TV is beyond boring and on it's way out?

[Kozmik]

As long as Fox never cancels The Simpsons, I’ll be happy.

[elmwood]

@AuntiePam

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?

Maybe I’m wrong, but I think television programming in the 1950s and 1960s catered to senior citizens extensively. Vaudeville-like variety shows were a staple of television programming into the 1970s. Game shows often featured aging Broadway stars as panelists. Many shows were sponsored by Geritol. Most sitcoms were rather bland; a senior citizen of the 1950s was probably more comfortable with I Love Lucy than a senior of the 1990s with Seinfeld.

[Charlie_Tan]

@Justin_Bailey

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.

Huh? I didn’t have money to spend in the 70’s? Advertising wasn’t aimed at me?

[cmyk]

@Sam Stone

“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.

I was talking about the rating system that’s similar to the MPAA’s.

One thing that’s hard to gauge, is in the 50’s, TV was still in it’s infancy. The whole medium was still being explored. It’s almost impossible to compare the programming available in that day, to the varied and myriad choices out there now.

Television as a style of storytelling is evolving and growing depending on what audience is out there and what their interests are as a majority. Hee Haw and Green Acres just aren’t relevant anymore to the vast majority of the population. Very few actually grow up on farms, and those that do are far more connected to the cosmopolitan world than they were in the 50 and 60s. TV studios produce shows they think will draw the largest amount of advertisers for the primetime spots.

Who knows what will be in vogue when I’m in my 70s and 80s? My guess is that the face of television will evolve even further, as Gen-X and the following generations grew up in the computer age, the gap between generations is closing somewhat, and that entertainment will have an easier time appealing to more and more people.

I think I have more interests in common with my parents than they did with theirs. And likewise, I think my kids will have more interests in common with me, than I did mine. Hopefully that trend continues as it’s easier for the computer generation to stay more in touch with everyone else. The demographic will begin to smooth out.

[Ephemera]

@cmyk

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.

As a child of the eighties, Saturday mornings are nothing like what they used to be the last time I watched, which was only a couple years ago.

[cmyk]

@Aesiron

As a child of the eighties, Saturday mornings are nothing like what they used to be the last time I watched, which was only a couple years ago.

I totally agree. I attribute it to channels like Noggin, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, etc.

The only way we could get our fix (and that Hasbro, Mattel and Kellogg could advertise) was saturday mornings. Only Nickelodeon existed then, and they had very few cartoons at the time.

BUT… Saturday Morning programming is still there, nonetheless.

[Anne_Neville]

@AuntiePam

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.

Get him a Tivo (or other DVR). He will be able to find something “good” whenever he wants, and he will never want to go back.

I find I watch less and better TV with my Tivo. I used to watch TV under two circumstances:

1. When something I wanted to see was on
2. When I just wanted to watch something

With the Tivo, those two are combined. I can watch anything at any time, so I can watch the things I specifically want to watch when I want to watch TV. I don’t watch the “best that’s on now” stuff that I used to watch when I just wanted to watch something.

I do not work for Tivo, nor does anybody I know (or if they do, they haven’t told me). Tivo is not paying me to say this, but they should be

[mswas]

@msmith537

I’m the same age as **cmyk ** (35) so I didn’t have the Internet until I graduated college. We had email in college but no one really used it because you had to be a Comp Sci major to figure it out. I had my first cell phone at 23, first job with individual MS Outlook email at 25, high speed internet at 26, first Instant Messenger account at 28 and first MySpace and Facebook page at 34. Kids these days have access to any of these (financial situation not withstanding) basically as soon as they can read and write.

Interesting, I first got the internet when I was 15 and I am but 5 years your junior.

Having just come back from my parents house in the suburbs, I am struck by how isolated everything is. Each house is separated by trees or a hedge on each side and at least 100 yards of woods in back before you hit the next street. It’s like three miles to the main part of town or the town park and about a 20-30 minute drive the nearest mall or movie theater. Growing up there in the 80s, your choices for communication were either the telephone or physically go over to someones house. If you didn’t have a couple of friends who lived in walking/biking distance you were kind of screwed until you could drive (or you sat around watching TV).

So ultimately my question with the internet is does it help suburban kids keep in touch with each other within their isolated subdivisions or do they just disappear into their own individual virtual worlds, indulging their fantasies with no real human interaction?

I think they talk a lot more but communicate a lot less. My sister for instance is on her cell phone all the time. She cannot be alone with her thoughts. Oftentimes she neglects the people who she is actually with in order to gab on her cell phone with someone who she is not with.

[mswas]

That being said, TV is far from on its way out. TV is far better today than it ever was. There has rarely been a TV show as good as Battlestar Galactica, Brotherhood, Dexter on at all, let alone all within the same year.

[AuntiePam]

@Anne Neville

Get him a Tivo (or other DVR). He will be able to find something “good” whenever he wants, and he will never want to go back.

I should have qualified my post – we have Tivo for the TV in the basement. It cost too much to install it upstairs because of the location of the phone lines (per the tech). Hubby uses it for an occasional piece of porn or a football game. He works nights so he’s never gotten hooked on a particular show. Maybe after retirement.

And yes, Tivo should pay you. If I didn’t already have it, I’d get it.

[saoirse]

@Sam Stone

“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.

I don’t think they were catring to them in the same way, though. Back when there were three channels, there was a limit to how much a network could afford to alienate other segments of the population. I was trying to think of shows that actually were specifically aimed at boomers before the mid-70s. The ones I came up with, Room 222, The Mod Squad, and The Rookies, seemed to be aimed as much at the parents of their natural audience.

[cmyk]

Because a show is “aimed” toward a younger crowd, doesn’t mean the older folks won’t like it. Shoot, by parents, who are in their sixties, watch and love shows like LOST, HEROES, and the now defunct INVASION… which are clearly “aimed” at adults in their 20s & 30s. Shows like that are enjoyed by teens too.

[An_Gadai]

@msmith537

Having just come back from my parents house in the suburbs, I am struck by how isolated everything is. Each house is separated by trees or a hedge on each side and at least 100 yards of woods in back before you hit the next street. It’s like three miles to the main part of town or the town park and about a 20-30 minute drive the nearest mall or movie theater. Growing up there in the 80s, your choices for communication were either the telephone or physically go over to someones house. If you didn’t have a couple of friends who lived in walking/biking distance you were kind of screwed until you could drive (or you sat around watching TV).

So ultimately my question with the internet is does it help suburban kids keep in touch with each other within their isolated subdivisions or do they just disappear into their own individual virtual worlds, indulging their fantasies with no real human interaction?

This is something I noticed the first few times I visited the US ('99 & '01), kids my age, 17/18, were using the net to hook up with others, make friends sharing common interests etc in a way we weren’t yet doing in Ireland. It supplimented the normal friend-making/socialising procedures in this country but it seemed like a real boon for kids in the 'burbs or rural areas, especially those who didn’t have cars yet.

[Wendell_Wagner]

Sam Stone writes:

> 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.

Will people please learn to do arithmetic? The oldest baby boomers turned 18 in 1962, not in the 1950’s. You know, I actually remember the TV shows of the 1960’s, and except for the children’s shows, none of them were aimed at baby boomers. (And even the children’s programs didn’t try to distinguish baby boomer children from those of previous generations.) Heck, baby boomers weren’t even considered to be a distinct demographic until the 1970’s. Until the 1970’s, the Baby Boom wasn’t even thought of as something that happened to the babies born between 1946 and 1964. It was an event that happened to their parents.

Furthermore, the early hippies mostly weren’t baby boomers. They were pre-baby boomers, born during World War II and often before the war. By the time the baby boomers reached adulthood, the ones who thought of themselves as hippies (and they were never a majority of their age cohort) weren’t forming a new social group but joining one that was already there. By the time that the age cohort born in 1955, halfway between the beginning and the end of the Baby Boom, reached adulthood, being a hippie wasn’t even particularly rebellious anymore.

The TV shows of the 1960’s seldom took any notice of what we know think of as late 1960’s political rebelliousness. (Occasionally they took notice of 1960’s music but only in a oh-they’re-so-cute-with-their-funny-clothes-and-funny-hairstyles fashion.) In so far as they did notice the changing world, they would make fun of hippies. The shows of the 1960’s were stupid, as far as I’m concerned. They were all about silly gimmicks. What if a family of hillbillies got rich and moved to Beverly Hills? What if a man married a witch? What if there was a family of monsters living in suburbia? What if a man discovered that his mother was reincarnated as a car?

In comparison, after the Rural Purge of 1971, the new shows made some sort of acknowledgment of the changes in society. Shows like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and MAS*H made some attempt to look at the way that society had changed and how both baby boomers and their parents (and even their grandparents) were adjusting to those changes. The world changed in the late 1960’s while TV tried to ignore it, and only in the 1970’s did it belatedly try to catch up.