No Interpretation Without Proper Representation: A Look Into the Misinterpretation of Age and Diversity In Television Is there a limit on how old you can be to act as a certain age? There’s an ever-increasing gap between the age of the actors/actresses that play teenage roles in television and it’s actually a problem we need to address. A big topic in today’s world is how teenagers view themselves, their bodies, and how television sets these unrealistic notions about what a fourteen year old may look like. The critical media analysis I am going to be discussing is related to the ages and diversity of the actors and actress’s television shows hire to play teenagers. I’ll start out talking about the history of this topic. The first sitcom
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This topic is particularly specific to teenagers on popular shows on MTV, VH-1, and even Disney channel. One show I particular that stands out to me than others is MTV’s Teen Wolf. This show is centered around a couple freshman, sophomores, and juniors in high school. These actors and actresses don’t look like your normal 16 year olds that you’d see if you walked around my old high school. Literally everyone on that show is in the best shape possible and all portray being great looking and just acting like looking the way they do while acting as a 16 year old is completely normal. Well I’ll tell you at age 16 I was this little 5’6, 135lb kid with pimples and some baby fat, and according to Livestrong.com I was a very average 16 year old kid because they found out that the average height and weight for a 16 year old is 5’7 and 132lbs. Yet the average age for the actors on the show Teen Wolf is twenty-two and everyone has to have a six-pack. Teen Wolf is just one of many shows on multiple networks that use this …show more content…
Although this issue is getting better, we still can see a big problem in today’s television. According to Dictionary.com the definition for diversity is “the inclusion of individuals representing more than one national origin, color, religion, socioeconomic stratum, sexual orientation, etc.” This made me think of diversity in a whole new light, because when I usually think of diversity I tend to lean on the side of that it just means to include people of different race. I was very wrong, because on that end of the spectrum I felt that television wasn’t actually doing a bad job with that category, but when I did more research on the subject the numbers were staggering. According to Nate Jones of Vulture Magazine of the 11,000 speaking parts that appeared in 2014 studio films and live-action scripted TV shows from 2014-2015 season, “only one-third were female, and only 28 percent were nonwhite. When female characters did appear, they were more than three times as likely as men to be sexualized. LGBT representation was even worse, with the community making up only two percent of all speaking parts.” Seeing these numbers completely shocked me, I knew it was bad, but this is
This topic is particularly specific to teenagers on popular shows on MTV, VH-1, and even Disney channel. One show I particular that stands out to me than others is MTV’s Teen Wolf. This show is centered around a couple freshman, sophomores, and juniors in high school. These actors and actresses don’t look like your normal 16 year olds that you’d see if you walked around my old high school. Literally everyone on that show is in the best shape possible and all portray being great looking and just acting like looking the way they do while acting as a 16 year old is completely normal. Well I’ll tell you at age 16 I was this little 5’6, 135lb kid with pimples and some baby fat, and according to Livestrong.com I was a very average 16 year old kid because they found out that the average height and weight for a 16 year old is 5’7 and 132lbs. Yet the average age for the actors on the show Teen Wolf is twenty-two and everyone has to have a six-pack. Teen Wolf is just one of many shows on multiple networks that use this …show more content…
Although this issue is getting better, we still can see a big problem in today’s television. According to Dictionary.com the definition for diversity is “the inclusion of individuals representing more than one national origin, color, religion, socioeconomic stratum, sexual orientation, etc.” This made me think of diversity in a whole new light, because when I usually think of diversity I tend to lean on the side of that it just means to include people of different race. I was very wrong, because on that end of the spectrum I felt that television wasn’t actually doing a bad job with that category, but when I did more research on the subject the numbers were staggering. According to Nate Jones of Vulture Magazine of the 11,000 speaking parts that appeared in 2014 studio films and live-action scripted TV shows from 2014-2015 season, “only one-third were female, and only 28 percent were nonwhite. When female characters did appear, they were more than three times as likely as men to be sexualized. LGBT representation was even worse, with the community making up only two percent of all speaking parts.” Seeing these numbers completely shocked me, I knew it was bad, but this is