Netflix criticised for featuring too much smoking in its shows
Netflix has come under fire for featuring too many shows in which its characters smoke on screen.
US anti-smoking organisation Truth Initiative said it found 319 of what it describes as ‘tobacco incidents’ in Netflix shows.
By far the worst culprit was Stranger Things, a show with a substantial teen following, which included a total of 182 scenes featuring cigarettes, thanks in no small measure to David Harbour’s cigarette-loving police chief Jim Hopper.
“There has been a revolution in television that now encompasses a complex universe including Hulu, Netflix and an emerging world of on-demand platforms,” said Robin Koval, CEO of Truth Initiative.
“And while everybody was watching, but no one was paying attention, we’ve experienced a pervasive re-emergence of smoking imagery that is glamorizing and renormalizing a deadly habit to millions of impressionable young people. It has to stop.”
“Well-documented movie research shows that youth and young adults with high exposure to tobacco imagery are twice as likely to begin smoking as those with less,” the research adds.
Netflix shows, it claims, feature twice as many smoking scenes as rival broadcasters, with Orange Is The New Black featuring 45 scenes of smoking, House of Cards with 41, Fuller House with 22 and the documentary series Making A Murderer, which featured 20 instances of smoking.
The Walking Dead on AMC also featured highly 94 scenes of smoking, while it’s claimed that 79 percent of shows that are popular among viewers aged 15-24 feature smoking ‘prominently’.
In a statement to Variety, a spokesperson for Netflix said: “While streaming entertainment is more popular than ever, we’re glad that smoking is not.
“We’re interested to find out more about the study.”
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