Joshuaonline Presents
When television was just broadcast over the air TV (and free, we've been swindled) local stations and networks tried to appeal to as many mass audiences as they could, because, especially on commercial television the viewer is the product and the ad buyer is the costumer and would like to make sure they are buying right. Cable comes around , and I mean cable in the sense of having new channels as pay only channels, there was new spaces for demographic targeted channels.
Children had spaces on broadcast TV, the main 3 networks would give them Saturday Morning, CBS also did weekday Mornings until the 80's with Captain Kangaroo. If you lived in a market that had more stations; mostly independent (non network affiliated stations) then you would have some weekday morning and/or afternoon programming; maybe even a local kids' show. (WGN had Bozo) and maybe Sunday (for the non God-fearing families). That was it, until cable and some guys thought up having a children's channel. Also PBS had children's programming in the non-commercial space.
Nickelodeon, as example since it's the first one, was focused on a child audience (at least during daytime hours) and could do more program hours toward kids than WGN or KTLA could. Even they still had limitations, they figured kids should not be watching TV at 11pm and had block for their parents to watch called Nick at Nite, but that's different than what was around before this revolution.
Nickelodeon even split demographic their audience: pre school aged kids get their own section. As the 1990's came around there was a lot of choice for children's television. For the purpose of this post, FOX Kid was running on the FOX network and later the company bought Pat Robertson's Family targeted channel called , uh Family Channel, and rebranded it as FOX Family (Channel).
FOX Family strived to do something like Nickelodeon, and what Family Channel kind of did before it, and that was focus on trying to get different audiences to watch their channel. Kids had daytime, families had evenings, and adults had later evening. (Though was more like a Nick to Nick at Nite switch and not a Cartoon Network to Adult Swim switch in program tone) . FOX had goals, back to them soon.
Now, back to talking about channels focused on demographics. In general, ESPN does skew male, that doesn't mean ladies don't watch it, it's just that it's more targeted to guys like most sports broadcasts have advertising that skews toward things someone thinks males like. Lifetime, the cable channel, used go by "Lifetime: Television for Women" it's purpose was to skew to a female audience, and even sparked competition with WE TV launching the name WE meant Women's Entertainment , which a bit direct, (Meanwhile, ME TV didn't mean Men's Entertainment) and there was Oxygen (because only women like to breath) which still kind of does skew towards women in their true crime programming, at least that's what their suits say. Later Spike TV shows up, and becomes the first network for men. (Named Spike!)
Gendered focused television wasn't new because of cable, it was around before. Networks did it, daytime television was targeted towards women because "Ladies are at home during the daytime being wives so... they might want see adverts for stuff wives need to buy" --some guy probably said this in 1950.
Now children's TV did have more gender neural in its thought, that's not say there wasn't some targeting towards different genders at anytime before the 80's, but the 80's really did bring a lot of that up. Thanks to many shows being based on toys, and toys getting a big gender bifurcation in the 80's (not to say there wasn't gendered toys before the 80's). There was "My Little Pony" marketed towards girls and "Transformers" marketed towards boys.
Nickelodeon, on the other hand, didn't buy into the toys= shows thing, they acquired and later made their own as well, children's programming they thought would be of value to children and just trying to sell by gender to their advertisers. You'll see that most of their shows were gender neutral in the sense that a boy could even watch "Clarssia Explains it All" and relate to something. That's not say the programs might have had more skew in audience by the audience watching, but that wasn't Nick's intentions.
This is were everything to comes together. FOX had a broadcast kids block and a family/children's cable channel. There was something coming along, then called "Digital Cable" This allowed for the concept of having more channels, having spinoff channels, having even more niche channels, and hoping that people would be willing to pay a little more to watch them. This exploded, and FOX wanted to get into the game too.
So. I've always wanted to write about these channels, but didn't know how, because unlike even Cable Music Channel which lasted a month, these channels really don't have much internet content of them floating around. I can only cobble together a few things, so that's why I'm trying this different styled post to see if maybe there's a way to do it.
In 1998, FOX Family Worldwide announced they were launching two new digital cable networks: Boyz Channel and Girlz Channel. (the z because it's the 90's Wazzz up!) These channels would focus on children ages 2 to 14 between the hours until 9pm ET. (source) They both would end up focusing on parents as Parentz Channel (which I hate the Z used her more than anywhere else) oddly not the Momz channel or Dadz Channel, weak. With programs for parents to learn about parenting or something, it wasn't going general entertainment for adults because Fox Family.
I don't have an indication really how the reception to the idea of gender segregated children's channels were received. (Besides this snarky article from EW) There was some concern that Girlz channel might suffer in ad sales because of the perception that girls do watch boys' shows but not the other way around. (https://kidscreen.com/1998/12/01/23818-19981201/) So, I need a time machine and ask some people in 1999 about that, then buy a lottery ticket and record some footage of these channels, that would help.
The pitch for the channel was that hey look there are channels for golf, news, cooking, and polka (where the heck was that channel?) and there are channels for women , and there's boys' schools and girls' schools , boy scouts , girl scouts, so why not launch a boy(z) channel and girl(z) channel? (Source : Fox Kids 1999 upfront)
They weren't worried about cannibalization of Fox Family, much like how Disney Channel wasn't worried about Toon Disney. It might be more helpful to have 3 program choices (4 with fox kids afternoons and Saturdays) in the FOX world. (Don't go to Cartoon Network, please-- Someone at FOX, probably)
The channel(z) launched in October 1999. Thankfully, due internet archiving, it is easy to find out what programming these channels aired. Starting with Boyz Channel (spell check hates this post) they had a program called "Boyzopolis" which from looking at the website was boys' themed talk show thing. It seemed to be focused towards younger teens ,boy(z) and stuff they would find interesting. It is a shame that there's really no content to sample from the show. The show aired daily 3 times a day.
Everything else in the line up is programming from Saban/ Fox kids library, and mostly archival programming, seeming to keep anything newer on FOX Kids and Fox Family, which makes sense because those were the money channels. It's like how Cartoon Network's Boomerang was , with all archive programming going after a specific audience. The only original series for Boyz was "Boyzopolis"
The programming in general was like "X-Men", "Spiderman", "The Tick" , "Eerie , Indiana" etc, It doesn't feel like overt BOY channel that one would assume. Let's check out Girlz Channel. (Switches to Channel 1142)
They had "Girlzopolis" which is the same as the other show but with girls, it aired at same times as the boy show but on this channel. A good look shows that the line up isn't too overt in a way that some would surmise. There are girl lead shows, of course and slightly more live-action that over on Boyz. They also aired some of Saban's programs that ran on UPN Kids, so that's nice to see. Both channels also had some pre-school programming, which is odd because Fox Kids had some too, so....
They only had few shows on both channel's with repeating through out the day, with the preschool blocks breaking up the pace a little. I think if they had lasted long and since it's not modern cable, they would have soon expanded. I get the idea that FOX wasn't trying for toy-aisle television and was mindful that there would be some criticism on how these channel(z) would end up looking, so they seemed to have gender focus but not too overt to make it feel like pandering.
Both websites do something interesting as well, there's a thing called GB space (get it?), this was the era of the internet hitting traction and kids channels had websites and etc. The concept of GB Space was to bridge boys and girls together. Which also fits to them having segments and bumpers about girls wondering about why boys do something and vise versa. It seems they were going beyond just trying to sell to boys and girls a bunch of toy stuff. There's also an advice area for kids to ask for advice.
Now the Parent part...
Parentz Channel was the name of the evening post 9pm ET hours of both channels. They weren't a simulcast so it was two different versions of Partenz channel. Which means Partenz Channelz. Some of the programming aired on both channels , but there were two gender specific shows: "Bringing up Boys" was for the Boyz Channel (ooh they didn't spell it Brining Up Boyz, tisk) and was hosted by Dennis Prager. Searching to see anything about this show lands the results of a James Dobson book and series. On Girlz there was "Guiding Girls" (no z) with Sissy Biggers (name is on the nose there) Biggers worked on Food Network and Lifetime. These programs seem to be the same concept of helping parents uh parent their specific gendered child. They had neutral programs that aired on both "Parentz 101" (thankyou) and "What Every Baby Knows" (sadly not a Rugrats rip off)
The websites for Boyz, Girlz and Parentz also mention they had an advisory board of doctors of various fields having to do with children especially. It seems FOX was invested in making sure these channels had experts.
My Cable Music Channel comparison is kind of apt, though they lasted longer than 30days, the channels closed in August 2000. They had 100,000 subscribers, none of which recorded anything to see stuff from the channel(z) in the future. (source) At this point, FOX probably had no investment in continuing with kids programming as the next year they sold FOX Family Worldwide to Disney and never looked back.
The idea of having a boy focused and girl focused channel for children didn't die as much as went dormant, ironically, the company that bought Fox Family Worldwide: Disney, decided to give it try in 2009.
Disney Channel had started skewing more towards young tween (redundant) girls with their programming in the mid 2000's, there was some programming that might give something for boys, but was lacking. Toon Disney/Jetix Channel was sitting there and Disney in August 2008, announced they were rebranding the channel to Disney XD.
Disney XD's main focus was going to be Boys ages 9 to 14, to compliment Disney Channel's focus of Girls ages 9 to 14. They had already added "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody" and "Phineas and Ferb" to Toon Disney's line up in anticipation. Disney's numbers figured out that Disney Channel wasn't attracting males to their channel as much as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network were. (source) Though, this post isn't going to be a deep dive of Disney XD history , it's interesting to see what Disney's plans here were.
The difference between Disney trying it and the FOX attempt was the less blatant way it was done on air. There was no Disney Girls TV and Boys TV. They just kind of gave them demographic focuses but still left it bit open, so girls could still watch "Zeke and Luther" on Disney XD and not be told HEY THIS BOYS TV ! Same with Suite Life, which did rerun on XD, but still did first run on Disney Channel, boys could still watch and not be told this is Disney Girls. Might have been the smarter plan.
I don't think that the gender split idea was the damage to Boyz and Girlz channels, it was really in a spot that really it wasn't viable. They had low carriage, but that could have increased, but the timing wasn't good. Fox Family and Fox Kids were both in ratings slumps and there was too much going on at once. The care for these services really were the last thing they really could invest in. Like I said, Fox Family Worldwide was sold to Disney in summer 2001, there has to be some feeling that FOX was probably considering getting out the kids TV game around the time they decided to shut down the Boyz and Girlz Channels.
That's it for now, hope you liked this something different. Tune in next time, when we launch a very oddly specific target audience of cable channel for kids who have brown hair and live in Montana.
Thanks to this , it was really helpful to find stuff about these channels https://forums.lostmediawiki.com/thread/5852/boyz-channel-girlz?page=2
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