Netflix has turned its back on families

Netflix is the entertainment industry’s Trojan horse — a seeming gift for families, allowing parents some control over what their kids can watch. In reality, what Netflix delivers should give parents extreme pause.

In just two decades, Netflix has gone from being a relatively small-scale DVD sales and rental company to an entertainment industry superpower with about 125 million subscribers worldwide and the ability to attract A-list writing and acting talent while garnering top awards and industry accolades.

Unfortunately, during these years of stratospheric growth, Netflix seems to have given little thought to the family audiences that have proved to be the backbone of the company and provided the solid foundation for expansion and stability that has attracted investors and enabled Netflix to make multimillion dollar development deals.

Netflix has been happy to build its business on the backs of family audiences — throwing them the occasional bone of a reboot of an older, favorite TV series like “Full House,” offering a reliable yet oddball collection of children’s programming that runs from “The Little Prince” to “Captain Underpants,” or even announcing a commitment to building faith and family-based shows. (Netflix hasn’t released any detail about what this will look like.)

Even so, Netflix has been unwilling to make meaningful reforms that would make viewing a safe and enjoyable experience for all members of the family. The company has been too willing to defend potentially harmful, problematic, even pornographic, content.

Last year, Netflix released “13 Reasons Why” — an original series based on a popular young adult novel of the same name, about a teenage girl who commits suicide, despite concerns from school counselors and suicide prevention experts about the possibility of “suicide contagion.” After it debuted, Google searches on how to commit suicide spiked 26 percent. Nevertheless, Netflix renewed “13 Reasons” for a second and even a third season.

When asked about the controversial program during the 2018 shareholder meeting, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said, “Nobody has to watch it.”

Then last December, Netflix began airing the Argentinian film “Desire,” which depicts a 9-year-old girl masturbating to orgasm. In response to critics, director Diego Kaplan said, “Everything works inside the spectators’ heads, and how you think this scene was filmed will depend on your level of depravity.”

A 2017 analysis by the Parents Television Council revealed that nearly 60 percent of Netflix’s original offerings were rated for mature audiences only; just 1 percent were rated for general audiences, and only 8 percent were rated PG. And although Netflix does offer some parental controls, our research found that even if a child might not be able to stream adult-rated content when those controls are turned on, there was nothing to prohibit a child from browsing through an adult user’s profile, where he might see highly sexually suggestive titles and cover art, like “Zack and Miri Make a Porno.”

Our research also found adult titles grouped with child-targeted content, so “Sausage Party” — with its cartoonish yet suggestive cover art — appeared next to family titles like “The BFG.”

It’s important to note that Netflix recently added a way to let parents block individual titles — and that’s a good step. However, this also requires parents to know about each and every title available on the platform. With the thousands of titles available at any one time, that’s impossible.

Families have become increasingly reliant on Netflix as an alternative to traditional broadcast and cable television, but Netflix has been defiant when it comes to owning any responsibility for the potentially harmful products it delivers.

Netflix executives need to adopt some old-school principles and realize that they’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. They can’t have it both ways. Unless Netflix is willing to better serve families and distance itself from these more problematic programming choices, or until Netflix shareholders use their voices to drive change from within the company, families would do better to choose alternative streaming services.

Tim Winter, a former NBC and MGM executive, is president of the Parents Television Council.