Good point. Please come to my house and convince my husband of this. He thinks he should be able to find something “good” whenever he wants.
He probably could, but he flips through the channels and keeps flipping when he comes to a commercial. He won’t even use the on-screen guide.
I’m watching less TV than before, but I think it’s better TV.
Actually, a more accurate way to say it is, the shows are aimed at people who are still trying to define themselves. Advertisers like to sell products based on what the item says about its owner. It’s easier and people who respond to those appeals tend to be people with lots of disposable income. So the shows are generally aimed at young people. You might like them, too, but that wasn’t the idea.
Law & Order is a deliberate exception. During the first few years the show was on, the writing staff were largely people from classic shows from the 70s and 80s. I learned this, by the way, in a 60 Minutes story about a woman who had lied about her age (saying she was eight years younger, I think) in order to get a screenwriting job.
Thanks to On-Demand and DVR/TiVO, we can now cherry pick from the hundreds of crap shows out there.
Yeah, I think it’s kind of rediculous to throw out the word adults and expect us to assume you mean baby-boomers. I know boomers have been historically accustomed to everything being aimed at them, but now that people in the next generation are doing more of the working and paying and consuming in our culture, why shouldn’t some things be aimed at us? I’m tired of this attitude (that I hear from my boomer parents too) that anything not aimed at older people is terrible and devoid of culture. News flash - not all of us want to watch Masterpiece Theatre every night!
Thank you.
I not only rest my case, I’m going to lie down with a cold compress on my head.
I’m still rather confused about what case you’re resting. Are you honestly saying there is no television that appeals to the 40-60 demographic? Because even though I’m 26 and nearly everyone else I work with is 40-60, we all watch the same TV shows.
Which have already been mentioned (and which you dismissed out of hand). Shows like Lost, 24, Law and Order, CSI, The Office, The Sopranos…
And then don’t forget the big two from the “game show miniseries” world: Survivor and The Amazing Race.
As is true of so many of your grand pronouncements, EM, great chunks of this one doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense.
Halloween started the modern slasher trend, and was released in 1978, when the people in the age range of 17-23 (old enough to go to R-Rated films on their own, young enough to have collegiate tastes) were all boomers. The slasher genre declined after the mid-80s, which just so happens to coincide with the time that the youngest boomers were hitting their mid-twenties and moving on to more mature fare. While Gen-X also enjoyed slasher films, they didn’t have the numbers to sustain this boomer phenomenon.
Similarly, the modern dumb sex/teen comedy trend began with Animal House, also from 1978, and followed a similar trend. Strictly a late boomer phenomenon.
Both genres are now reviving thanks to the children of the boomers.
Guess again. The Beach Party films were released between 1963 and 1966. Having seen a couple and disliking them even as a child, I can’t imagine anyone older than high school or college age enjoying them. Guess which cohort was filling the halls of learning during this era? The oldest boomers ranged from age 17-20 during the period. Their main selling point was their star, Annette Funicello. Her fan base came from the MIckey Mouse Club. Boomers were all under 9 when that show debuted.
You did. It was called the 80s. Didn’t you ever wonder why there were so many goddamned Viet Nam War films then? Did you not notice The Wonder Years, The Big Chill, thirtysomething, Family Ties? How every film and TV show had a 60s soundtrack? Where the hell were you?
I do not understand how any boomer can possibly believe that there was any tiny smidgen of culture that was not at one time aimed directly at them. Just because things have now moved on, the boomers complain. But scotandrsn is right - everything was all about you, for ages and ages.
The idea that you have been “squeezed from both ends in entertainment” seems pretty far-fetched to me.
I really don’t undertand how what I said is making you ‘rest your case’.
I’m a boomer, sorta. Born in 1945 – close enough.
My memory may be faulty and the program schedules (and advertising campaigns) probably won’t confirm it, but I don’t remember being catered to more than any other age group.
I think the only age group with a right to complain about ageism in TV over the years are the old folks – our grandparents and great-grandparents. What shows have they had, except maybe The Waltons, Golden Girls, and Lawrence Welk?
And yet…
Let’s take this in chronological order.
Simply wrong.
The beach movies were a continuation of the pre-Beatles music and youth cultures. Annette, too old to be a boomer herself, had her music career pretty much confined to 1959-60. This largely overlapped the career of even older co-star Frankie Avalon, who was arguably the bigger star at the time both because of his greater music career and his burgeoning film career. Note that Annette had done no films at all between leaving Disney and appearing in Beach Party and indeed had been mostly invisible for years.
You’re also making the same, rather odd, mistake as others in this thread. Virtually every piece of entertainment has a varied audience, in age as well as other factors. Yet most entertainment has a particular core audience it is targeting, with the other audience participation as gravy. Some boomers no doubt watched the beach movies. But their core audience was aimed at pre-boomers, the same pre-boomer crowd who makeup the audience for 50s oldies music today.
You might want to put that strawman down. It appears to be getting too heavy for you.
Putting people born in 1964 in the same cultural pot as people born in 1946 creates insuperable problems for people who want to claim boomerhood as the font of all problems. Yes, the demographic bulge stretches that far, but culturally those born in the second half of the bulge are vastly different from those born earlier. Anyone too young to appreciate The Beatles when they were active is obviously part of a different cultural heritage than those born earlier.
And that era was very short. By Porky’s in 1982 that type of movies had already left the boomer behind as a core audience and were targeting younger viewers.
Wait, the 80s were a long run dominating media? The 80s? Doesn’t that make my point about the boomers getting squeezed from both ends better than I could ever make it?
And you’re also going from teen/collegiate audiences in 1978 to the mid-30s crowd of The Big Chill only five years later. My, how quickly they grow.
Better luck next time I make a “grand pronouncement” about something I lived through and know intimately.
BTW, how old are you?
To respond to the OP: Dear Og, I hope so.
I’ve never watched much TV, but in the past, oh, five years or so, I can’t even bring myself to turn it on. Admittedly, there are a very few shows I love (Sex and the City, Friends, House MD), but I’ve watched them exclusively on DVD, apart from the current season of House which I wish I could. The reason is the vast amount of commercials, unfunny sitcoms ans spin-offs and season 184 of some tired reality show whose characters noone can bring themselves to care about.
IMHE this experience is echoed by many of my fellows. The only time a TV gets turned on around here is for hockey games, or about once a week for House or The Office, with everyone grumbling about the timeslot and why are all the damn commercials the same anyway? DVD’s and Youtube-ing entire shows are seen as much more practical and user-friendly, while not dealing with endless maketing by people apparently on Prozac.
And for perspective, I’m 18.
The youngest pre-boomers were in college at the time the first Beach Party film came out, and 21 when the series ended. You’re telling me the theaters showing those films were packed to the rafters with adults and college students, with nary a high school kid to be seen? Five minutes of any of these films tells you they do not play to a mature adult sensibility. They were made for the teens of the day, and those were boomers.
You’re going to try to one-up what you perceive as a strawman fallacy on my part with a No True Scotsman fallacy on yours? Spare me.
Wait, now I’m talking about your True Boomers and I’m still wrong? What the hell are you getting at here? And yes, while I might agree with you that the media took some time to suss out the Boomers as a market, you dominated quite completely from about 1979 to about 1991. Then grunge and everything else Gen-X took over for about a decade, give or take a couple years, there’s certainly some overlap. And then we had Britney Spears. That’s the nature of these things. The dominance of a particular cohort doesn’t last long as a rule. Ten to a dozen years is a good run. Hope you enjoyed it whle it lasted.
Exapno, can you please tell us who the following TV shows are being “aimed” at? Because if they’re not being aimed at adults, I’m utterly confused as to who the audience for these shows.
24
Lost
Law and Order
CSI
The Office
ER
The Sopranos
Ah, the tried-and-true “I’m old so I can never be wrong” arguement.
When did demographics become so important to advertisers? Not in the early 60’s, when boomers were teens. We didn’t have money to spend – not like kids do now.
Here are the top-rated TV shows in 1961-62. Some of the shows had characters that would appeal to teenagers (Kookie and Rowdy Yates) but except for Dobie Gillis, none of them were geared to my generation.
Haven’t you answered your own question? Advertisers always cared about demographics, but the teen demographic only became important when they started to have money to spend in the late 80s/early 90s.
Before that (like the whole decade of the 80s), Boomers were the major demographic and had nearly every show catered to them.
Even today, the “importance” of teens to advertisers is greatly overstated with a few high profile movies that quickly fade and a handful of mid-to-low rated TV shows (a genre that has had a place on the schedule for decades).
The whole idea behind generations is malarkey anyway. While, certainly there was an offspring boom after the War, the population since has done nothing but steadily increase since. TV evolves year after year. I find prime time shows aimed more at genres than ages. It wasn’t until just recently that television even started rating shows for age groups.
For decades, all ages at any given time had shows to pick from in whatever genres interested them. Even now, most television is divided right down the middle: Family entertainment, and Adult. With cable, there are whole channels devoted to children’s programming, and yet Saturday Mornings still endure as a haven for kids.
What’s yer poison? News? Drama? Comedy? Science Fiction? Thrillers? Animation? Politics? Religion? Nature? Food? Science? Reality? Gameshows? It’s all out there and always has been in various forms and quality. The good news today is we have DVRs. They’re so cheap now, they’re practically giving them away in boxes of Cap’n Crunch. You want to improve your TV going experience… hook one of them up, tell it what you like, and wait a week. It’ll change yer life. 
Then again, I think some people just don’t like television.
“Hee Haw” and “Green Acres” were both cancelled because their audiences were too old. Green Acres was cancelled 36 years ago.
Television started catering to the younger audience about the time the Boomers were in their teens. The rise of the teenager as a definable subgroup started in the 1950’s when the baby boom kids began getting old enough for driver’s licences. Before then, you were a child until you were an adult. Teenagers in the 50’s and 60’s found new freedom and economic power, and the baby boom ensured there was a lot of them. Advertisers took notice.
Sam Stone writes:
> “Hee Haw” and “Green Acres” were both cancelled because their audiences
> were too old. Green Acres was cancelled 36 years ago.
The Rural Purge of 1971 was only partly about age:
It was mostly about CBS (and to a smaller extent the other networks) realizing that the more rural, somewhat older demographic for their shows weren’t what advertisers wanted. Their TV ratings were still reasonably high, but the advertisers wanted to sell to a more urban (and somewhat younger) audience, so a number of long-running programs were cancelled that year. The TV shows that replaced the cancelled programs were ones like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, (the 1970’s version of) The Bob Newhart Show, and MAS*H. The characters in these shows weren’t particularly younger than the shows they replaced, but they were more urban.
When radio was invented, booked didn’t become obsolete. TV didn’t replace radio, or movies.
People have varied interests. No matter how “bad” TV might get, it willl still have it’s followers.