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You've Come a Long Way Since Harriet Nelson, Baby
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12723 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
5,417 Words |
| Author
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Ben Stein
Ben Stein is a writer, lawyer, economist, and actor living in
Malibu, California. |
About ten years ago, a sea change came over American prime-time television. The once monolithic audience representing every stratum of American life began, slowly but surely, to disintegrate. Though network prime-time shows once commanded audiences of almost 90 percent of all viewers, the onset of cable, more independent stations, VCRs, and general revulsion with programming created a new environment. The better educated, more well-to-do had cable and watched movies. The more cinematic still rented cassettes and showed themselves films at home.
Escape Artists
Other segments of viewers turned to game shows and sports on independent stations. Younger viewers turned themselves into addicts of MTV ("Money for nothing, and the chicks for free," as some said.)
By the late 1970s, the prime-time audience comprised about 70 percent of the viewers, and they were largely a new kind of viewer.
Middle-class moms and dads had tended to leave the audience. Welfare mothers stayed. Men generally began to leave, especially if they were well off. Black preschoolers stayed. Well-to-do teenagers vanished. Latchkey children of single mothers tuned in. Well-heeled older Americans turned to books or cable. Less well-off widows stayed loyal to the networks.
All of these changes were trends and tendencies only, but they were distinctly visible to the people who sold time, the people who bought time, and the people who made and bought programming. The task of the networks
... (1997 of 30178 Characters)
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