Screening Safety: Harnessing Television for Social Change
Screening Safety: Harnessing Television for Social Change
Using Hollywood to help make "safe storage" as ubiquitous as "designated driver"
By: Morgan Spry
Television's ability to reach into the hearts and minds of people worldwide is unlike any other media of its kind. In recent years, we have seen real-world changes in behavior with the help of some television series’ attempts to address drunk driving. Brady’s newest campaign, Show Gun Safety, is hoping to similarly capitalize on this tactic by using TV to promote the safe storage of guns in American homes.
In 1988, the Center for Health Communication (CHC) launched the U.S. Designated Driver Campaign as a new component of the nation’s approach to preventing alcohol-related traffic deaths and injuries. This campaign set out to implement the Scandinavian concept of a “designated driver” into American society, signing on major networks such as ABC, CBS, and NBC to help get this term popularized in American culture.
TV writers agreed to place drunken driving prevention messages — including frequent references to designated drivers — into scripts for television programs such as Cheers and L.A. Law. This consisted of short messages in dialogue between characters serving as role models, within a context that facilitated social learning between characters.
For example, in the cold open of Cheers Season 5, Episode 13, Sam, the owner of the bar, buys a group of men a cab after there was a miscommunication in who would be the designated driver — and it turned out that all three men had been drinking that evening. Following that conversation, Carla turns to another patron offering to drive him home if he'd had a few drinks.
Six years after the start of that show and with the involvement of others involved in the CHC campaign, drunk driving-related fatalities declined by 30%, demonstrating the social norm change brought on by this successful idea. By 1991, the term "designated driver" was so well-known that it was included in the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, showing its prominence as household terminology.
Drunk driving is now universally regarded as an irresponsible social behavior, and has lead to the expansion of rideshare systems like Lyft and Uber to further prevent people from resorting to this dangerous activity.
Today, it’s firearms, not car accidents, that are the leading cause of death among American children. Brady hopes to follow a similar pop cultural model of social norm change to lower the number of unintentional shootings by partnering with Hollywood as part of its Show Gun Safety initiative.
Following the 2022 mass shooting at Uvalde Elementary School, about 300 writers, directors, and producers — including Shonda Rhimes, Jimmy Kimmel, and Mark Ruffalo — signed Brady’s open letter supporting positive culture change by modeling firearm safety on screen. A year later, Brady organized about two dozen Hollywood actors, directors, and showrunners for a roundtable discussion at the White House on the role the TV and film industries can play in combating the gun violence epidemic. Further, Brady is partnering with talent agencies Endeavor and Creative Artists Agency to foster widespread change in the depiction of gun safety in TV and film.
At the core of Show Gun Safety, Brady recommends three principles to its partners on how to responsibly demonstrate firearm usage, and hopes to popularize the use of safe gun storage through behavior and dialogue in film.
Several Shondaland TV shows — including Grey’s Anatomy (Season 12, episode 20, “Trigger Happy”) and Station 19 (Season 3, Episode 2, “Indoor Fireworks”) — have created storylines centered around the potentially deadly outcomes of unsafe firearm storage. In the same manner as the designated driving campaign, the use of trusted characters, such as Captain Pruitt Herrera from Station 19, has served to emphasize the need for safe gun storage in various Public Service Announcements.
Brady’s Show Gun Safety initiative is making strides toward increased safe firearm storage and modeling safe gun usage on TV. In the coming years, I hope that this movement gains as much traction as the designated driver movement. The issue of unintentional shootings is completely avoidable, and safe gun storage is just common sense.
Morgan Spry is a senior at The Ohio State University studying Public Affairs and Political Science. She was a communications intern at Brady, and previously served as a press intern in the United States Senate.
Image by Alexander Antropov from Pixabay.