Now it's The Walking Dead for kids – must we all be teenage zombies?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/24/the-walking-dead-teenage-zombies-tv-dramas

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Fox has just announced that one of its big hit series – The Walking Dead – is getting a family-friendly edited version to be broadcast earlier in the evening. Leaving aside the obvious gags about how the bowdlerised version of a bloodthirsty action drama set after a zombie-driven collapse of civilisation might make for a tidy five minutes of airtime, why?

There really is no shortage of "young adult" fiction, either on the page or on the screen, sloshing around our collective culture right now. Teen drama is omnipresent. If it didn't start with Harry Potter, the tales of the boy wizard were at least a tipping point.

Right now, the big Tumblr-friendly fantasy drama is Divergent. It's a sort of Brave New World knockoff that owes a substantial debt to the tone and casting of The Hunger Games. Next month some other property will come along to be distilled into animated gifs by twenty- and-thirtysomethings that ought really to know better.

Smack in the middle of the Sunday night TV schedules we have The Musketeers. It's a cracking teen-friendly re-skinning of the Dumas stories with four preposterously handsome young men in enviably over-engineered jackets that would be perfect for that Saturday tea-time demographic. So why is it scheduled in the prime-time Andrew Davies racy adaptation slot?

Jonathan Creek? Sherlock? Agents of Shield? Pure Tumblr-vision. The wildly popular Mrs Brown's Boys is little more than a Rabelaisian Krankies.

Even when popular culture isn't explicitly chasing the teen audience it feels like it is. The 50 Shades books are about to follow Dan Brown's incredibly popular Da Vinci Code on to the big screen. Both series read as if they were written for, if not by, 15-year-olds.

A cynic might suggest that our schools and universities are churning out graduates with the reading age of a 12-year-old. A more sympathetic commentator might point to lifestyles that no longer have time for the verbosity of Trollope or the opacity of Joyce. A historian might draw parallels with the epidemic of "nervous exhaustion" that swept Europe in the late 19th century, and speculate that we're reacting to the explosion of the information economy the way our forbears were traumatised by the industrial age.

Or maybe with all our iPads and laptops we're just too distracted for grown-up entertainment.

Certainly, the only thing that gets an inveterate two-screener like me to devote my full attention to the television nowadays is something with subtitles that won't allow me to look away, or a dire imprecation from the continuity announcer that the following programme contains violence or scenes of a sexual nature.

Even then, it's likely to be something like True Blood. That's essentially just an amped-up version of teen drama Buffy the Vampire slayer that dispenses with Joss Whedon's firecracker dialogue to make more time for dispiritingly well-toned young men to slip their shirts off.

We talk a lot about TV phenomena such as House of Cards, Breaking Bad or The Wire. But they're made by subscription channels that have the sense to create shows for the people who pay the bills. I think they're only remarkable because they're so rare.

I'm as fond of juvenilia as the next person. Probably more so. I don't for a moment begrudge our young people some entertainment tailored for their specific requirements and outlook. But lately, there seems a shortage of books, films and especially television programmes that have had their training wheels removed.

I can't think of many popular TV dramas this year, with the honourable exception of Jed Mercurio's gratifyingly lively Line of Duty, that weren't focused on the Key Stage 3 set. Once the BBC is condemned to chasing the same "broad demographic" as all the other channels, will we even get that?

It's been the standard jeremiad of chaps my age since the end of the Bronze Age, but we do seem to be getting more juvenile as a society. Fine, let the march of technology turn us all into mindless zombies if it must, but do we have to be teenage zombies?