The TV Column

Networks are grasping that older folk watch TV

"Under the Radar" -- The NCIS team must rely on Twitter for a case involving  a missing Navy Lieutenant, on NCIS, Tuesday, Oct. 8 (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. Pictured left to right: Mark Harmon and Pauley Perrette Photo: Cliff Lipson/CBS ©2013 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
"Under the Radar" -- The NCIS team must rely on Twitter for a case involving a missing Navy Lieutenant, on NCIS, Tuesday, Oct. 8 (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. Pictured left to right: Mark Harmon and Pauley Perrette Photo: Cliff Lipson/CBS ©2013 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Here's food for thought for those in the AARP generation -- TV may finally be warming up to us geezers.

Fact: NCIS is TV's No. 1 drama. It is the most watched prime-time show on television outside of sports.

Fact: NCIS consistently pulls in about 19 million viewers each week, but it also has an aging audience with a median age of 60-plus.

And my point? Until quite recently, advertisers almost completely ignored viewers over the age of 49. Older viewers were thought to be set in their ways and not worth catering to. Advertisers coveted the 18-to-49 demographic and paid premium bucks to the networks that could deliver.

The networks did their best to furnish the eyeballs, and it was reflected in "cutting edge," "hip" and frequently puerile programming.

As they've aged, baby boomers have been baffled by that philosophy, and now it appears new technology and the sheer weight of numbers are finally affecting traditional TV.

In a recent article, the Los Angeles Times reminded us it was only a couple of years ago that NBC pulled the plug on the popular Harry's Law starring Oscar winner Kathy Bates, 66. As NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt said at the time, "Its audience skewed very old and it is hard to monetize that."

The Times quotes Bates' reaction: "People's jaws dropped. Geez, Louise, who do you think watches TV out there, bud? The advertisers have got to wake up to this. Who do you think's got the money out there?"

The numbers back up Bates. The last of the baby boomers will all be 50 this year, and they watch a lot of television.

Are the networks finally coming around? Maybe. TV shows are beginning to feature older actors now. CBS' The Millers stars 72-year-old Beau Bridges and 62-year-old Margo Martindale.

The Blacklist's James Spader is 54. Modern Family's Ed O'Neill is 68 and his TV wife, Sofia Vergara, is aging quite nicely at 42.

NCIS? Taciturn hero Leroy Jethro Gibbs is played by Mark Harmon, still hunky at 63. And Harmon is settled down, too. He and actress Pam Dawber (Mork & Mindy) have been married 27 years. That's like 60 in Hollywood years.

New technology is another force behind the changes. The Washington Post reports that, according to studies by media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson Research, "television is increasingly for the old and the Internet is for the young."

"The shift in demographic viewing is caused by a combination of factors ranging from lower TV penetration rates of under-25-year-old households to increasing use of time-shifting technologies in most under-55-year-old households," Nathanson is quoted in the Post.

The bottom line: The TV audience is aging. The median age of a broadcast or cable viewer during the last TV season was 44.4 years, the Post reports. That's a 6 percent increase in age from only four years earlier.

The major broadcast programs now have a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7 percent from four years ago. The median age in the United States was 37.2, according to the U.S. Census.

CBS has the oldest audience, with a median viewer age of 58.7, but it hasn't affected the bottom line because CBS owns the rights to most of its shows and distributes them widely.

NCIS, for example, is viewed around the globe, has a younger audience online and gets money from cable licenses.

That brings us around to TV and those young whippersnappers, the millennials -- the generation born from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. For them, the importance of controlling where and when they watch has driven technology to new viewing platforms -- especially online streaming services such as Netflix.

The TV industry is in flux. Live viewing is down 13 percent for all ages except for those 55 and older.

How will this all shake out? I'm betting that soon it will no longer be such a big deal to turn 50 anymore and Bates will get her answer: "Geez, Louise, who do you think watches TV out there?"

Utopia revisited. Primarily because it seemed fascinating on paper (and nothing else was going on), I gave Fox's new unscripted series Utopia a good deal of ink when it debuted Sept. 7. I had not seen it yet. Now I have.

The conclusion: Don't bother. The series, from the creator of Big Brother, returns at 7 p.m. today. It is formulaic, predictable and what's worse, boring.

I'm told that Fox shelled out $50 million to set up this little "social experiment" on a movie ranch in Santa Clarita, Calif., and populated it with the usual suspects cast for drama.

There's a hillbilly redneck handyman and a Pentecostal preacher; a recovering drug addict ex-con and a hothead libertarian; a survivalist prepper, a lawyer, and a tantric sex advocate who's into yoga. The list goes on. I predict the series won't make it much past Thanksgiving.

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Style on 09/16/2014

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