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Today's creative explosion in scripted TV has crowded out some all-ages genres that used to exist. A show like Starz's Da Vinci's Demons, about the exploits of the young inventor in Renaissance Florence, might have been a clean historical MacGyver if it had aired in the '80s or '90s. Because it's on pay cable in 2013, it's full of disembowelments, pederastic clergy and couplings more explicit than any Leonardo anatomical sketch.
Enter reality TV. It's no accident that many of the series I've mentioned are competition shows: like sports, it's a genre that can appeal to kid and adult interests without denying either one. Most of these series are made for adults without any particular goal of being all-ages entertainment.
But on their own terms, they reflect things that kids are interested in: competition, creation, performance. Maybe more important, they're also a kind of structured introduction to the grownup world. They gamify aspects of adult life--cooking, traveling, keeping a house, holding a job. Storage Wars and House Hunters are about pricing and setting value. There's a whole world of reality shows about work, like Deadliest Catch and Gold Rush, often made accessible with some kind of scorekeeping element.
And while appropriate is a subjective term, many of these shows keep it relatively clean. (O.K., MasterChef's season premiere included a cook who prepared roadkill, resulting in about a million "beaver" double entendres, but if they didn't sail over the Jrs.' heads, it's because they've heard worse at school.) In some ways, these shows re-create formats older than today's parents: What is Duck Dynasty if not The Beverly Hillbillies in camouflage?
As for those old days of TV, I remember them too well to romanticize them: for every Cosby Show (whose reruns we still marathon from the DVR), there were plenty of insipid family sitcoms; I'll take Restaurant: Impossible over Small Wonder any day. As tough as today's media world is to negotiate as a parent, I'm glad my kids are growing up in a time that has created prime-time series like Breaking Bad and Louie--which they can watch, much later, when they're older.
In the meantime, I'm grateful for reality TV. If it's sending the world to hell, at least we can go there as a family.