The TV Parental Guidelines system was first proposed on December 19, 1996 by the United States Congress, the television industry and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and went into effect by January 1, 1997 on most major U.S. broadcast and cable networks in response to public concerns of increasingly explicit sexual content, graphic violence and strong profanity in television programs. It was established as a voluntary-participation system, with ratings to be determined by the individually-participating broadcast and cable networks.

It was specifically designed to be used with the V-chip, which was mandated to be built into all television sets manufactured since 2000, but the guidelines themselves have no legal force, and does not apply to news or sports programming, thus precluding networks like CNN, Fox News Channel, ESPN and Fox Sports Net from applying the ratings system, along with the majority of infomercials (which are classified the same as regular commercial break advertising, which also is not rated); however recently, this rule has stopped applying to some entertainment news and newsmagazine programs such as Extra and Access Hollywood which all now carry TV-PG ratings mainly due to fair use clip content from outside sources including reality television programming which is often above the TV-G threshold.