, but they were saying like, when you hide your parents' addictive behavior, you are enabling their addiction. And I was like, oh, I never thought of it like that before, this is relevant to me.
Mike: That’s actually a pretty sophisticated concept for the types of public information campaigns, because they're usually so one dimensional.
Sarah: Yeah. I was used to those kinds of movies because I was already familiar with them being something I could comfortably mock. But oh, and I think this was an after-school special. I loved this movie, my friends and I reminisced about it for years. It was a TV movie they showed us in eighth grade sex ed at my school called, “What If I'm Gay?” And it was great because it was made in 1985.
Mike: It was 1987, I was just watching it on YouTube. Yes. It's fascinating. it's hilarious
Sarah: Because you think that Evan Handler is going to be gay, but then he's not, it's one of the soccer players.
Mike: And then at the end, it's amazing that it ends with this thing where he finally confronts his best friend. So his best friend figures out, finds a gay magazine, confronts him about being gay. “You're gay, bro. We're not friends anymore.” And then he talks to this coach who was like, “Being gay is not really okay, but you'll be fine.” And then the movie ends, the last scene of the movie is him telling this friend of his he's like, “You don't have to like me, but just don't hate me.” And his friend is, “Okay.” And like that’s the happy ending. It's like, gay is bad, but let's be friends anyway. It's so retrograde now. But in 1987 it was probably, I don't know, 1987 was actually pretty late. So maybe it's not that progressive, actually.
Sarah: It's weird to try and reconcile yourself with history. Because one of the things I realized that I found bizarre and fascinating is that, so I was born in 1988, I think 1990 is the year that Judith Butler's Gender Trouble comes out. Which really starts this wildfire of people realizing that gender is all imaginary, which is an incredibly over-simplifying way that I'm putting that Judith Butler would be mad at me about. But essentially saying that we have all of this accrued behavior and tradition and culture that is a pearl that has formed around no actual grain of sand. And there's a pearl there, but there is no sand there. And everyone's like, there's sand, there's definitely sand. And it's no, there's no sand. And what we have is real and meaningful and how we relate to it is complicated and exciting, but there's no sand.
Mike: That is exactly the kind of thing that is too far out there by an inch for afterschool specials. That's the kind of thing that they could maybe hint at, but it just shows you to what extent the afterschool specials, and really anything on the network at that time because it was really before cable, had to be very mainstream. It had to be really in the middle of the bell curve. And even something like Judith Butler would not seem all that controversial now because we're used to all this niche programming. But back then, you really had to hit like 60% of the country with everything you said. And even that would have been considered really fringe.
Sarah: Did you know what the response was like to what if I'm gay in 1987?
Mike: What was interesting is the country loved afterschool specials. They won a bunch of Emmys. They won a Peabody award for an episode about a guy that's taking ballet and he gets teased, and it hints that he might be gay. It leaves it ambiguous whether he's gay, we're gay viewers would be like, that's a gay person, but straight people wouldn't pick up on it kind of thing. Yeah. But it went to Peabody because people were like, oh, it's so progressive that boys can dance ballet. That was a dangerous idea then. And that was a big deal that they were blowing the lid off of gender norms.
And what I came away with actually, was I was actually pretty impressed by the content of most of the afterschool specials considering how long ago they were. So I want to read you some of the names of these, because they’re as cheesy as you would expect. But then once you get into the synopsis, and I watched a couple of them, they're actually pretty mature. So before we get into the new nuance, here's the names. So one of them is, “My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel”, “Me and Dad's New Wife”, “It isn't Easy Being a Teenage Millionaire”, “The Hero Who Couldn't Read”. This one is fucked up. This one's about date rape and it's called, “Can a Guy Say No?” And there's one about bullying called, “Getting Even - A Wimps Revenge”. And then there's the drug panic ones, “Reading, Writing and Reefer”. And then, because I used to be one, I got really interested in one called “High School Narc”. And also I love that nearly every single one of these has random, huge named actors popping up. Rob Lowe is the star of one, Lauren Hill is in one of them, Sam Rockwell, Will Smith. There's one called “Daddy Can't Read” that has fucking John Travolta and Michael Jackson. Fucking bananas. Even also, like for me and you, this is our spirit animal. You know Jan from The Office?
Sarah: Yes.
Mike: She's fucking in one. She's 13 years old.
Sarah: I love Jan. Every time I watch The Office, I admire what she does with that character.
Mike: She should've gotten a spinoff.
Sarah: Whenever I watch Miami Vice, which happens fairly often, I'm like, wow, this is like the farm league for actors in the eighties. Pretty much every episode of Miami Vice has some random person right before they were famous. Bruce Willis is an abusive husband who Crockett has to kill, obviously. John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Leonard Cohen had a cameo on it inexplicably, he was already doing pretty well. Julia Roberts, maybe afterschool specials where the teen Miami Vice.
Mike: Part of it is that because it's an anthology show, there are just so many actors they have to use. So because every single one of them is starting from scratch, it's six to 10 actors per episode. And they're new. So just statistically, it's got a pop up with a bunch of random actors. Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is in one. Jodie Foster stars in fucking four of them. She's in one where she joins a little league team and they're like,” Girls can't play baseball, you're a girl.” And then she's like, “No, girls can play baseball.”
Sarah: Isn't it wonderful to look back on what was extremely edgy 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago. And just how exciting it was to have a girl play baseball. There's something very pure about that.
Mike: Yeah. It's interesting too, of how we should judge these shows? Because when they're this old, they're inevitably on the wrong side of history on 50 different issues. And you don't want to defend them by just saying that they're a product of their time, but you also can't really discard them either. I think, especially this guy Tossi, and I'm sure that all the teens making these shows were doing their best and trying to push people's consciousness to what they were able to accept at the time. They couldn't do some Judith Butler two-hour documentary, but they could do girls can also play baseball. That's what the country was ready for at the time. And that's what the structure of network TV, because there were only four channels at the time, that's what structurally they could get away with. And they really did push it pretty far, but it's also that's not really an excuse, right? It's not oh, they did their best. Some of these are still pretty retrograde, right?
Sarah: To an extent, this is the same question where you say, how do I maintain the profit margin that I need and that the network needs. And how do I not alienate a core demographic of viewers. But also if the intent is actually there to try and educate people and meet middle America where it is, what did you see that you were impressed or surprised by, or that seemed, surprisingly boundary pushing, considering the other material that you were looking at?
Mike: Let me read you a bunch of Synopsys, because I think the synopsis demonstrates the extent to which it wasn't just moralistic stuff. Tossi really thought of this as his mission was to educate and entertain young kids. So the content of these is actually pretty diverse. We remember the moralizing ones, the ‘don't smoke reefer kids’, but that's actually only about a quarter to a third of them. A lot of them are just kind of normal dramas. A lot of them are based on books and they're just books about kids living their lives.
So here's a bunch of synopsis: ”A wealthy businessman returns after conquering the stock market. He inherits a class of underachievers and sets out to make them winners”. This is a really good one, “The story of a retired clown and his undying love for children”, “A teenager with a stuttering problem overcomes his shyness to become a championship figure skater”.
Sarah: Oh my God. That sounds amazing. I need to watch that tonight.
Mike: “Two siblings discover a wounded deer, which they nurse back to health”. I didn't watch that one, but there's probably some message in there about we should all love nature or whatever, but it's mostly just like an Old Yeller story.
Sarah: I like how the synopsis sound like there's absolutely no premise at all though. That there's a retired clown and that's the situation.
Mike: Yeah, that was the one I wanted to watch the most actually, but I couldn't find it online. “In order to better understand his blind girlfriend, teenage Jeff spends an entire day blindfolded.”
Sarah: That sounds like a really good, like young Michael J. Fox role right before back to the future, he would like, earn his stripes by playing teenage Jeff.
Mike: “A teenage girl is convinced that her mother does not understand the younger generation. Mysteriously, she is sent back in time and meets her mother as a teenager.” “Jack is a motivated high schooler until he experiments with marijuana and falls in with a fast crowd. Soon he's dabbling in harder drugs, such as LSD, quaaludes, and cocaine. Will he wise up before it's too late?” So obviously that's one of the super moralizing ones. But then we've also got, “Teenager is stunned when his best friend commits suicide and is left with one unanswered question, why?”
Sarah: Is that the Chad Lowe one?
Mike: I think that's the Chad Lowe one.
Sarah: This leads me to an interesting area because you were saying that you would want it to watch the retired clown one, but you couldn't find it online. And something I find really interesting is that some of these are on YouTube because somebody has a tape somewhere and they put it online, or because they got released somehow along the way. And the way I watched the Chad Lowe one was that when I was at Bennington, we used to go to the Yankee Dollar for fun, because it was one of the only things in town really. And they used to have this DVD bin where you could get a DVD for a dollar with two movies on it. And they just would put anything on them. So one of the 50 cent movies was the Chad Lowe movie. And first of all, I remember that being a very good afterschool special.
I've remembered it for this long, but also there's something interesting about a form of media being so dominant in its way and being on all the time on network TV, being a cultural phenomenon in that way, and then disappearing and being impossible to find, or like you find little traces of it in the dollar DVD bin, but there's no sense of longevity.
Mike: The columnist for The Onion AV club, Nathan, and has this concept of forgotten busters things that were extremely popular at the time, but that we never talk about any more. For example, he mentions Avatar, which everybody saw, and no one can quote a line from that movie or name a character from that movie. And it's still, I think, the highest grossing movie of all time. I think there's something forgot buster-ish about these movies in that they were huge, they had the biggest actors at the time. They got Michael Jackson to be in one. These are a big deal, and they were totally monoculture and it was something that everybody sat down and watched, and everybody talked about, and there were tons of articles about them.
I found all these articles from the New York Times and the LA Times about, “Coming up this week there's a preview of this new afterschool special, make sure you tune in.” It was something that country really talked about and really had huge cultural influence. And I was amazed at how few actual single episodes have Wikipedia entries, even, that it's just, they're just gone. They're just wiped from the cultural consciousness. And they show up on eBay or whatever and in VHS cassettes, but once the tapes are gone, they're gone.
Sarah: Yeah, that makes me think of the contingent of people who believe that they want some movie called Shazam starring Sinbad as a genie. Do you remember that? This kind of exploded, I think about a year ago and all of these people who had been kids at the time, which makes any conspiracy theory suspect said, yes, I’m remembering all these plot elements and saying that they had remembered the video art. And I'm one of those jerks who think that they're thinking of Kazaam, which was a movie starring Shaquille O'Neal as a genie. And also maybe a little bit of Magic Island with Zachary Ty Brian. But the point is that it makes total sense to me that people would believe in their hearts that this movie existed and there's no trace of it. Because there are so many things, like an afterschool special, that you would see and remember very vividly and not be able to find again, because they were disposable media in that way. And I don't think it would happen with a Sinbad movie, because that would be some kind of a Disney thing. But on the other hand, Sinbad plays a genie is the kind of early nineties forgettable thing that would potentially be out on video briefly and then never on DVD, and it would be forgotten, and I feel like maybe the millennial sense of we live in this digital age of all of our media being archived and instantly accessible, and it's on our tablet and it's on the air, on the cloud, all around us. The idea that there were things that we saw and loved and developed strong memories of and now can't find, feels almost creepy.
Mike: I think afterschool specials are an interesting institution in this genre in that, because also I think because there's so many random famous actors in them, they all just get mixed up in our brains. They get mixed up with the public information campaigns, which were significantly less sophisticated. And they also get mixed up with very special episodes of actual major shows like when Blossom, didn't they do a rape episode or something?
Sarah: Probably.
Mike: And it's really easy to mix those up with these actual afterschool specials, which were much more didactic because they have the same sort of tone, and they probably have the same fucking actors too. It's all these like random eighties kids that pop up everywhere. And so if you sat people down and asked them to describe afterschool specials, I wonder how many of them would turn out not to exist or to just be special episodes of existing shows.
Sarah: Yeah. The whole Sinbad thing, with people saying I absolutely have specific memories, I swear. It’s like people create memories of committing murders that they never actually committed. You can fabricate a Sinbad movie for yourself.
Mike: You went a whole like 24 minutes without mentioning murder, Sarah. This is a first.
Sarah: That was a really long time. Yeah, that actually leads me into an interesting question of, did you ever encounter a premise or a title for an afterschool special that was surprisingly dark or that bit off material that it seemed…?
Mike: Oh yeah. So as we get into the eighties, the ones I already read you are all like seventies and early eighties. And then I think as the country becomes more complicated and as this moralism becomes further and further away from the savviness of actual people, the afterschool specials get a lot darker. So there's one in 1987 where the synopsis is, “Teenager Kevin discovers he's been infected with AIDS by a blood transfusion.” And that seems like it's the breaking point where they start to get much more social and structural, and for the first time African-American protagonists, that hasn't happened in any of them before. There's two on date rape. So there's one where the most popular boy at school rapes this girl. And it was seen as a way of bringing attention to acquaintance rape.
Sarah: I also might've seen that one at sex ed camp in eighth grade.
Mike: You might've, that one's actually pretty famous. There were also clone afterschool specials. So ABC afterschool specials were the original, and then NBC and CBS also had their own franchises. So that of course gets mixed up, because who can remember what channel these things were on. But each one of them did one or two on gayness, one or two on HIV, one or two on date rape. So there's five or six among each of these topics floating around.
Sarah: I love how gayness gets thrown in with these incredibly traumatic experiences. Of course it is at the time, but still it's like, what if I have AIDS? What if I'm gay? And one of those things is more fun than the other.
Mike: And you can’t have both at once too, right? It can't be a gay kid that is having consensual sex and gets infected with HIV. It's always a blood transfusion, right? Because then he gets to stay innocent. And then with the gay episodes, it's I'm gay, but I definitely haven't fucked anybody. I'm gay, but I'm this like perfect, happy, acceptable vision of gayness where no one is threatened by it. But if you had both of them at the same time, like we weren't ready for that yet.
Sarah: That reminds me of how, speaking of the eighties, I watched Fame, the movie of Fame again for the first time in a while. Have you ever seen the movie?
Mike: No.
Sarah: It's great. One of the main characters, Montgomery McNeil, is gay and that's his big arc as a character is coming out. But the reality that they've created in this movie is that he is the only gay kid in the entire performing arts high school.
Mike: Nice.
Sarah: And it's just like, really? He had to be tragic and sexless and alone.
Mike: I think it was really Philadelphia before America was ready for a person who was gay and had actual sex in mainstream depictions.
Sarah: When did that start happening?
Mike: I think it was early mid-nineties. I remember Will and Grace getting crapped on by gay writers for being like, none of these characters ever have sex. There's kind of romance, there's like little pecks on the lips, but there's never talk of sex. There's never a realistic depiction of the way that gay men talk about sex. And that it was always a sexless, attractive, white, affluent, as non-threatening as possible. And again, it's this balance between what is America ready for and can we push the envelope? But there's clearly a limit to how much you can push the envelope.
Sarah: He's not the gay character America wants, but he's the gay character American needs. At some point you get to the Batman mold. That makes me think of how Brokeback Mountain came out when I was in high school. And as someone who had been writing slash Newsies fanfiction for years at that time, I was like, oh yes, this is happening. This is the world that I want to come of age in. And I felt attached to that movie, but it's so tragic and no one ever has a chance. You get a few beautiful days in the wilderness and then your whole life is crushing loneliness and secrets and death. And you're left with a shirt.
I remember when Milk came out, watching it and being really surprised and realizing that I hadn't seen before, joyful sex scenes. There was just a lot of happy making out in that movie.
Mike: In the first half. Yes.
Sarah: And then things become complex as they do. But I remember just being like, you don't get a lot of frolicsome making out between men. They can make out sadly like somberly or violently.
Mike: Those are men's only two modes.
Sarah: Those are like the forms of sex that we're willing to look at.
Mike: Some of these afterschool specials, I was also really impressed with one in the late eighties that was about two sisters, one slim and one overweight, magically switched personalities, giving them a new appreciation of each other. Which is also pretty woke to address weight bias. That's a thing that is still very taboo now to deal with. And the fact that they were dealing with it then is pretty okay, well done.
One of the ones that made the biggest splash was called The Wave, which was based on a true story about a teacher whose students were skeptical about how Nazi Germany worked. They were like, why would people follow the Nazis even though they weren't a member of the party, blah, blah, blah. And so apparently, he came up with this whole regime in the school where he created a program called The Wave. It was about having good posture and eating well and this ubermensch feel. And he recruited the kids to it. And apparently after a couple weeks, they were like shunning people that weren't part of The Wave. They were thinking they were better. They were planning to take over the other classrooms. It's on YouTube and it gets super dark, super fast, but that's another one where you're actually teaching people about fascism and the way that authoritarian systems work, which is cool. It's not exactly pushing the boundaries all that much, but the fact that they were actually addressing things like this, we are participants in a structure, we are affected by things like what leaders say to us is. Okay, afterschool specials, you did okay.
Sarah: What were the things that felt just extremely dated?
Mike: I watched one called School Boy Father, which stars Rob Lowe as he gets his girlfriend pregnant, and she keeps it and somehow, he ends up with custody of the baby. And then there's a scene toward the end where the baby's crying at night and he's like, stop crying and he gives it a bottle and it won't stop crying. And then he looks up at the ceiling and he's just like, I can't do this. And then it cuts to the adoption agency, just like him and his mom at the adoption agency and he's signing papers. And his mom is like, you're doing the right thing. And then it’s like, executive producer and it ends. And you're like, oh, that's the end. He doesn't learn and grow? He just gives up the baby. That one was a little, I was like, all right, Martin, Tossi you can do a little better than that. One of the things that I found really interesting about this guy, Tossi, that's running the show at the afterschool specials is that because his parents were alcoholics and he grew up with this past, he was really particular about the way that alcoholism was depicted.
So there's one in the eighties called Francesca, which is about a daughter dealing with her mother's alcoholism. And Tossi said that he didn't want to imply that the parents were ever going to stop drinking, which I think is a very mature viewpoint and a depressing one. And so the mother tries to get the daughter to stop going to Ala-teen, which is alcoholics anonymous, but for the kids of alcoholics, which I didn't even know was a real thing. The mom tries to stop the daughter from going there and the daughter basically says your drinking is the problem. It's not my problem unless I make it mine. And she tells her mom that I'm going to keep going to this regardless of you. And the episode ends with her telling her mom you need to stop drinking. And her mom is Like, I'll try, but I can't promise anything. You'd think that this would be much more and then Susie stopped drinking and everything was fine. No, it ends on this kind of ambivalent note. Things might not get better, and this is just part of growing up is realizing that your family sucks.
Sarah: That is part of growing up and it's so rarely represented on network TV. Sometimes your family sucks.
Mike: There's also one in the early nineties, I think their business model started to falter. And so they started doing fewer. And also you can tell they're getting cheaper because they start doing town hall meetings and things that are much cheaper to do. You're not hiring actors and directors and scriptwriters and stuff. And so there's one in 1992 where they hire Oprah to do basically the entire 1992 season of afterschool specials. And so she convenes a town hall of people of different races to just talk about the racial experience and their experiences of racism in America, which is pretty cool in 1992.
Sarah: Oprah also really has always taken on far too much.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. She's a busy lady and they called it a “special shades of a single protein” and the whole idea was that race is bullshit, race is just this one stupid thing. There's no biological basis for it. It's socially constructed.
Sarah: So they're doing a freshman reading of Judith Butler version of race.
Mike: That's when they finally got Judith Butler, in 1992.
Sarah: Yeah. But they're like, there's no sand and the pearl is an illusion.
Mike: So that was my takeaway of the actual content is that they're not as bad as we think they are. So I tried watching as many as I could, and many of them are shockingly bad, but I also think that any TV from that era would be shockingly bad to a 36-year-old in 2018. I think this was not the golden age of television generally. The production values were not great. The acting was not great. The writing was not great. But if you watch anything from that era that is true, like Starsky and Hutch is not very sophisticated, even fucking Cheers, which isn't even that long ago, I find excruciating to watch just because it's so predictable. Every scene, you know exactly what they're going to do with it. And that's how all of these feel is that in every scene you're like, oh, here's the part where she confronts her mother, and the mother is going to be mean to her. The minute the scene begins, you just know that there's going to be no surprises. But I think a lot of that is the fact that it's 2018 and I'm 36 and I've seen a million of these things by now. So I think by the standards of the time, they had pretty good production values and they were pretty skillfully written and directed. It's just, we're looking at them through this filter of we just don't make TV like this anymore. Some of the academic articles call it edutainment and we just don't do that anymore. And so it has to feel cheesy to us.
Sarah: Or we do reality TV. I feel like some of the void that the afterschool special used to fill is filled by shows like Teen Mom. I was thinking the other night because I was doing the thing you do where you try to watch TV, and you go on Netflix or whatever. And you're like, what should I watch? Should I watch something I haven't seen before? And then you realized that Netflix is now releasing 85 shows per week, and you flick through 800 things, and you get completely overwhelmed and you're like, I'm going to watch the first 45 minutes of Heat again and fall asleep. And that's what you do.
Mike: That is like 85% of what I do on Netflix. I spend 30 minutes scrolling through a bunch of shit. And then I watch something I've already seen because I'm like, I can't invest in some new wild west docu-drama right now. It is 11:30. I'm just gonna watch some Bob Ross and go to bed.
Sarah: Yes. And you get overwhelmed. And they're also all of these prestigious things where you're like, I know I should watch this. The worst way to sell a TV show to me is to be like, it's so good. It's mind changingly mind-bendingly good. And I just think I do not have the mental real estate for something mind changingly good. I need to watch the first 45 minutes of Heat again. And I wonder what that lack of a monoculture does to us, because there is TV that becomes a cultural obsession in that way. There was that period of about a month where everyone was watching True Detective and no one could stop talking about true detective, but that's still confined to a relatively small demographic. The people who watch True Detective were talking very loudly about it, but I doubt it had a majority market share or anything like that.
Mike: That was like 100% like people we know. I was reading the other day that something like 65% of the country has never used Uber. We are in bubbles to an extent that we do not fathom, that is unfathomable. Things that we perceive as wildly popular are enjoyed by like half of a half of 1% of the population. But it's just everyone we know, because everyone we know is college educated. Everyone we know is generally employed. Everyone we know is probably living in a big city.
Sarah: And we all talk a lot about what we’re consuming.
Mike: And we're really loud about what we're into. It's just so easy to forget the extent to which we are a huge niche and that everybody's a niche like your niche if you're in Duck Dynasty too, like everybody's in their own niche.
Sarah: My other example was like, when Beyonce performed at Coachella and everyone lost their minds for 48 hours and that's a bigger one, but not everyone lost their minds. There were some people who had no idea that Beyonce was doing anything.
Mike: I think also the critique of the monoculture is interesting too, in that for so long the left wing, radical critique of America was that mass media was creating conformity. And you just don't hear that anymore. That problem resolved itself quietly because we're all-consuming random shit now that's very tailored to our tastes. And so it almost seems like it's less of a problem than these informational bubbles that everybody's living in. If you do have a shared set of facts, everybody does watch Walter Cronkite every night, in a way that's good and that you can debate the facts, but the facts themselves are not under debate. But then that does produce a populace where there just aren't that many opinions. There isn't that much diversity because there's only so much that ends up making the news. And so we don't process smaller stories. It's a really very small number of gatekeepers. And so there's only so many hot takes that you can write about the news of the day.
Whereas now we're in this place where if you go to subreddits, it's like what counts as news on the random socialist subreddit, versus what counts as news on like the soccer moms subreddit. They're both true, but they're both anecdotes in completely different places. The soccer moms will be like, oh, look at this lady who brought her kids to school when her car broke down. And some random thing that happened in like Michigan. And then the socialists it'll be like, the CEO admits that he's ripping off his workers or whatever. And both of those things did happen so they're both true in a way, but that piece of news has traveled only to a very small number of people. And so we are all in the same reality and that even if we're consuming facts that are true, we're still in this mode where we think that certain things are a crisis, or we think that there are certain things that are trends, but they're just anecdotes. And those anecdotes have been amplified somehow.
Sarah: The question that I find so interesting is are we better able to converse with each other as a nation? And are we better able to understand the issues that the different demographics in our country are facing if we're given this standardized sort of nut roll, everyone goes home, and the issue is Rob Lowe being a schoolboy dad. And the next day you're like, Rob Lowe is the schoolboy dad. Huh? I guess not anymore because he couldn't hack it. And that's what you have to talk about. And you've all seen the same news, pretty much, or, news on one of three stations. And it had to be standardized to the extent that it appealed to both a broad swath of Americans and also to the demographics that are considered valuable by the people making the programming. Or in America where we have all of these different, tiny little media landscapes in this mosaic. And we're trying to communicate with each other coming from wildly different pockets of media and news that also allow us to believe that we're doing what everyone is doing. Everyone's watching True Detective when in fact basically essentially no one watched True Detective. I think True Detective was also probably popular for its time, but if it had come on in 1986 and gotten the market share that it did, it would have been considered an embarrassing failure, probably.
Mike: Back when things used to get like 40 or 50% of the whole country watching them.
Sarah: Yeah. What have we lost?
Mike: I Googled ‘afterschool specials problematic’ to see what would come up as far as social critique of afterschool.
Sarah: A way to see if millennials are talking about something.
Mike: Some of the critique of them basically is around this monoculture idea that they all take place in the suburbs. Even the ones that have African-American characters, it's always there within a nuclear family. They go to an affluent school. It's never anybody in a housing project. It's never even anybody living in an apartment, right? It's always people in homes.
Sarah: Except if your dad lives in a hotel downtown.
Mike: That was as dark as it got. It's this kind of monoculture idea that it's all about, whatever challenges they have, it's a deviation from the nuclear suburban family. And the solution is always swerving back.
Sarah: They knew which side their bread was buttered on.
Mike: That's the thing. You'd have to, this is the problem with monoculture, right? Is that you can't appeal to the 12% of the country that lives in apartments or the 50% of the country that is poor because they don't buy stuff. You have to appeal in this invisible way, you're appealing to a market segment. And that really profoundly changes what kinds of stories get told, but in a way that people don't really notice, in a way that isn't obvious to the viewer. It creates this idea that what is normal is mom, dad, brother, sister in the suburbs. But even then, that wasn't as common as we think it is. That idea of this is the default, even then it was something like 40% of women were working outside the home during this period. And so this idea of the housewife, she stays home, mom and dad don't get divorced. That wasn't actually as common as we think it was. I was so common in media depictions that we think it was everybody. And I think that image persists now, we have this idea that there's this 1950s that we can go back to.
But so much of that for us is constructed from fucking leave it to beaver that was total bullshit. But we had this idea that was actually representative of what's in the country, because that's what we've seen. Whereas of course there's no stories in any of the media back then about segregation or poverty or people being kicked out of public housing because there was no more funding for it. Those stories just never got told. So they've been completely forgotten or they're in some PDF on a .edu website and nobody's ever going to notice them. And so there's a really interesting article about the depictions of disability in afterschool specials. And it mentions that it's all about overcoming your disability and becoming normal. So the kid with the stutter just gets over it and then he doesn't have the stutter anymore and he rejoins society. And there's one about a girl with juvenile arthritis, who again, is cured and she rejoins society. And that's a metaphor for the way that it looked at any form of deviance or any social problem. It's not about learning to live with it or being your best self in whatever condition you have or just that some people are in bad circumstances, things like structural poverty. It never really dealt with those things. It was all about going back to the nuclear family, going back to the suburbs, going back to affluence. Just putting that as the default gave people the idea that this is what we should all be striving for.
Sarah: You can see how trying to integrate gay characters into that would lead to this weird, it feels like the ending of what if I'm gay is except yourself, but don't talk about it too much and it's okay if your friends can only tolerate you because that's the best we can hope for.
Mike: Yeah. Tolerance is as good as you're going to get. Don't expect too much more from this kid. Of course that show was written for straight people, but it's depicting what we want from gay people. I want gay people not to threaten me.
Sarah: It’s the fear and the trauma of maybe having a gay friend. Yeah.
Mike: That's the undercurrent. Oh, this is what I have to deal with, and this is how I expect to gay people to deal with me is to not threaten me to not demand. To not say I'm here, I'm queer get used to it. But to say I'll be quiet in the corner, and I won’t mention it but be nice to me and keep me around. That's what the mainstream culture wanted from that.
Sarah: That reminds me too, of how I feel like one of the complaints people making about media or people demanding their rights and so forth is just this thing, people didn't use to be autistic. How come we never heard about it? And it's that we have had neurotypical people around since we have had people and we’ve been able to say that they just really liked trains for a really long time. I think in the late 17 century, the first school for the deaf was established in France. And for a long time, deaf people and autistic people were seen as the same, because if you're severely autistic, you just have a lack of responsiveness to people around you, which includes sound and deaf people were often not educated or taught to communicate. So they developed this extreme psychological isolation because of that. So we literally could not tell the difference between deafness and autism for a really long time. And just all of the all of these forms of difference that don't fit with the mainstreaming narrative that you either if someone is mainstream-y, you mainstream them. And if they're not, you just completely ignore them because we can't talk about systemic poverty. It'll take over an hour and a half to solve that problem. And so we just can't get into it.
Mike: And there's also something to make sure you don't rock the boat too much in that, okay, maybe you are autistic, but don't be mad at me. Don't fight or be angry about your autism and demand your rights. There weren't very many sympathetic depictions of that kind of rhetoric of I'm gay, Steve, fuck you. There weren't that many depictions of that. It was like this idea of like difference is okay as long as it's quiet and doesn't fundamentally challenge me to change any of my beliefs or change any of the laws or systems or whatever.
Sarah: Yeah. Jodie Foster just wants to play baseball with the boys, and he just wants them to accept her and whatever gauntlet she has to run to make that happen is okay because she wants to join things as they are.
Mike: There's actually a feminist critique of that episode. And you nailed it like better than the feminist academic article that I read. That's basically what it was saying is that you're not actually questioning the institution of little league. You're just like, I want to join your club. It's the argument about, should we have gay marriage, or should we get rid of marriage altogether institutionally? It's the exact same argument, but just apply it to little league.
Sarah: Jodie Foster.
Mike: And Jodie foster. I think I've mentioned this before that I have this theory, that culture affects us far more than we think it does.
Sarah: Oh yeah. Because we don't have a control group.
Mike: Yeah. And this is how you form this idea of what is normal. What's interesting about the afterschool specials is that it was a deliberate attempt to actually educate kids and tell them things that they needed to know while being very deliberate and very transparent about it. So the date rape episode had statistics that kind of flash on the screen at the end that said 92% of rapes are acquaintance rape. And there's a suicide one that had a suicide hotline number that came up. There was one about a couple where they get gonorrhea and it's like them dealing with STDs and stuff. And it was very educational. And what's interesting is that we still learn about the world around us from entertainment. It's just much less deliberate now. It's much more invisible, that instead of watching afterschool specials, you're watching Beverly Hills 902 and the OC or even like Teen Mom or whatever. And you're like this is how people act. This is how I'm supposed to act. Whereas the after-school specialists were like, hello, this is how you are supposed to act like it was thinking it through what are we teaching kids? Let's be super deliberate and try to be accountable to what we're teaching kids. Whereas shows now are teaching kids stuff, but they're acting like, oh, it's just entertainment. I don't think we're as deliberate or as maybe concerned about it now as we should be.
Sarah: Yeah. And you would never have an episode of Pretty Little Liars where they flashed a number on the screen. We're saying we are trying to teach you about this thing because I think the assumption, and this is probably true is that as viewers, especially teen viewers, the response would be, fuck you, don't try and teach me something. I'm going to decide what I am thinking about and what I believe. I find it so interesting that, for example, you and I who grew up watching all sorts of TV and have also been around it for a long time, we just know the beats of the network special in a way that I don't think that a teenager would in the eighties. And part of that is because we're adults.
But also part of it, I think, is just because the media landscapes that we grew up in had already been so saturated by this form of narrative. And it was just everywhere. And we learned it. That if someone handed us a piece of paper and said, outline a TV movie, we could probably be like after 20 minutes, this has to happen and after 15 more, and then there has to be some kind of reversal. And then before you go to commercial, someone will say something surprising, and they'll play a little music que. HBO a couple of years ago, did a really good documentary about the Pam Smart trial, which was the narrative that was the basis for, to die for which I think is Nicole Kidman's finest hour.
Mike: Oh my God. I love that movie. I've heard that book, too.
Sarah: Yeah. It's such a fascinating little moment in what American media was in the mid-nineties. One of the things they talk about in this documentary is that there was this narrative that Pam Smart was a conniving seductress. And what we know about her and what she had to say for herself and what the people close to her had to say for her really doesn't bear that out. But it was the story that people knew. They knew the conniving seductress hires the luckless guy, in this case, a teenage boy, to kill her husband like that. The postman always rings twice. That's the classic Nora narrative. Everybody knew it. And so it showed up on TV and could be easily massaged into that mold. And they were like, oh, of course, Pam Smart is an evil conniving seductress and just ran with that narrative.
Mike: It's like these Jungian archetypes.
Sarah: Yeah, totally. Because what I want to believe is that as Americans, we can at least develop tolerances to not to mono myths, like the conniving seductress I think is one of the mono myths that shows up in all forms of media over and over again. I don't think we're more immune to that narrative as a whole, but we do get jaded about certain forms of media through which narratives come to us. So for me, as someone who was young in the mid-nineties and got very comfortable and familiar with, and it is able to be cynical about the, I am telling you, this is the message I want you to receive, eighties tone that I think was in afterschool specials and also on news. I think that a teenager of today, if the media was like, I am trying to tell you this is what is happening, this woman is a conniving seductress and that's the story film at 11. We at least have more cynicism about a person on TV, trying to tell us something.
Mike: It’s interesting you bring this up because all the articles I've read about the downfall, the demise of afterschool specials says basically what killed it is cynical teens.
Sarah: It was us, Michael. We did it.
Mike: I know. Achievement unlocked. There became the sense of worldliness as the pose that teenagers took in media and in real life. Basically all of these cliches had been played out so much by that point, as you were just saying, and you just couldn't do that level of earnestness anymore, you couldn't be as obvious about the fact that I'm trying to teach you something. I'm trying to send you a message. I'm trying to teach you a moral lesson. You just couldn't do that anymore. And so one of the really interesting articles that I read was about the depiction of date rape in afterschool specials versus how it was depicted in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the OSI and Veronica Mars. They mentioned something called ‘compassion fatigue’ where, when you've seen a social problem depicted so many times, it actually makes it more difficult to solve. You see something over and over again and you're like, this is too complicated, this is too sad. This is too hard. And also, especially, this is boring because you've seen the narrative so many times that it makes you less interested in it. So the more you see TV shows about a kid with anorexia and she's down to 86 pounds and she still thinks she's fat, et cetera. We have actually seen that story many times.
Sarah: I feel like that really good afterschool special narrative too, because it's like a girl in peril, but she's not being traumatized by a representative of the patriarchy. She's doing it to herself.
Mike: There were actually a lot about eating disorders. But that's the kind of thing that once you've seen that story depicted so many times, you're like, ugh, here's the part where she pukes up again. And it innerizes you to it. It makes you less compassionate because we're just immune or we're allergic to cliches. And so it's the cliche, the repetition that you're responding to, not necessarily the moral content and so TV producers started to realize that.
And so I have not seen it, but the authors of the study talk about how in Veronica Mars, the show begins with her being date raped at a party, drugged and date raped. And there's a voiceover that's really worldly of do you want to know about my date rape? So would I. I don't remember it. And it's her kind of like rolling her eyes at the experience of being date raped, kind of like, this doesn't affect me that much. I just want to solve it like any other mystery. And again, I haven't seen this, or I have no idea how it's actually depicted, but the authors of the article are saying that that's something that kind of downplays the experience of date rape or makes it just another thing that teens deal with. Another thing I thought was really fascinating about this article is they mentioned another thing that got rid of didacticism was shows started having a plots and B plots and C plots.
Sarah: Did they not have those before?
Mike: And these, since I read this in this academic article and I was watching these old afterschool specials, no, they're like one fucking note. It's there's no subplots. It's literally because they're 48 minutes after the commercials. And so every scene is about the main thing and the scenes are long. That's another huge change in media now that scenes are short because we get the point after three lines of dialogue and then we move on. Whereas in this one, it's Rob Lowe feeding the babies, like a six-minute long scene, dude. It's like Terrence Malick. You're like, all right, we’re still feeding the baby. Are we done yet? Come on. Our attention spans are so much shorter now so they're packing like 10 subplots in each one of these shows. And what this article mentions is that by treating date rape, the A story is like Melissa can't decide to cheat on a test. And the B story is Troy might not make the tennis team. And the C story is Elaine getting raped. It's about the same level as passing a test or joining the tennis team. It levels things off of how many minutes of attention this social problem is getting teaches you in this subtle way how important of an issue it is. And all of these social problems that are injected into these shows just end up getting less attention because they're one of 50 other things and most of it is like teenage bullshit, teenage bullshit, date rape, teenage bullshit. And it makes you think that oh date rates can't be that big of a deal. Cause they're just teenage bullshit.
Sarah: Yeah, that makes me think of this episode of Felicity.
Mike: They mention that in the article!
Sarah: Yeah. And I remember thinking that it was thoughtful and well done considering the context. And I saw when I was about Felicity's age and the episode is Felicity has her ongoing situation with Ben and there's some third thing. And Amy Jo Johnson gets date raped, and they resolve it at the end with the guy getting kicked out of school. He’s going to go back to Minnesota and then everyone moves on and it comes up a little bit, but yeah. It comes up in terms of Julie and Ben start hanging out more in eventually dating because she was traumatized by the date rape, and he has to take care of her and that's why Felicity doesn't get to date him for another two years. So it does get swallowed into the overarching plot.
Mike: It just becomes more teenage bullshit. Yeah.
Sarah: And there's also no sense that this is a systemic issue that affects more than just Julie. Julie got herself date raped. Now she gets to have a relationship with Ben.
Mike: I like how we've managed to make this one depressing, afterschool specials are fun and funny. We've ended on date rape and the world becoming a worse place.
Sarah: Okay. My speculation is that audiences of American media are capable of being more savvy about the powers that be attempting to lie to them in an unsavvy media way or a dated media way. So that’s vaguely hopeful.
Mike: Wahoo. What strikes me is the extent to which you just can't bring it back. Even if you wanted to bring back afterschool specials as an institution or this idea of let's actually do some instruction, let's discuss social problems in a nuanced and compassionate way for a specific audience. You just can't do it anymore. Being that deliberate, that level of earnestness, I think would just seem really patronizing now, even if you were doing it very openly and accountably and doing your best, you just can't do that anymore. And so it's funny how we’ve moved on, the way that we move on as a society from this idea of deliberately teaching our kids anything through media.
Sarah: Yeah. You and I are great at making things dark. The thing is if you're talking about American mass culture, then it's always going to get dark at some point, if you let it. Say we try to do this today. Say somebody with Carte Blanc had a network said, let's make an after-school special. Let's make it about the opioid epidemic. You would never ever make something that was, Timmy's mother has an opioid addiction.
Mike: Can you imagine Jesus? I'm rolling my eyes just thinking about it.
Sarah: And why would that be so off-putting? Because I guess it's the idea of authority, the idea of someone coming in and saying here's the situation.
Mike: I think it's also the deliberateness, too. It's the same way that like when Christians come to your door, everything about the conversation with them is you're trying to convert me. You know that, they're not trying to entertain you. They're not just having chit-chat, even if you're just chatting with the weather, there's this thing in the back of your mind, it's like you are trying to convert me with every single thing that you're doing. And so I wonder if it's like that purpose just infects everything that you see about the show, that if it's edutainment, if you know you're supposed to get something nutritious out of it, you're never going to be able to just enjoy it. Whereas the idea of entertaining somebody is much more complex than educating somebody. If someone says, hey, I made the show, I want it to entertain you. I want it to make you laugh. That feels pure to us in a way that I want it to make you think, or I want it to make you act in a certain way doesn't.
Sarah: That also makes me think of my favorite very special episode of all time was this episode of Designing Women that they did in 1987 that I think you and I have probably talked about where Tony Goldwyn is a young client of theirs, because they run an interior design firm and he comes and he says, I want you to design my funeral. I'm dying of aids. And they don’t specifically say that he got it from a transfusion of some kind, and he actually is presented as a young gay man. And they do this whole sequence where they have a homophobic customer come in and basically do the straw conservative American argument that was very well represented at the time about, this is punishment. And they just say statistics for about five minutes. So here's the ways that you can contract HIV. Here are the ways that you can’t. They literally have Delta Burke say if it's punishment, then how come lesbians get it less?
Mike: Nice. That's actually a pretty good point.
Sarah: That's a really good point. It's like the best point that Delta Burke had that entire show. What I find so interesting about that is thinking about being an American in 1987, and you might not have access to a library that has periodicals that have reliable information about AIDS, and you might not be exposed if you're not actively searching out information, you probably aren't going to be exposed to it just by the media you consume in the course of the day. So the sitcom that was on one of the major networks that got into everyone's house was actually able to perform this public health function and also to try and do something humanist with the power that it had. And yeah, I don't think that we would respond well to very clearly Delta Burke claiming to be talking in scene but really be educating you, the audience. What do you have this feeling of I don't need to be told information. I can get information anytime I want. I can look it up online. I just don't need to.
Mike: Yeah, because you’d don't need you to be the Wikipedia entry on the opioid crisis for me right now.
Sarah: It feels like the Netflix phenomenon really where all of the information we need to understand something that's happening to us is in front of us. And we're like, ah, I'm going to watch the first 45 minutes of Heat again.