Can Family Entertainment be saved?

With a staggering underserved market up for grabs, retail and brand
giants Walmart and P&G make the case for meaningful entertainment.
JC Manigault reports

It's family night at the Rodericks’. And like many
American households, after a full week of car pooling,
play dates, soccer practice and an array of day-to-day activities,
Carla Roderick, a 38-year-old single parent from Wayne, New Jersey and
mom of girls 10 and 8, gathers the kids and their favorite snacks to watch
the latest installment of their favorite family show. As the family settles in,
no sooner are they engaged by the episode’s plot than a racy one-minute
promo for Jersey Shore (a sexually charged popular reality show) pops
up, sending Carla diving for the remote control in hopes of diverting the
children’s attention. But while she attempts to find an alternative, quickly
flipping through a number of channels, bypassing a litany of adult dramas
and even some great children’s picks, she finds nothing else (besides
the customary rerun) that as a family they can watch, without the added
concern of inappropriate content or ad placement. And we are guessing
by some of the latest data of US households with young school-age
children, you have experienced it too.

These days, films that reinforce good values are few and far between.
Not since the early ’80s, when The Cosby Show, Family Matters, and Full
House aired, has the coveted 8 p.m. time slot attracted families back to
their living rooms with well-written and well-acted great entertainment
that inspires confidence and trust.

According to Ben Simon, Walmart’s Director of Brand Marketing and
spokesperson for Walmart’s and P&G’s “Family Movie Night” initiative,
“In today’s economy, it all boils down to a numbers game that has to
make business sense for everybody—from the network to advertisers—so
it makes business sense when people show up and watch.” But with most
major networks relying on a demographic system that favors single young
adults and edgy programming, this makes for an uphill battle, since most
TV and cable networks, in their quest for ratings, have honed in on the
advertisers’ highly coveted 18–24 target (simultaneously tapping into older
audiences), but sadly, overlooking a vast audience of 35 million moms
and 75 million kids who represent, according to Simon, the massive
bulls-eye out there.

“Our objective,” states Simon, “is to not just have great programming
that the whole family can love, but have a big, broad audience enjoying
and participating in the programming itself. The more we can show the
broad-based industry that there are a lot of adults, families, parents, and
kids out there who want to watch this type of programming, the more it
will start to have the necessary impact on some of the current frameworks
in media and in entertainment space. We want to change the definition
of family programming. As it stands, family-friendly programming, quote-
unquote, tends to maybe have a bad definition in the minds of some of
the people in Hollywood and in the media industry. So we want to revise
its definition by showing that family programming can be authentic,
exciting, deal with real issues, and be done in a high-quality, excellent
way that we all can be proud of.”

Almost two years, six installments and seen by a collective 22 million
viewers, Who is Simon Miller?, a heart-pounding summer spy drama that
tests the limits to which families will fight for each other, starring Robyn
Lively, Loren Dean and Emmy-nominated Christine Baranski (premiering
on NBC Saturday August 6 at 8/7c), marks the two retail giants’ con-
tinued commitment to good family values. “We talked to large groups
of moms across the United States, and what we found was that across
the board there was this resounding unmet need by concerned moms for
more forms of family programming that the entire family could watch
together. It’s really kind of a simple idea. Mom wants to have program-
ming the whole family can enjoy and that she doesn’t feel like she has
to dive for the remote for—whether there is an inappropriate scene in
the programming, or maybe even ads that are unsuitable for a family
programming environment.”

As major power players, the retail and brand giants not only produce
family-friendly content but also control most of its advertisement slots.
“We do everything we can to control those two hours so that the entire
experience is appropriate for the whole family. And though we can’t
control every individual local ad that is bought (the little snippets of
local ads for a car dealership or whatever’s local), the rest of them,
all the national ads, are all run through us, and what we’ve tried to do
is not only to make them appropriate for the entire family but to bring
real ingenuity and creativity to the ads.”

Will other major companies and major networks follow suit? That’s yet
to be determined. “Our hope,” Simon explains, “is that the effort not only
meets this unmet need, but acts as a catalyst that will lead to hundreds,
or even thousands more hours of real family programming in the market-
place on an annual basis.” With a line-up of films slated for the latter part
of 2011 and early 2012, and a mom-led, grassroots movement gaining
momentum—it looks like family-friendly entertainment is once again
poised to regain its proper place in America’s living room—and
we’ll be watching.

JCM