I hardly need to tell you that most TV programming is in the range of mediocre-to-bad. And now that some of us have hundreds of channels on our cable or satellite channel boxes--literally hundreds on mine--the sheer scale and bulk of televised badness is absolutely unprecedented.

But even if most of it sucks, won't everyone just keep watching, because watching TV for 8 hours a day is just what Americans do?

Well, maybe not anymore.

The news that is completely freaking out network executives right now is that a vast swath of the viewers they most desperately want--young adults, people between 18 and 34--are suddenly watching less TV. And mostly they aren't just migrating to the cooler shows on cable TV; they're apparently just not watching.

This mass defection from the networks is most extreme among men under 35. According to the Nielsen rating service, about 750,000 young men have stopped watching primetime network TV this season. The younger they are, the more dissatisfied they are: among men under 25, 20% of those who watched last season are not watching this season.

They're spending a zillion hours doing something else--more likely playing Grand Theft Auto III than reading Moby Dick, but nevertheless escaping TV's thrall.

This may all prove to be some kind of short-term blip.

But maybe it'll last. Maybe it'll spread. Maybe it's Generation Y rebelling, in its fashion, against the Man.

I know my own two teenaged children, who have free-range TV privileges, now watch really only a single network show--Friends, and that's going off the air at the end of this year.

My theory--OK, not quite a "theory," more like a wishful speculation--is that younger people, and young men in particular, are the canaries in the mine of American television culture.

In other words, it could be that the relentless, 500-channel gusher of video Cheez Whiz is combining with this season of uniquely forgettable primetime shows to create a new condition that's leading people with other options to start opting out of TV.

Everybody knows the stereotypical male remote-control M.O--the impatient hair-trigger click click click click click. But it's not as if we all enjoy the act of clicking qua clicking. We're just on a TV hunt for something good, something tasty, something interesting.

It's been true for a while that most of the people who watch the three big old networks are not young--a majority today are baby boomers and their elderly parents.

Maybe the generations coming up really aren't just going to go along wholesale, and sit on the couch and watch whatever lowest-common-denominator drivel the networks serve up.

Maybe, 60 years into the TV era, the mesmerizing allure of the box has peaked.

About Kurt Andersen

Email Kurt Andersen

Commentary Archives