That’s What She Said: Old Kid Shows vs. New Kid Shows

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Let me put on my cranky
pants, with suspenders, as I rant about something that really winds me up. Kid’s
shows these days are superficial crap piles that build unreasonable
expectations into the minds of preteens. Check out the shows produced by the
American networks – the actors are so preternaturally good-looking they could
be vampires.  (Have you ever seen
Zendaya? She’s basically a young, less homicidal, Naomi Campbell.) Their hair
is so perfectly styled that a hurricane couldn’t disrupt it. There may be one
kid who weighs slightly more than normal Hollywood weight – but that’s the
designated “funny one.”

Now I know the
producers have thousands, maybe even millions, of child actor reels from which
to cull their genetic winners – but the kids watching don’t know that. They may
think that’s how people their age are supposed to look.

And do not get me
started on the shows’ content. The kids on these shows don’t have normal
problems – they’re all recording artists, running their own clothing stores or
insanely wealthy from some indeterminate source. Whose reality is that? The
children of the 62 people who control 85% of the world’s wealth? Despite the
fact that the characters are dripping with privilege, the writers expect us to
believe that these kids are normal and, even …sympathetic. That they’re just
regular kids who sometimes feel bad and need their friends to help them out of
jams – like that time they accidentally mistook an oil Sheikh for a hair
stylist. Don’t you hate it when that happens to you?

Back in my day, we had
kid shows that taught us morals, values and that a good story could trump
Canada’s pathetic production values.  Take
Degrassi, for instance. Now I’m not sure which incarnation of Degrassi that my
siblings and I used to watch after school but the kids in that show could have
been plucked directly from my school. They had pimples, weight problems, and crappy
clothes. Some had extreme hairstyles – Spike, so named for her spiked hair –
but for the most part they had the same bad hairstyles that we were all
striving for at the time (a tiny satellite dish of hair in the centre of your
forehead.)

The stories on Degrassi
were realistic. The kids in the show were experimenting with things that
sometimes were bad for them – which is where the writers punished them quickly
and ruthlessly. Spike had unprotected sex – boom, she was pregnant! Shane tried
drugs – boom, he was brain-damaged! I’m glad none of the characters
experimented with an Ouija board or their head would have been rotating like an
owl for the rest of the season (though realistically with a Canadian budget,
they would have replaced the actor with a real owl.)

After Degrassi was
over, we were subjected to another Canadian masterpiece – The Littlest Hobo, about
a German Shepherd who didn’t wanna settle down (maybe tomorrow?). Each episode,
this philandering canine would stop at a place, befriend a kid and their
family, and solve a crime. It helped that the criminals always articulated
their entire plan out loud while the littlest hobo lurked nearby. Once he knew
the details, this pet detective wouldn’t run and tell like some snitch (ahem,
Lassie), he would thwart the crime using his own ingenuity. In a few episodes,
he actually untied people with his mouth! I have fully functioning fingers and
I can’t even untie people – or a dog, ironically.

Then at the end of each
episode, the kid would yell: “Hey Blue” (they always gave the dog a stupid
name), “where you going?” But the dog hobo would trot away without looking
back. I always thought the fact that he left was mean – there’s a whole
generation of kids out there with German Shepherd trust issues.

What a lot of people
don’t know is that five different dogs actually played the Littlest Hobo. After
the series ended, four of them wasted their TV money and died broke and alone
in tenement doghouses.

Back in my day, kid
shows were humble; the focus was on story, not on the wardrobe budget. So, when
you turned off the TV for dinner you felt like you were a normal person having
a normal life … albeit with a mediocre dog that couldn’t even solve a simple B
& E.