Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Hey, Gramps! Want more TV shows aimed at you? Then stop watching them.
May 27, 1999 | You can learn everything you need to know about media by reading the ads in advertising magazines -- the meta-ads, that is, the ones that advertise media outlets to advertisers. The ads read eerily like mid-1700s New Orleans auction posters: "CourtTV captures women 18-49 ... CourtTV has them locked up." E! network? "We've got those upscale 18-49 year-olds." Entertainment Weekly? "Over 8 million trend-setting, free-spending, cool-worshipping pop-culture vultures. Ours, all ours." And the barking in this flesh trade gets louder the younger the bodies are; a quasi-pederastic trade ad for Seventeen shows an onyx-haired, smokily staring nymphet lying in a field: "She's the one you want. She's the one we've got."
Light of my life, fire of my loins! As the TV networks rolled out their fall schedules this past week, the obsession of the aging rouis of advertising and broadcasting resulted again in lineups, with the exception of CBS's, that are heavy on teens and young adults (and almost exclusively white): a vast menu of high schools, prep schools and post-school dating in Manhattan. The NBC Effect of the mid-'90s -- the creation of a republic of affluent 18- to 34-year-olds by targeted, elite-oriented Must-See shows from "Frasier" on down to "Union Square" -- has shaded into the WB Effect, in which the youngest sector of that state is splintered off. ("Our focus," said WB's president in announcing its lineup, "is 12- to 34-year-olds and that's it.") Network TV, having once decided that the perfect television show is a half-hour sitcom about well-paid media professionals, has now decided the perfect show is an hour-long serial about a well-paid media professional's self-absorbed, crybaby kid.
Young lust has made good copy pretty much since humans stopped dropping dead at age 20, and in the era of school shootings there will no doubt be much agonizing over whatever the hell the new youth TV says about our Inner Sophomores. But when it comes to TV, it's important to remember that networks are programmed not by cultural studies scholars but by businesspeople who make decisions out of financial interest (at least when the opportunity to get laid doesn't intervene).
So why aren't there more shows directed at seniors? In a society where ageism has been a truly pressing concern ever since the baby boom neared its Social Security payday, the popular interpretation of this phenomenon is that normally bloodless capitalists lose their senses when confronted by age, forgetting out of sheer prejudice that older people have money to avoid taking with them. It's the cult of youth! It's America's perpetual childhood! It's our unhealthy attitude toward natural change! Even the New York Observer's hilarious take on NBC's "upfront," or fall-lineup presentation, broke into uncharacteristic, earnest outrage over the Peacock's smarmy derision toward CBS's seeking over-49 viewers: "as if that were a sin, as if they did not buy products."
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