Whatever Happened to Grown-Up Movies for Kids?

“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” HBO’s miniature “Game of Thrones” spinoff about a new-minted knight at a crowded tourney, is a welcome change from the grim and ponderous aspects of George R.R. Martin’s extended universe — more Renaissance Faire than medieval dungeon, with brighter colors and livelier spirits than the grueling “House of the Dragon.” And watching its basically heroic protagonist head for his semi-happy ending, I had an unexpected thought: My 10-year-old would really like this show.

Unfortunately for our family’s viewing options, it’s still a “Game of Thrones” spinoff, which means it features gore and profanity and frontal male nudity and the most savage scenes of tourney combat I’ve had the distinct displeasure to encounter. So I won’t be adding it to the queue for any of our betwixt-childhood-and-adulthood kids.

But with “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” unlike some other HBO productions where the adult content just is the content, it’s relatively easy to imagine a version that’s fit for youthful eyes. Or at least a version that has just that one scene where you’d fast-forward while otherwise keeping things PG-13. So I’ll use the show’s failure to be a youth-friendly production as an excuse to express frustration at the dearth of popular art that falls in that zone — telling grown-up stories in a fashion suited to the ages between, say, 10 and 16.

Of course it isn’t hard to find popular art pitched directly to younger teenagers: The bookstore shelves groan with Y.A. fantasy and the entire superhero-industrial complex is explicitly geared to 13-year-old sensibilities. We aren’t living under some tyranny of R-rated movies — far from it — and so parental complaints about inappropriate material in prestige television might be greeted with an eye roll: We purged sex from the multiplex, the box office is dominated by comic book movies, what more do you want?

What I want is emphatically not more Y.A. culture or “tween” books or Marvel sequels. Rather I want more adult culture that’s accessible to early teenagers, that presents grown-up themes without being explicit about everything, that feels like a bridge connecting childhood and adulthood rather than a young-adult detour or a jarringly coarse acceleration.

It’s true that growing up always involves encountering stories that are more explicit than your parents would prefer — the R-rated movies at a friend’s sleepover, the sunbaked paperbacks found in summer rental cottages, the internet equivalents that I shudder to imagine. Part of being a parent is hoping that one’s kids will make a transition to adulthood that’s more gradual and decorous than one’s own experience; part of being a teenager is testing the limits of that conceit.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook

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