TV Party

About fifteen years ago, I stopped reading Rolling Stone on a regular basis. This was primarily because I had to tear out half a dozen scented fragrance ads, and wade through twenty pages of ads for anorexic boys wearing underwear. The other reason was that culturally I was out of step. I would turn to the back page to see how many of the top one hundred albums I could imagine owning. Once that number dipped below zero, I felt more comfortable with my memories of Rolling Stone, rather than the corporate reality that it had become.
Last week when I was in the grocery store, I picked up a copy of TV Guide while I was waiting to check out. The most startling realization was the most obvious - it had swollen to twice the size. No longer "digest size," TV Guide now contains more stories, and fewer listings. In other words, they're dropping the "guide" part. This saddens me, as I can remember anxiously awaiting the arrival of each week's issue and planning my TV viewing for the upcoming week. This magazine was my lifestyle contouring guide.
I live in a Tivo world now. Why would I need a TV Guide to tell me which shows I have no intention of watching? A study conducted by Harris Interactive suggests that the television industry's obsession with youth is backfiring. Getting at the prized 18-49 year old demographic is vital for the evil geniuses who run TV. ABC and NBC conduct all of their business with advertisers in the 18-to-49 demo. From a financial standpoint, if you're 50 or over, you mean nothing to those networks' executives. For Fox, the CW, MTV, BET and countless other networks, even 40 is too old.
I haven't watched an episode of "Lost." Or "Grey's Anatomy." Or "Dancing With The Stars." ABC has become the place where I watch college football. I did try an episode of "Heros," but I have already lived through my otherworldly obtuse phase with "Twin Peaks." I no longer watch "ER" because all they killed all the people my age to make room for more airplane crashes. I have become that crabby old man. "You kids and your 'reality TV.' When I was a boy we had one reality show and the host was Walter Cronkite - and we liked it that way." Now that "Saturday Night Live" has become a punchline for two different NBC shows, I no longer feel any guilt for "missing" it.
It's not going to be long before my son finds himself in the sights of that target demographic. Nickelodeon already has their hooks in him, and he's already figured out how to program the Tivo. I'm a little bit afraid. And a little jealous.