Truth is, we’d rather watch bad TV than no TV

VETERAN televiewers lament an erosion in the quality of the programming. “They don’t make ‘em like ‘All in the Family’ anymore.” “ ‘Taxi’ -- now that was a show!” “ ‘Home Improvement’ -- sure it was silly sometimes, but it was funny!” Faulty memory? The inevitable distortion of when-we-were-young nostalgia? Not an uncommon phenomenon. Sports enthusiasts know it well. Nobody throws a curve like Koufax or a pass like Unitas. And don’t get me started on Rocket Richard.

Let’s set quality aside for a moment. And this from a man who spent many a late night sharpening story lines and shaving syllables in dogged pursuit of comedic perfection. Hindsight suggests I may have been indulging an irrelevance.

Don’t get me wrong. Chasing quality’s an honorable calling, but it ignores the fundamental reason people watch television, and that reason is this:

We can’t turn it off.

You come in the house, you turn on the television. (Please let this not just be me.) You check the mail, listen to your messages, the TV’s on. You’re not watching but it’s on.

The phone rings, you answer it. Do you turn off the television? No. You mute it. The call may not last that long. Besides, you might be missing something.

Dinner in front of the television, maybe yes, maybe no. There’s a game on, forget about it.

Bedtime. You turn off the television and head upstairs. You get undressed. But first, you turn on the television in your bedroom. Getting undressed is not that interesting. You can do it and watch at the same time.

You go in the bathroom, you don’t turn off the TV. You make it louder, so you can hear it in there.

You get into bed and you watch till you’re ready to fall asleep. If you have a spouse, you can fall asleep with the TV on, and they can turn it off when they’re ready to fall asleep. You wake up, on it goes again. “I just want to hear the weather.” Fine. But after you hear it, do you immediately turn it off? Be honest. Do you?

You say TV’s draw is understandable. There are so many choices today. True enough. But have you ever found yourself flipping through the hundreds of channels searching for something -- anything -- you’d be willing to watch? You flip away, “No ... no ... no ... “ and when you get to the end, what do you do? Do you turn off the TV? I don’t. I go back to the beginning and start again.

The number of viewing options is not the issue. When there were just three channels, you always watched something. A TV executive explained this phenomenon and coined the term “least objectionable program.” In every time period, he explained, audiences gravitated in the greatest numbers to the program they disliked the least. Hence, “least objectionable program.”

You’ll notice this sage if cynical TV maven didn’t say viewers watched the “least objectionable program, or nothing.” “Nothing” was not an option. Viewers watch the show they dislike less than all the others. Why? Because ...

... they can’t turn it off.

Nielsen Media Research estimates that the average American watches more than four hours of television a day. We are slaves to the tube, or that flat thing that’s replacing the tube. In a way, programmers must find our irresistible need to watch joyously reassuring. They work in a medium that’s impossible to reject. You can get big houses out of that.

On the other hand, knowing people watch your show because they hate it less than everything else does take a bit of the shine off of winning your time slot.

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Santa Monica resident Earl Pomerantz, an Emmy-winning television writer, owns TV Guide Preview Edition issues dating back to 1956, except for three.