KIDS EATING UP THESE SERIALS
How binge-watching has changed children’s television forever
The fifth and latest season of Netflix’s All Hail King Julien, an animated Madagascar spinoff for seven-year-olds, begins with what — by the standard of children’s programming — constitutes an astonishing turn of events. Julien, lord of the lemur kingdom, finds himself dethroned and banished when Koto, a villainous indri, stages a brutal coup. In exile, Julien plans to reclaim his throne from this jungle despot. Over the course of the season’s 13 episodes, we watch this plot play out.
A sprawling narrative is routine for the Netflix original series, but King Julien differs in several important respects, chief among them that it’s a kids show. Five years ago, a complex storyline sustained across many episodes would have been unthinkable in kids TV. But King Julien — as well as other series on Netflix and other streaming services — represents a radical shift in children’s programming.
The episodic kids show of old has vanished. Children’s serials are now the norm.
“It’s all about binge-watching these days,” says Barry Ward, president of Bardel Entertainment in Vancouver. “It’s what Netflix wants now. People are consuming their content in much larger doses.”
Bardel is the animation studio responsible for King Julien and other Netflix Originals for children, many of them created in collaboration with DreamWorks under an agreement between the studio and the streaming service. Ward says that, as his business has begun to transition from traditional television broadcasters to VOD and SVOD services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, the scope of the content itself has fundamentally changed.
In the past it was customary for a children’s program, such as a network sitcom or crime thriller for adults, to tell simple, self-contained stories one halfhour or hour at a time. A conflict would be introduced and, by the end of the episode, cleanly and definitively resolved. It was a mere condition of circumstance: A network could not reasonably expect its audience to tune in one week after another without fail, and it could not afford to lose those members of the audience who had fallen behind or simply weren’t bothered to follow a prolonged plot.
And if this were an issue for the general public, it was doubly true for children as it was for adults. Is a seven-year-old even capable of remembering what happened a week ago, let alone interested enough to keep up?
“Traditional broadcasters don’t want to worry about things like continuity,” says Tara Sorensen, head of children’s programming at Amazon. “What matters to them is freedom and flexibility.”
But for a service like Amazon Video — whose children’s programs, including Tumble Leaf, Just Add Magic and Niko and the Sword of Light, tend to appear on the platform in season-sized batches — there is no need to rely upon an audience to return to any given show over time. The content is all on hand, instantly; kids can devour a 20-episode story in a single afternoon.
“When a series works,” Sorensen points out, “it gets watched very quickly. Even preschoolers will watch programs all the way through and watch them over and over again.”
On YouTube, information about who watches what drives content creation with remarkable precision, and that boundless hunger is already being exploited to a stunning degree. Babies old enough to slam an indiscriminate fist onto an iPad screen will cycle through hours upon hours of dreck tailored to their attention.
When kids today watch something, they tend to watch it a lot.
For animation studios like Bardel, the demands of serialization present certain logistical challenges.
“It takes a lot more work in the planning stages especially,” he says. “The writers have to be more cognizant of what’s been going on in previous episodes, and can’t come up with just anything episode to episode. It puts an onus on the scriptwriter to be in the loop about longer arcs. Everything has to be taken into consideration as one consistent story.”
Workflow has been disrupted, for studio and broadcaster alike. The culprit? Sequencing.
“The episodes have to actually be delivered in order now,” Ward says. You’d think order would be necessary no matter what the format — but in fact a series with standalone episodes had considerably more freedom in its precise arrangement week to week, and studios often availed themselves of it.
It’s difficult to predict the impact of binge-watching on a developing mind. Episodic kids’ shows have vanished for good, it seems. The long-term repercussions of children’s serials remain to be seen.
It’s all about binge-watching these days. People are consuming their content in much larger doses.