Where there’s smoke ... there’s Netflix
Truth Initiative says streaming services exhibit three times the violence, sex, and smoking onscreen
Streaming services aren’t beholden to the same content restrictions as broadcast television. The result, to some viewers’ chagrin and others’ delight, is often more sex, more violence and more cursing.
And, it turns out, among the vices often embraced by streaming services and avoided by broadcast television is tobacco in all in its forms — which Netflix is being called out for.
The Truth Initiative — the non-profit anti-tobacco organization — released a study that compared seven popular Netflix shows to seven popular broadcast shows. In this sample, it found Netflix’s shows featured characters smoking almost three times as often as those produced by broadcast networks like NBC, ABC and CBS.
The organization behind the study argues this could lead teenagers and young adults to smoke.
“There has been a revolution in television that now encompasses a complex universe including Hulu, Netflix and an emerging world of on-demand platforms,” Robin Koval, Truth Initiative CEO, said in a news release. “And while everybody was watching, but no one was paying attention, we’ve experienced a pervasive re-emergence of smoking imagery that is glamorizing and renormalising a deadly habit to millions of impressionable young people.” “It has to stop,” added Koval.
Netflix has not specifically addressed the study’s findings.
“While streaming entertainment is more popular than ever, we’re glad that smoking is not. We’re interested to find out more about the study,” a Netflix spokesperson told Variety.
The biggest offender, according to Truth, was Stranger Things, the 1980s horror throwback that unexpectedly became one of the network’s biggest hits to date. The show contained 182 scenes featuring tobacco or tobacco usage.
In Hollywood’s golden age of the 1940s and 1950s, cigarettes were as much a part of movies as opening credits. Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe — to name a few — rarely filmed a scene without a cigarette dangling from their famous mouths.
That wasn’t entirely coincidence. The tobacco industry often used movies as a vehicle to advertise cigarettes. In one infamous deal, Sylvester Stallone was paid $500,000 to feature Brown & Williamson cigarettes in five of his movies, including Rambo and Rocky IV, according to the New York Times.
When the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings system was introduced in 1968, it didn’t account for tobacco usage by adults. As a result, G- and PG-rated movies often featured smoking.
That changed in 2007, when — under pressure from anti-smoking groups such as the Truth Initiative and the Harvard School of Public Health — the MPAA added smoking as a factor in assigning film ratings, alongside sex, violence, and swearing.
The change largely reflected society’s own feelings on smoking, which is an increasingly uncommon activity — only 15 per cent of U.S. adults were smoking in 2016, down from 20 per cent in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rates are similar in Canada, Statistics Canada says. Given that, some of Hollywood creators have steered away from including tobacco usage in their productions.
“Audiences want the ability to idealize themselves in the stars,” Daniel Melnick, who produced Blue Streak and Air America, among others, told The New York Times.
The change was generally regarded as positive, since there is a connection
between real-world and onscreen smoking, says a 2012 report from the U.S. Surgeon General. The report concluded that “giving an R rating to future movies with smoking would be expected to reduce the number of teen smokers by nearly one in five, preventing up to one million deaths from smoking among children alive today,” the CDC says.
Regardless of why the characters are seen smoking, it’s striking that many of the shows on Netflix included in the study, such as Stranger Things and Fuller House, are aimed at children.
“We also know that the normalization of tobacco use in movies does have a strong impact on a child’s risk of future tobacco use,” David Hill, chairman for the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Communications and Media told U.S. News and World Report. “We know that there’s a dose-dependent effect between exposure to tobacco use in movies and shows and a child’s subsequent risk of tobacco use.”