“Watching television” might, in the not too distant future, become one of those things that has to be explained to younger people, in the same way that we now have to explain rotary dial phones, record players, 8-tracks, and how much better Mars bars used to taste to anyone born after about 1990.
There are two reasons for this: the number of people who watch a given television show has been steadily decreasing for years, and the people who actually watch these shows on a television when they’re originally broadcast is likewise declining.
In the 1950/51 American TV season, 61 per cent of all houses with televisions watched Texaco Star Theater, making it the most popular show of the year. With the odd exception, the most watched TV show of every year since has had a smaller audience share than the one preceding it, so that All in the Family in the early 1970s was watched by 30 per cent ofhouseholds with TVs, ER in the mid-1990s was watched by 22 per cent, and in this century American Idol reached a high of 17 per cent in 2006/07 and dropped steadily after that, proving that there’s a limit to how much punishment some viewers can take.
This declining audience share can be explained, in part, by how many hundreds of TV channels are now available. Name a specialty interest, and you’ll probably find a channel devoted to it somewhere at the far reaches of your channel guide. When there were only a handful of channels, it was possible for something like the final episode of M*A*S*H to be watched by a mind-boggling 125 million people in the U.S. alone, a number that today’s TV executives can only dream about achieving.
Nowadays those 125 million people are, between them, probably watching approximately 127 different shows at the same time on a given night, which not only drives shows’ audience share down, but also makes it much tougher to discuss your TV viewing at work the next day (and if you do find someone who watched what you did, there’s sure to be a third person who recorded it, or is waiting for the DVD to come out, who will be glaring at you as they hiss “No spoilers!”).
Which illustrates another reason that “watching television” in the traditional sense is, if not dead, then certainly not in good health. Long gone are the days when if you wanted to watch a certain show, you had to make sure you were in front of your TV on the date and time when the network in question aired it. These days, people are as likely to record a show and watch it when it’s convenient to them, not the network; or catch up with it online; or wait until the DVD is available.
Or, more and more, they’re cutting the cable altogether, fed up with companies which insist that if you want Turner Classic Movies you can only have it if you get several children’s TV stations as well. They’re turning to providers like Netflix to supply their viewing needs, getting what they want when they want it.
Is “watching television” going the way of “listening to a cassette”? What’s a cassette? Here, let me explain…
