Watching Nickelodeon’s two new 24/7 networks for 24 hours solid gives WINSTON O’GRADY a peek into kid culture. And our own.

Photography by Danny Turner

It would be easy to say, after watching children’s TV for 24 hours straight, that I fear for the future of the republic. After all, I have learned that the leaders of tomorrow—our future lawmakers, our titans of industry, our generals, our surgeons, our ministers—all grow up on a steady diet of programming that details the seabed activities of a pants-wearing sponge who works for a money-grubbing crustacean, the wanderings of a saucer-eyed Latina who is by turns either lost or being harassed by a kleptomaniac fox, and the shenanigans at a high school where everything but actual learning takes place. And that cable networks make this material readily available to them, 24/7.

So am I fearful? And should you be? The short answer is that “fearful” might be too strong. “Concerned” works, but so does “hopeful.” For the long answer, stay tuned.

All Nighter The Naked Brothers Band segues into Saved By the Bell.

First, some housekeeping matters. We all know the criticism of TV: It’s a “vast wasteland” with 120 channels and nothing worth watching. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that children under the age of 2 watch no TV and that those older than 2 should watch no more than two hours a day. That’s why, from an early age when our parents yell at us to turn that thing off and go play outside, to adulthood when we lament the fact that our lives are so empty that we just veg out in front of the tube, many view TV as the most passive of all forms of media.

Still, Americans love television. If there is a bigger lie than, “No, that doesn’t make you look fat,” it is, “No, I don’t watch much TV.” You probably do—a lot. The average American sees 4.5 hours a day. That adds up to 68 days a year. The average American child manages to squeeze in four hours a day. The average American household contains 2.75 sets, which we switch on for more than eight hours a day.

Fair enough. I wanted to see if America’s children receive as steady a stream of televisual garbage as did my cohort, back when network executives considered Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, and reruns of Hogan’s Heroes as state of the art. I figure if the fare is better after 30 years of study, then maybe today’s kids will turn out better than I did.

Kangaroo Court Capt. Kangaroo and Mr. Bunny Rabbit in a classic moment with a carrot.

Nickelodeon certainly knows the target markets for its two new channels. “Noggin aims for 2- to 5-year-olds, and The N looks for 15- to 17-year-olds,” says Amy Friedman, senior vice president of original programming and creative director of The N. “But everyone under 20 ‘views up,’ so we see many younger kids tuning into The N.” I would learn that precocity is the soul of tween TV.

The N

Saturday, 1 p.m.
I start with The Naked Brothers Band. The conceit of T.N.B.B. is that it is a rockumentary about a downtown band fronted by two brothers, Nat and Alex Wolff, neither of whom appear naked but both of whom possess a level of cool and acumen with the ladies I have long strived for but never achieved. They play instruments, they sing—“Crazy Car” does have a good beat—and they have a 10-year-old manager whose last gig was apparently at Grossinger’s nightclub in the Catskills. Their father makes cameo appearances. He’s an accordion-playing moron from whom the brothers have learned nothing about coolness and who desperately needs his sons’ approval. For a pair of pre-pubescent boys, Nat and Alex exude an astonishing level of post-modern irony. I run upstairs and put on black clothes to get closer to the zeitgeist.

Now, the kids in The Partridge Family were groovy, but not exactly cool in the arch and all-knowing way of Nat and Alex. Irony didn’t exist on TV in the 1970s, and so it barely existed in my young life. That made me a younger 7-year-old than my own 7-year-old, who’s being raised on this stuff. And another thing: Shirley Partridge might have been a struggling widow, but she was smart and in control of her kids—even the nubile Laurie. Mom was the boss, and a boss performer, not a clown like the accordion-playing doofus on T.N.B.B. Times have changed.

Mended Family Drake, Josh, and the rest of the bunch blend better than the Bradys.

Saturday, 1:30 p.m.
Drake and Josh is a half-hour sitcom about teenaged stepbrothers with only one thing in common: a bedroom. Drake is dreamy, with his shaggy hair, cool T-shirts, and perpetual smirk. He plays the guitar, and the chicks dig him. He’s also stupid. (Rome is not in Romania, Drake.) Josh is fat, works in a movie theater, and aces school. He doesn’t seem to have a girlfriend, although when I look on a fansite later—all of these shows, I discover, have fansites—it appears that Josh slims down in later seasons and gets a girlfriend. Their little sister, Megan, is much smarter than Drake and Josh, and her pranks make their lives a living hell.

The humor runs extremely broad, with Josh taking more pratfalls than any self-respecting second banana should. In the episode I watch, the boys dress up like the Blues Brothers and sing in a talent show, which means that kids know who the Blues Brothers are. In the same way that one must read classical mythology and the Bible in order to fully understand the Western canon, I guess one must know television history to fully understand modern television. At 4.5 hours a day per person, that’s an entirely reachable goal.

No 44-year-old can watch the blended family on Drake and Josh and resist a comparison—and a well-aimed jab—to the archetypical blended family on The Brady Bunch. In their pratfalls and bickering, Josh and Drake present a far more realistic view of an American family than the Bradys did. I know. I grew up in a real family of six children. While the Bradys were visiting Hawaii and having Don Larsen and Joe Namath drop by, my brothers and I were fighting over the last drops from a can of Hi-C and the crumbs of a Hydrox box.

Saturday, 2 p.m.
Hey, that’s Josh and Drake’s little sister, only she’s grown up some. It’s iCarly, a show about a tween with her own webcast. Miranda Cosgrove portrays the really smart, really pretty, really precocious, really popular kid who just happens to be a Web personality. Here, Carly tries to get her obnoxious history teacher to change the grade on her paper from a B+ to an A. He won’t budge, so her brother hacks into the school computer and changes it himself. Only Carly feels so overwhelmed with guilt that she uses her computer skills to change the grade back. The lesson here is that honesty, especially when applied with cyber skills, is always the best policy.

It occurs to me as I lie on my sectional sofa watching iCarly that I could actually be outdoors, exercising. The University of Michigan Health System claims, as do hundreds of other institutions, that there is a direct link between watching TV and being overweight. Watch more than four hours a day, and you’re very likely to dent your scale. That’s one of the reasons why the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry recommends that parents limit the amount of TV their kids watch, both per day and per week.

The next show interrupts these very deep thoughts.

Multicultural High The diverse teens of Degrassi might look happy, but don’t be fooled.

All Saturday Evening
Degrassi: The Next Generation is the cornerstone of The N’s evening programming, with non-stop showings from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. Set in the fictional Degrassi High School in Toronto, the show captures the manic energy of a big urban high school. I can’t believe a network aimed at tweens would air a program so aggressively topical. But over the course of an evening’s viewing I come to appreciate it. The show addresses every single problem faced by kids; nothing is taboo.

I wonder if my adolescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s would have been easier for all involved if I could have watched a show every night that addressed bullying, sex, self-mutilation, racism, cheating, and all the other stuff the wonder years are made of. At least I would have known that I was not alone in my angst. Sure, I had James at 15, and 16 for that matter. But two seasons of Lance Kerwin does not an adolescence make.

If kids really do view up, Degrassi presents some lessons that parents might not want a still-cocooned child to learn. First of all, the good guys sometimes lose. Spinner gets his butt kicked by the hard guys from Lakehurst, and lovely Darcy still doesn’t have a handle on the depression that drove her to slit her wrists. Members of Degrassi’s peace council lose their cool and end up in brawls. Teachers aren’t always fair.

In short, Degrassi is just like real life, one that older teens need to understand. If parents don’t want them watching a show that presents life so realistically, then we need to get right with the fact that we don’t want them walking through metal detectors to get into school either. But they do. That’s the world we’ve created. The media merely reflects it.

Still, would I want my 12-year-old watching Degrassi? No way. There’s plenty of time for him to get corrupted. But once he’s in high school and shows signs of starting a brawl in the middle of a peace council meeting, I’m pointing him, enthusiastically, toward Degrassi.

Big Bill, Little Bill Bill Cosby poses with an animated version of his younger self.

Sunday, 1 a.m.
The Degrassi block gives way to reruns of retro teen shows: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Saved by the Bell. I remember when these shows originally aired, in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The Fresh Prince is a young kid from Philly, played by Will Smith, who moves to Southern California to live with his rich uncle. Hilarity ensues when his hip-hop ways clash with his uncle’s stuffy manner. Smith comes off as charming, but the lessons about tolerance seem force-fed. Even a 10-year-old knows when he’s being taught something Very Important.

That said, Fresh Prince still beats my generation’s version of strangers in a strange land. I’m talking about The Beverly Hillbillies. Whereas Smith always learns a lesson about how to get along with people from different backgrounds, the Clampetts remain stubbornly attached to their old ways. If Jethro wants to tool around Griffith Park in a tank, then by golly Uncle Jed will get him one, even if the city slickers don’t think it’s right. So we’ve made some progress.

Then again, maybe not. Saved by the Bell is about a bunch of kids at a high school. The episode I saw deals with a plot to get a kid named Screech out of detention. The show is unrelentingly sophomoric, even though the students were applying to colleges. These kids would get eaten alive at Degrassi High. I flip over to Noggin to find something more highbrow.

Noggin

Sibling Rivals Bossy Ruby and headstrong Max take a rare break from mischief.

Sunday, 2 a.m.
It’s Max and Ruby! I remember these animated rabbit siblings from when my kids were little. Ruby is the bossy older sister, Max is the little brother who never listens to her but always comes out of things smelling like a rose. It’s a gentle show. The situations the pair encounters—where are all those chocolate Easter eggs?—feel only a little bit dicey, never enough to produce any true anxiety. Not in me, anyway, and probably not in a kid, either. It’s richly drawn and soothing—almost like watching the early rounds of a golf tournament on TV.

Which raises a question: Why broadcast something so squarely aimed at 3-year-olds at a time that audience is presumably asleep? N spokeswoman Mia Best tells me later that when the network announced it would go 24/7, parents of insomniac children flooded the network with e-mails of thanks for providing them with something to keep their young Captain Midnights entertained in the small hours. So the audience exists. Nickelodeon wouldn’t disclose figures but Best says that the demand from cable providers is “brisk.”

Sunday, 2:30 a.m.
Next up: Little Bill, then Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear, two more animated shows. Little Bill deals with Bill Cosby’s childhood but not the one he spent with Fat Albert. Rather, it’s about a kid who asks a ton of questions of his great family. He learns a lot, no surprise from a show by a guy with a doctorate in education.

Little Bear is about, well, a little bear who has adventures with his friends and family, like camping and singing with his grandpa. It, too, is gentle and kind of funny, but not laugh-out-loud funny. The show reminds me of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Say what you will about Fred Rogers’ persona, his show was accepting—just what little ones need most.

While watching the Little duo, I am struck by two things. Thing No. 1: Little kids must love bright and primary colors, because both of these shows, like almost everything else I will see on Noggin, is as primary as a Mondrian painting. Thing No. 2: All of the adults portrayed on Noggin are caring, wise, supportive, and fun. In other words, they are completely unlike the adults portrayed on The N. Little kids look up to adults; teenagers look down on them. Talk about reflecting your culture.

Sunday, 6 a.m.
Blue’s Clues comes on, which I watch with my early-rising 5-year-old, Catherine. “Why are you watching a baby show?” she asks, proving that kids do view up. Catherine and her twin sister, Christine, are huge Hannah Montana fans. And she’s right. Compared to much of the stuff I’ve watched over the last few hours, Blue’s Clues seems just one step above Teletubbies. With one big exception: No show I watch in my marathon packs more lessons into a half hour than this one. Kids count, learn the alphabet, get some socializing, and learn a few things about how the world works—namely, that if you put a stamp on an envelope, the postman will deliver it. No wonder writer Malcolm Gladwell called the show “perhaps. . .the most irresistible and involving television show ever made.”

While kids will learn a lot watching Blue, I wonder: Will they learn as much as my friends and I did watching Schoolhouse Rock? Back in my day, if you wanted to watch cartoons you had to get up on Saturday morning and turn on the broadcast networks. Somebody at ABC figured out that Congress might let them put commercials for Sugar Smacks in heavy rotation if they snuck a little learning past young viewers in three-minute snippets at the end of Wacky Races and before The Banana Splits. And so was born Schoolhouse Rock, a mini-show that used animation and catchy music to teach a generation about grammar (“Conjunction Junction”), math (“Three Is a Magic Number”), and the legislative process (“I’m Just a Bill”).

How catchy was Schoolhouse Rock? On my wife’s first day in a constitutional law class at Duke Law School, her professor asked the assembled scholars if they could recite the preamble to the Constitution. Of course they could. In one voice, they sang out “We the People,” just the way Schoolhouse Rock taught them.

sometime mid-morning
I’m fading fast. Dora the Explorer is on, making me long for the urbane humor of SpongeBob SquarePants. I hated the doe-eyed Dora when my kids watched it, and I hate it even more now, as my marathon hits the 19th hour. She is, as the Georgians used to say, an enthusiast. She is relentlessly upbeat and eager. Her voice is a squeal. Good for kids, annoying for parents—especially exhausted ones. Go see Abuela, Dora. Adios, Dora. And Swiper, go get some therapy. Or a job, you thieving bum.

In a huff, I doze off. Sometime around noon I wake up, with Oswald playing. Fading in and out of consciousness, I register a handful of details—impressions, really. Huge blue octopus…is he wearing a derby?…penguin friend…wiener-dog sidekick…bright colors…then fade out.

findings (and leavings)
If TV mirrors the cultural identity of a nation—and I think it does—my 24-hour kid-TV marathon reveals the following about America’s children:

• The temptation for obesity is huge.

• Younger children love bright colors, animals, and their elders.

• Older ones think they’re smarter than their parents. When it comes to dealing with electronics, they might be right. But come on: Not all moms and dads are dopes.

• Musicians get all the chicks.

• Girls are always smarter than boys.

• High school is terrifying. Everything there can go wrong—and often does.

Of course, I didn’t need to sit in front of my TV for 24 hours to learn all this. I have young children and lots of older nieces and nephews, so I know little kids love their parents a lot, and I know older ones put all adults in the dork camp. One look at my basement floor, scattered with all manner of plastic toys, tells me little kids love primary colors. And although I graduated from high school 25 years ago, I know that the place can be a minefield best navigated with the help of good friends. In that respect, The N and Noggin provide extremely accurate reflections of American childhood.

But is kid TV good? Should we let our children watch this stuff?

The answer is one I use on my kids all the time: It depends. No, if the shows undermine morals you’re working so hard to instill in your kids. No, if your kids can’t handle the snark of The Naked Brothers Band or the edginess of Degrassi: The Next Generation. Yes, if the stuff is good. To take a few examples from my era, the Partridges beat the Bradys and the Clampetts. Besides, TV is the dominant form of mass communication. If you don’t want your child cast out from the middle school lunch table, she needs to know what her peers are talking about.

But watch with your kids. Talk about what’s on, to counteract the bad stuff and to reinforce the positive. Laugh along with them at the funny stuff, and roll your eyes at the drivel. And read with them, and talk about what you’re reading. And let them exercise. No, make them exercise. And you should work out with them. And lie on your backs in the grass and watch lots of clouds go by with them, too. Practice moderation in all things. After all, I can recite routines from The Three Stooges. But I also brush up my Shakespeare.

So, yeah, the kids can watch Noggin and The N. But no more than an hour a day. Please.

Making the Grade Spirit puts kid TV champs to the test.
Arthur An 8-year-old aardvark sniffs out problems at school and home. PBS ADULT WATCHABLE Yes EDUCATION GRADE A- OVERALL 4 stars	Hannah Montana A teen idol balances grammar with Grammys. Disney ADULT WATCHABLE No EDUCATION GRADE C OVERALL 2 stars	SpongeBob SquarePants A fun-loving sponge soaks up undersea adventures. Nickelodeon ADULT WATCHABLE Yes EDUCATION GRADE C- OVERALL 3 stars
That’s So Raven A teen psychic gets flashes of the future. Disney ADULT WATCHABLE No EDUCATION GRADE C OVERALL 2 stars	Dora the Explorer A Hispanic girl travels with a booted monkey named Boots. Nickelodeon ADULT WATCHABLE No EDUCATION GRADE A OVERALL 3 stars	Ben 10 An alien relic empowers a boy to morph himself into 10 alien aliases. Cartoon Network ADULT WATCHABLE No EDUCATION GRADE D+ OVERALL 1 star
iCarly A teen gets a taste of fame when her Web-based talent show goes viral. Nickelodeon ADULT WATCHABLE No EDUCATION GRADE C OVERALL 2 stars	The Suite Life of Zac and Cody A hotel lounge singer’s sweet digs give rise to her sons’ misadventures. Disney ADULT WATCHABLE No EDUCATION GRADE C OVERALL 2 stars

Winston O’Grady fires up his flat-screen TV in Chatham, New Jersey.