No, Seriously. Really?? Naaaaah...You MEAN It??

Those of you who've been around for a while know my fondness for PBS cartoons. They're the televised equivalent of comfort food to me, escapism to simpler days. And so, from time to time, if nothing else is on or I want something to half-watch while I work on other projects, I'll turn to "PBS Kids Sprout", a 24-hour cartoon channel.

Until last week, they had something in the evenings called "The Good Night Show", which was hosted by a character named Melanie--kind of a surrogate big-sister/preschool-teacher/really-great-babysitter character, who did crafts and recited poems and played games, with the viewers encouraged to participate. Frankly, I found her unbearably perky and annoying, but I'm 36; I can see how she would have been charming to a three-year-old. A couple of weeks ago they started a new season, adding this little muppet-like character called Star, who just annoyed my socks off.

So imagine my surprise, last Thursday, to turn on Sprout and find: no Melanie, no Star. There was just the usual male announcer-voice telling what show was coming next, and songs from "Sesame Street" or "Dragon Tales" in the interstices, where Melanie's segments normally would have been. I wasn't sure what had happened, if the ratings had just plummeted with the introduction of "Star" and they had to retool, or what.

Curious, when I got to work this morning I Googled "PBS kids sprout melanie". And here's what I was led to: (From the PBS Kids Sprout website):



Okay, first of all: she was canned for something she did SEVEN YEARS AGO??? Damn, thought I; that must have been soooome video! I mean, generally you don't get taken off the air until they find the video where you're showing boobies; she had to have been completely nakers, at the VERY least, to get FIRED. This has got to be something big, I thought; I wonder if I can find it? I've gotta see what was so bad they'd fire her over it!

Fortunately, metafilter had a link to the video. It's technically NSFW, if you work for a pack of Puritans and/or the sort of people who were scandalized by Janet Jackson's nipple. So if you work for those kind of people, let me cut to the chase: it's a spoof of those abstinence commercials, the ones with a virginal-looking girl talking about her future, and how she doesn't plan to get pregnant. Only instead of leaving it there, she finishes with "...And THAT's why I choose anal sex!" Nowhere in this video (about 20 seconds) is there any suggestion of nudity, or of the act being described; the only content that could be considered REMOTELY offensive is the mention of anal sex. But the PBS execs decided that, because of this video, keeping Melanie as a host would damage their credibility with their audience.

Let's think about that, shall we? Who is Sprout's audience? Predominantly preschool children, if the website is to be believed. Except preschool kids don't know about this story, so that's obviously not the issue--it's the parents PBS is worried about.

Why would their parents be concerned? Parents are generally worried about things that will harm their children somehow. But the only way this video could "harm" their children is if they found it, viewed it, and knew the significance of what it was discussing. (And if they were the sort of parents who considered such knowledge "harmful".)

How would preschoolers find this video? Only someone who knew about the controversy would know there was any reason to look for something; and I don't know too many preschoolers who are well-versed in Google. Simply typing "Sprout melanie" does lead to Metafilter, which links to the video--but how many kids of 4 or 5 would be able to discern which of the 123 results for "sprout melanie" would lead them to the controversial stuff? I mean, I know kids today are internet-savvy, but c'mon! Furthermore, the only reason it's on Metafilter is because of the story: she was fired for this video. If she hadn't been fired, there'd be no story, and no need for a Metafilter link.

Now the parents, of course, would know to find the video. But how does the mere existence of the video hurt their children if they don't see it? Is Melanie suddenly going to start demonstrating anal sex as she recites the Sprout Stretch Poem? Is she going to, one evening after "Barney", suddenly bust out with "You know, Star, sometimes friends have a SPECIAL way of getting closer?" Highly unlikely, I'd say. So really, the only thing that "compromises" her "credibility" is the fact that, somewhere out in the ether, there exists this video in which, many years ago, she mentioned buttsex.

Okay. So somehow, having said the words "anal sex" while in film school in 1999 makes you an unfit role-model forever. They've handled this controversy by sweeping Melanie under the rug, pretending she never existed, and thinking they've protected the kids by doing so. In fact, by firing Melanie, PBS has actually made it MORE likely that kids will see this video. I can easily see a five-year-old, curious as to why their nighttime TV routine was disrupted, asking an older sibling to look up Melanie on the internet and see what they find. Whereas, if Melanie were still doing crafts and playing games every night, there'd be no reason for curiosity, no reason to look Melanie up, and no story to find even if they did look her up.

On our kids' shows, thirty-plus years ago? We had Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, Richard Pryor. We had adults who had been in movies which we were not allowed to watch, who had made records we were not allowed to hear. There were adult shows, and there were kid shows, and if a kids'-show actor made an adult show...well, that was what actors DID. As long as they didn't bring that adult persona over to the kids side of the fence, nobody was harmed by it.

Fast-forward thirty years. Welcome to Paranoid America, where children must be protected from ideas they wouldn't otherwise comprehend; protected from books and movies and all the other things they wouldn't otherwise encounter, if we weren't drawing their attention to exactly these things in the hopeless quest to "protect" them forever.