Is Jekyll and Hyde too violent?

 

Recently there has been some progress in the world of television in that it has become more liberal. In some cases this is a good thing - suddenly LGBT people and minorities are being represented! Amazing! - and in other cases, we get shows that are simply trying to pursue the shock factor with sex, violence and other jaw-dropping deeds.

 

The problem with this progression is that eventually it will filter through into family-friendly timeslots. Gone is the family-friendly content that parents and kids can enjoy, and instead we get Jekyll and Hyde which features among other things, an obligatory punch-up per episode and genuinely scary supernatural monsters.

 

 

Except haven’t we seen this before? People of a certain age may remember that Doctor Who, especially the older episodes, were renowned for giving people frights. Monsters like the Daleks, the Cybermen and more recently the Weeping Angels have sent kids scuttling behind the sofa or watching from underneath a cushion. We certainly didn’t seem to have a problem scaring our kids back in the sixties and seventies - at least the previous generation didn’t anyway. I can’t help but compare the two series on scare factor - after all, Jekyll and Hyde reminds me of early 2005-2007 Doctor Who.

 

Even today, we’re subjecting kids to things that perhaps we shouldn’t be letting them watch. The Hunger Games franchise which seems to be popular with teens and ‘tweens’ is about a competition where teenagers fight each other to the death, thereby glorifying violence. To older viewers, it’s about a beyond-harsh system imposed by a political dictatorship wanting to punish districts for a rebellion 70-odd years ago. But what eight-year-old is going to understand that?

 

 

This isn’t a criticism of the content of the programmes as such. I’ve found Jekyll and Hyde to be nothing short of well-written, fully engaging, and with more twists and turns than a theme park ride. But if we’re going to mollycoddle our children, hadn’t we better go the whole hog? Surely it’s hypocritical to say to them that they can watch one thing with violence but not another.

 

Until this week, I thought Jekyll and Hyde was fine for children to watch. The thing that got me up in arms about the timeslot wasn’t the violence but the fact that one of the henchmen has a frog-like creature just hanging out in his eye and I’m grossed out by that. Eight-year-old me would not be able to watch! Generally though, I’m of the opinion that children seem to enjoy a good scare like this. I certainly did watching Doctor Who ten years ago. The problem is trying to find where the line is between ‘a good scare’ and ‘unsuitable for children’, which is hard when the line seems to be constantly moving. But I will say I consider creatures moving in someone’s eye to be over the line!