WHERE THERE’S STREAMING, THERE’S SMOKE
New entertainment outlets face fewer limits on lighting up
Many young fans have embraced the retro, 1980s world of Netflix’s Stranger Things, but its atmosphere conveys more than moodiness. There’s a lot of cigarette smoke, too.
“While You Were Streaming,” a new study from the anti-smoking group Truth Initiative, counted 182 scenes with smoking or images with cigarettes in the eight-episode first season of the supernatural drama.
Stranger Things topped the list in an examination of smoking on 14 shows the group’s survey found were most popular with Americans ages 15 to 24, the age group most likely to take up smoking.
Researchers worry that scenes of smoking, often featured to convey authenticity in a growing genre of period programs that trace back to Mad Men, may reverse a trend of declining use by glamorizing and re-normalizing cigarettes.
The study found a prime offender in Netflix, the increasingly popular streaming service, which has fewer content restrictions and no advertisers to push back.
In an examination of 230 TV episodes from the 2015-16 season, the study found 458 smoking-related instances (including smoking
products used or seen). More than 400 series aired that year, so the survey is not representative of TV overall.
AMC’s The Walking Dead finished second with 94 incidents, followed by four more Netflix series: Orange Is the New Black (45); House of Cards (41); and family sitcom Fuller House (22), though Netflix says plot points in that family sitcom take an anti-smoking stance.
Streaming content “has grown astronomically in the last few years, with a lot of great shows. As all of us are watching, nobody was paying attention to the fact that tobacco imagery is all over this content. We’re really concerned,” says Truth Initiative President and CEO Robin Koval.
Reynolds American, the parent of R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco companies, says it doesn’t pay for or otherwise encourage the placement of cigarettes in TV or films, and Altria, which owns Philip Morris USA, refuses to grant permission to use its brands.
Research from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that youths exposed to smoking in film and TV are twice as likely to become smokers.
Koval suggests smoking on TV shows could increase if streaming services continue to rapidly expand programming and don’t adopt policies discouraging smoking like those in
“As all of us are watching, nobody was paying attention to the fact that tobacco imagery is all over this content.”
Robin Koval
place at the broadcast networks.
“The (broadcast) networks have grown up in an era of stricter standards and practices, and they’re beholden to advertisers, all the things that tend to restrict content, whereas Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, that’s the brave new world and advertiser-free for the most part,” she says.
According to a study in 2017 sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the smoking rate among high school students continues to decline, from 23% in 2000 to 5.4% today. “Yet all this imagery is going up,” Koval says. “What frightens us is that all this progress could be undone as smoking gets re-glamorized and normalized.”
Asked for a response to the findings, Netflix said in a statement that “while streaming entertainment is more popular than ever, we’re glad that smoking is not.”
Broadcast networks discourage smoking in shows and permit it only when it frowns upon the behavior. In films, Disney won’t allow smoking scenes in films rated G, PG or PG-13, except in the case of historical figures or if the activity emphasizes the negative consequences.
Smoking was a common sight during TV’s early years. After the U.S. surgeon general and National Cancer Institute reported on the health and cancer risks posed by cigarettes, Congress banned cigarette commercials, starting in 1971, and the networks cut back on scenes with smoking.
Because there were no programming alternatives, “it was very narrowly controlled,” TV historian Tim Brooks says.
More recently, cable and streaming services have created more narrowly focused shows and don’t worry about language or behavior that might offend mass audiences (or advertisers), Brooks says. Their content isn’t regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, which grants broadcast licenses.
Smoking “is not making that kind of comeback … on the major broadcast or cable network shows that a lot of people see, but it is more visible” on other outlets, Brooks says.
Koval acknowledges the study’s narrow focus and hopes the results lead to broader research efforts that would track smoking in other popular shows such as Westworld, Veep and Saturday Night Live.
Apart from recommending that programmers eliminate all smoking references, Koval says they should be factored into TV’s content ratings system and state governments should take a show’s presentation of smoking into account when awarding tax breaks.
Truth Initiative president and CEO