Every so often I get in this mood where I just want to watch TV shows from when I was a kid. So the other day my roommate and I decided to start watching Boy Meets World from the beginning of season one. The first episode I watched, I noticed quite a few things. First, the opening credits are incredibly cheesy. They have Corey Matthews in all of his 90s glory with this cheesy music playing in the background and random shapes floating around. I'm not going to analyze the credit sequence or anything, it was just interesting to see a credit sequence from the early 90s and compare it to shows that are currently on air.
The second thing I noticed is that the show has different things strictly for the adults who are watching the show with their children. When I was a kid, I never noticed the relationships between the adults on the show, but now that I'm older it was kind of startling to see the adult stuff that they put on there. I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped when the dad was saying to the mom that they should go upstairs *wink wink.* I would have never noticed that if I was 5, but 15 years later I'm kind of shocked! Here I was thinking that this is a show for kids, but I was definitely wrong.
The last thing that I noticed was not as obvious. I had watched a few episodes before I realized that almost every character is white, especially all of the main characters. It was really interesting to see how much shows have changed in the last 15- 20 years. In current shows, there pretty much has to be a diverse cast. There are always at least a few African American characters, definitely a few Asian characters, and usually at least one Hispanic character, through the white characters are definitely the majority. However, in Boy Meets World, there was none of that, everyone was white.
In current shows, usually I feel like the minorities are shown, just because they have to be. They'll throw in a few minority characters to make it seem like they are being diverse. To me though, it usually ends up feeling forced. Although we are definitely taking steps in the right direction by going from all white characters to shows adding some minority characters, I think more needs to be done. The minority characters need to be incorporated into storylines better. Usually it feels like they have been placed in a show just so that show can meet their requirement for diversity or something.
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Nice point on a couple levels. (a) nice point re: the integration of today's casts (without wholly integrating them). (b) nice observation about how shows worked their possible target markets by adding a 2nd layer of adult humor. Do you think shows do THAT today? Do they assume kids are more sexually savvy? Do they need to target on 2 levels? Do niche networks (Disney, Nick, etc.) even try to target adults?
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