My parents allowed me to watch alot of adult horror as a kid, Terminator, Predator, the Aliens franchise, and a bunch of other gritty horror movies.
But I was always forced into my room upstairs if they decided to watch Torchwood. Though I’d try and sneak downstairs to listen to the episodes.
Even when I was 13, I tried watching it and had to angle my phone so my parents couldn’t see I was watching it, but I didn’t get very far in Everything Changes until dropping it for a few years (was shocked with the amount of blood).
Even when I fully got into it at 15, I’m now realizing alotta things went over my head whilst watching, that I only understand/appreciate as an adult.
I mean, I’d call what we got of Class more of a YA-show-that-is-equally-for-other adults than much of Series 1 and 2 of Torchwood was. And 2000s BBC3 was largely that sort of thing. Late teens & other adults-orientiated in fairly equal measure.
Mind you, I don’t think TV has much of a distinction. His Dark Materials was a YA novel series hit back in the late 1990s, and yet, the TV adaptation of it doesn’t really scream ‘just for the teens’ in its marketing.
Yeah, but they rate stuff strangely. You can have a lot of violence and still aim it for kids. But don’t you dare show the wrong kind of nipples! Then you have to be 18 at least!!!
As I said, it would be how I would classify them if I was using those age ratings. Not how the powers that be would. It’s what I’m actually familiar with as a base of comparison.
I think that coming from a Nordic country might affect me here. Because nudity is not that big of a deal here both in culture and in real life. But to me, it is crazy what is considered adult and not. To me, a film that is aimed at adults is more about the topics than what is shown. We have kids’ films with nudity (especially older stuff) and it is not that big of a deal.
So you see, a major reason people came over to the United States was for religious freedom. A lot of them were Puritan religious nuts who have passed down their beliefs through the generations, and a lot of those values unfortunately still exist in our culture and media, in a way that most of the Western world has moved on from. It’s better in that respect than it used to be, but there’s still a long way to go. Gen X and Millennials are far less like this than Boomers and earlier are, so once they finally start to get more power than the Boomers, perhaps we can see more of a shift away from puritanism.
While I would say some of the themes would be better understood by an adult, Season 5 of TSC very much goes back to the TV Season 1-2 focus on sexual scenes which don’t provide any thematic value other than for the audience to say “hot”.
But nowadays, there is a culture of young kids enjoying and sharing dark fiction, so the distinction between Adult or YA/teen is muddied, imo, when it comes to the genres of sci-fi/ horror.
And as it was aired in 2006, factoring in the exploration of homosexuality, and bisexuality, labelling it as “adult” would avoid the accusations of Doctor Who writers “grooming” kids and young teens. Plus all the assumptions that it would be “confusing” for children.
Or it could’ve been the biases of the time, as this was only 5 years after homosexual acts between individuals was legalized at 16, instead of 18. It could’ve still been a grey area. Just researching it, and British regulatory rating bodies at the time did have a tendency to rate something as more “mature” if it had two guys kissing, and rated it lower if it had two straight people kissing.
