Revered by many as the best children’s cartoon of all time, SpongeBob Squarepants continues to air on Nickelodeon where it has dominated since 1999. However, ratings since the conclusion of season three have been consistently underperforming, but why is that?
In fact, on Watch Mojo’s list of the “Top 10 Most Watched Kids Shows Of All Time,” every single one aired before the year 2016. Every single show…except for Bluey.
Every generation is subject to bias due to nostalgia. People who grew up in the 90s tend to praise the culture from that decade as the best. The same can be said about the 80s, the 70s, and the 2000s, but has children’s television truly gotten worse? Have we as a society allowed nostalgia to cloud our judgement of present day media?
Short answer: yes, it has gotten worse…kind of. Viewership amongst children’s programming has gone down significantly over the last decade, and the biggest reason for this is the switch to a more 3D, computer generated cartoon style. The earliest example I can think of for ugly CGI cartoons is Sid the Science Kid. Other notable low points are, but are not limited to: It’s a Spongebob Christmas and the Rugrats reboot.
Look at the difference between these two styles:
No wonder viewership has gone down. Who would want to look at this 3D garbage?
Was this just a stylistic choice because some executive liked 3D better than 2D? No! Funny enough, this style of animation is a lot cheaper than its 2D counterpart. Animation went on a downhill spiral. As viewership decreased, networks were forced to revert to a cheaper option of production, causing viewership to decrease even more.
The reason viewership decreased in the first place was because of a change in culture. As today’s children grow up in a world with many options for entertainment, parents are given many options as to what they want to expose their children to.
In an age of screens, many parents are utilizing apps such as YouTube to entertain and educate their children. According to the Pew Research Center, “89% of parents of a child age 5 to 11 say their child watches videos on YouTube, as do 81% of those who have a child age 3 to 4 and 57% of those who have [a] child age 2 or younger.”
This shift in what kids are watching has had a massive effect on viewership. Especially with the popularity of streaming services like Netflix and Disney+, children have a lot more access to whatever they want to watch. It’s not surprising that when they can choose from a large catalog of shows and movies, it’s going to be superior to whatever Nickelodeon is airing at that moment on cable.
The Achille’s heel of children’s programming has definitely been their inability to adapt to change. Back before streaming, kids were tied to the TV schedule. Whatever was on was what they watched. The entire gimmick of “Saturday Morning Cartoons” was that you didn’t have a clue what would be on, but you were going to watch it because chances were it was going to be entertaining.
While children’s programming has definitely taken a blow in recent years, there is a silver lining in Bluey.
Bluey is an Australian cartoon that has blown up in recent history as a powerhouse in children’s programming. It follows a family of dogs, and each episode handles a topic that can be as light hearted as Dad dropping Bluey and Bingo off at school. However, many episodes have been glorified because of their heavy symbolism and underlying themes.
Bluey has become so successful that many of its viewers are actually adults. There’s a Bluey movie coming out, and I would not be shocked to see a grown man in the theater sitting a few rows in front of a party of 5 year olds. If the makers of Bluey continue to do their thing and maybe even expand to other shows and projects, the future of children’s programming may be promising.
All in all, the majority of children’s programming is way worse now than it was in previous decades. It seems the creators have given up on quality because of their drop in viewership. As we continue towards a world dominated by streaming, I’m curious to see if we ever have another golden age of children’s shows.
With Cartoon Network announcing their website’s closure, will we be seeing any other early 2000s pioneers of the industry doing the same thing? Are we finally seeing the end of a long-running nostalgia-driven domination of television?
Who knows?
The only thing we as viewers can do is watch what unfolds.
