Wails From the Crypt: A True Story

Greetings from far beyond television’s aristocracy. Greetings from the crypt.

Population experts say there are about 65 million of us in the United States. Yet now that the TV networks have come clean about their fall seasons, we’ve been exposed as the undesirables, the worthless zombies that we are.

We’re the aged, we’re the musty, we’re the irrelevant. We’re the gnarled, the rickety, the shrunken, the feeble, the wheezing, the cadaverous, the incontinent, the bodily challenged, the brown-blotched damned, the stereotyped rabble. With trembling, arthritic, antique fingers, we grasp dentures, pacemakers and American Assn. of Retired Persons cards, not wallets, checkbooks and credit cards.

We are, as you might have guessed, television’s peasant trash, those walking obits, the cast-off, worn-out, decaying and dilapidated lepers who matter less and less to the planners of prime time, and in the coming fall season appear to matter not much at all.

The older-than-18-to-49 crowd.

When it comes to peak viewing hours, where is our affirmative action?

It was bad enough to be devalued by television years ago for being outside that micro-elite-within-the-elite so prized by advertisers, the 18-to-34 age group. Even into your 40s, though, you could count on still being quasi-nobility. But to have it affirmed much later, more vividly than ever, that there are rigid term limits to TV’s courtship of prime-time viewers, that surviving to 50 and beyond made you as replaceable as a broken hip--well, that’s devastating.

Not having seen any of the dozens of new shows announced for the 1995-96 season, we’ll have to take the networks at their word that it’s the 18-to-49 free spenders, not the 50-plus fogies that they’re wooing with fierce intensity. Yes, they’ve said it before. But never so emphatically and boastfully, nor supported by such panoramic slates of programs--dominated by singlesomethings and twenty-somethings--that mostly de-emphasize those who don’t fall into the advertiser-anointed age group. (The under-18 toddlers have a gripe here too. But please, one cause at a time.)

Here’s some history:

Once upon a time, when viewers were viewers even if they soaked their teeth in a glass at night, networks measured the success and failure of their programs by total audience, pure mathematics. For example, attracting 40 million viewers logically was better than attracting 30 million viewers. Then . . . progress. As ratings technology got more sophisticated and advertisers pickier, audience composition--race, gender and age--supplanted audience quantity in importance. Better to have fewer “better” viewers, as the theory goes, than hordes of viewers who may not be big spenders.

In a sense, then, prime time is increasingly driven by demographics rather than pure market forces, which is why some series (ABC’s late, great “thirtysome-thing” is one) have achieved first-run veneration despite never consistently achieving big ratings.

This phenomenon didn’t happen overnight. As early as 1971, CBS created a storm by replacing its hit “Hee Haw” and other popular “rural” series with ones designed mainly for urban yuppies. Flash-forward now to 1992, when NBC, seeking younger viewers, dropped the older-skewing “Matlock,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Golden Girls” despite their strong ratings. ABC gave the now-deceased “Matlock” a second chance, and those former series “In the Heat of the Night” and “Golden Girls” were temporarily rescued by CBS.

Ah, yes, CBS, which in that other millennium had overridden the tastes of its older, supposedly less urbane viewers in favor of youth but which, ironically, has recently sought to compete in prime time with series that some have characterized as being an over-the-hill gang. The result was third place, with CBS failing miserably in part, say some experts, by being the network with the largest chunk of viewers able to recall a time when there wasn’t television.

Hence, the network’s new look for 1995-96. As one writer brutally described it: “The new CBS schedule is a valiant effort to remake the image of the network from one that only appealed to folks in retirement homes to [one attracting] humans with a pulse.”

There you have it. Upon reaching 50, you’re packed off to a retirement home--that is, if you’re lucky enough to still have a pulse.

The reality, of course, is that Americans are living longer and remaining productive longer. In fact, 23% of the U.S. population is older than 55 and controls 77% of the nation’s wealth and half its discretionary income, says the Center for Mature Consumer Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

And when it comes to spending that income? “We are the same people we were as younger people,” Mary Cassata said by phone from the State University of New York in Buffalo, where she’s a mass communications professor specializing in TV attitudes toward older Americans.

So why the emphasis on youth corps? It worked spectacularly for Fox, which has flourished with programming aimed at the young. Moreover, the prevailing theory on Madison Avenue is that, contrary to Cassata, when it comes to spending, we are not as we were when we were younger. According to some surveys, the post-49 crowd is more brand loyal and, thus, less persuaded by advertising than are younger viewers.

This may mean that older viewers are more rigid and less receptive to things new. More likely, it means that younger viewers are weaker-minded wimps.

Whatever the case, many advertisers also believe that young-skewing shows are better buys than older-skewing shows that attract comparable numbers of households--and they are willing to pay higher rates for them--because the younger households are more likely to include an entire family of viewers: Mom, Pop, some kids, the baby-sitter, the baby-sitter’s boyfriend or girlfriend, perhaps some other teen-agers and their friends--the consumer multitudes.

What do you likely get with households whose occupants are older than 49? At best, a couple of white-haired fossils squinting at the screen through cobwebs.

It’s not that older viewers aren’t valued to some extent, as a sort of bonus. A boycott of 65 million golden oldies would swiftly get the industry’s attention, so we’re not quite irrelevant. In fact, you’d think that some of the industry’s smarties would wise up and do the kind of market research that would enable them to further increase their profits by tapping this audience and its enormous spendable income, instead of treating older viewers as invisible minions.

In doing that, they’re taking us for granted. Because studies show that the 50-and-older crowd watches the most TV (some even show that TV replaces lost social contacts for older viewers), we’re counted on to be there no matter what is on the screen. The fossils may not like it, as the theory goes, but they aren’t budging. We’ll be there because TV is the habit we apparently can’t shake. The grave is dug, we’re lying in it.