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When I was young, I watched a lot of television. A good 4 or 5 hours on an average weekday, from the moment I got home, Loony Toons right after school, to the Twilight Zone before bedtime.
But then I grew up, and TV lost its spell over me. Sure, I continued to watch occasionally, like a recovered addict, in moderation. Just enough to realize sometime during the 1990s that TV was suddenly, shockingly good.
I'm not talking about Cable TV – back in the mid-90s there was no such thing as a cable show that everyone talked about, that you had to watch. Television in the '90s was defined by smart, well-written prime-time network sitcoms like Roseanne, Murphy Brown, Seinfeld and, of course, The Simpsons.
But in the '90s the best shows were also by and large the most highly rated shows. That had never happened before. And mainstream TV was arguably superior to mainstream motion pictures. That had never happened before either.
Looking at the Nielsen top 10 in the '90s actually used to make me feel a little better about my fellow Americans. Western civilization wasn't necessarily in decline.
But that golden age, like all golden ages, was too good to last. In 1999, among the top shows were still ER, Frasier, Friends, 60 Minutes and The X-Files. But then within just a couple of seasons, the highest-rated programs were mostly... not so good.
And ever since, most of the shows at the top of the ratings have been mediocre series like CSI and all of its spin-offs, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Law and Order with all of its spin-offs and reality shows like Survivor, American Idol, The Apprentice, and Extreme Makeover.
Frasier and Friends have gone off the air. There is Desperate Housewives, but the last excellent primetime network show still running, The West Wing, was created 5 years ago, back in the '90s.
So…what happened?
Some of this is just a matter of inevitable, uncontrollable boom and bust cycles, like farming. We're in a drought.
But there's also an unmistakable generational underpinning to this trend line.
When the '90s began, baby boomers were 25 to 44 years old. In other words, practically all the people creating TV were, for the first and last time, members of the first generation that grew up watching television. The generation that thought they could and would do everything better than their parents had.
And at the same time, baby boomers back then were the desirable TV viewers, because we all fell into the only age group that advertisers really care about.
Meaning that one more time, as with rock and roll, back in the '60s and '70s, boomers in the '90s were responsible for a big, brilliant, groundbreaking pop culture moment that hasn't been equaled since.
But before anybody gets too self-satisfied: it is also baby boomers who are now running the broadcast networks, choosing the shows that go on the air.
And in response to the rise of cable TV, those big network executives are running scared and making panicky, safe, second-guessed, uncreative programming choices, in favor of the dumb and the bland.
In other words, it may have been baby boomers who made prime-time great in the '90s but it is also baby boomers who are turning network TV back into an unsatisfying wasteland today.
