TV Parental Guidelines

The TV Parental Guidelines are a television content rating system in the United States that was first proposed on December 19, 1996, by the United States Congress, the American television industry, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The guidelines went into effect by January 1, 1997, on most major broadcast and cable networks in response to public concerns about increasing amounts of mature content in television programs. It was established as a voluntary-participation system, with ratings to be determined by the individual participating broadcast and cable networks.

The ratings are generally applied to most television series, television films and edited broadcast or basic cable versions of theatrically released films. Premium channels also assign ratings from the TV Parental Guidelines on broadcasts of some films that have been released theatrically or on home video, either if the Motion Picture Association did not assign a rating for the film or if the channel airs an unrated version of a film.

The ratings were designed to be used with the V-chip, which was mandated to be built into all television sets manufactured since 2000 (and the vast majority of cable/satellite set-top boxes). They complement more advanced parental control systems that block by channel, program, or content, but the guidelines themselves have no legal force, and are not used on sports or news programs or during commercial advertisements. Many online streaming services television services, such as Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Paramount+, HBO Max, and Fandango at Home also use the guidelines system, along with digital video vendors such as the iTunes Store and Google Play, and digital media players, including the Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, and Roku platforms.

In 1993, the four major American broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC) began airing disclaimers before programs with violent content. This came amid increasing concern over the effects of violence in mass media, and was described by The Washington Post as an attempt to avoid government-imposed regulations. Three years later, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, which called upon the entertainment industry to establish, within one year, a voluntary television rating system to provide parents with advance information on material in television programming that might be unsuitable for their children. This rating system would work in conjunction with the V-chip, a device embedded in television sets that enables parents to block programming they determine to be inappropriate.

On February 29, 1996, all segments of the entertainment industry, led by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), joined and voluntarily pledged to create such a system. They agreed that the guidelines would be applied by broadcast and cable networks in order to handle the large amount of programming that must be reviewed – some 2,000 hours a day. The guidelines would be applied episodically to all programming based on their content, except for news, sports and advertising.

The same year on December 19, the industry announced the creation of the TV Parental Guidelines, a voluntary system of guidelines providing parents with information to help them make more informed choices about the television programs their children watch. The guidelines were modeled after the movie ratings system created by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968. The television industry agreed to insert a ratings icon on-screen at the beginning of all rated programs, and to encode the guidelines for use with the V-chip. The industry also created a Monitoring Board, composed of TV industry experts, to ensure accuracy, uniformity and consistency of the guidelines and to consider any public questions about the guideline applied to a particular program. The TV Parental Guidelines went into use on January 1, 1997.

In response to calls to provide additional content information in the ratings system, on August 1, 1997, the television industry, in conjunction with representatives of children's and medical advocacy groups, announced revisions to the rating system. Under this revised system, television programming would continue to fall into one of the six ratings categories (TV-Y, TV-Y7, TV-G, TV-PG, TV-14 or TV-MA), but content descriptors would be added to the ratings where appropriate, based on the type(s) of objectionable content included in the individual program or episode: D (suggestive dialogue), L (coarse language), S (sexual content), V (violence) and FV (fantasy violence – a descriptor exclusively for use in the TV-Y7 category).

Further, the proposal stated that the icons and associated content symbols would appear for 15 seconds at the beginning of all rated programming, and that the size of the icons would be increased. The revised guidelines were supported by leading family and child advocacy groups, as well as television broadcasters, cable systems and networks, and television production companies. Finally, the revised proposal called for five representatives of the advocacy community to be added to the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board. On March 12, 1998, the Federal Communications Commission found that the Industry Video Programming Rating System was acceptable, and adopted technical requirements for the V-chip.