TV Gets Older As It Runs Out of Young People

The Wall Street Journal reports that broadcast TV is getting older. Well, of course. TV ran out of (White) young people. As America becomes a bifurcated nation, one of aging Whites with money, and young mostly Spanish speaking Hispanics without money, cultural changes are already transforming America. Rock music has died as a new and engaging creative force, largely because the 1980's was the last White cohort big enough to support innovation, coupled with the collapse of the Black family (and Church going thus choir training). FM radio such as Indie 103.1 is another example of not enough young White people to support what used to be a money-making institution. TV is getting older because its is running out of young, White people. And that will in the end, translate to a renewed cultural conservatism and set of attitudes, older people not being known for adventurism and open-ness to new experiences, risk taking, and thrill seeking.


The Journal notes:

In CBS's new cop show "Blue Bloods," Tom Selleck, at the age of 66, plays a New York police commissioner. Kathy Bates, at 62, snagged the lead role in NBC's legal series "Harry's Law." And 62-year-old rocker Steven Tyler is fast becoming the crowd's favorite judge on his first season on Fox's "American Idol."

Viewers 55-plus make up nearly 60% of the weekly audience for 'The Good Wife' on CBS; a 30-second ad recently cost $108,000.

Television is starting to act its age.

For decades the TV industry has operated on a currency of youth, creating shows that appeal to 18- to 49-year-olds, the age group advertisers traditionally consider most likely to buy new products, switch brands and spend on everything from cars to soft drinks. But as the nearly 80 million baby boomers continue to age out of the coveted demographic—the oldest boomers are turning 65 this year, the youngest 47—networks want to charge advertisers more to reach them. After all, these viewers still watch a disproportionate amount of TV, and they control half of all U.S. consumer spending.

From Ed O'Neill's patriarch on ABC's "Modern Family" to 51-year-old Hugh Laurie on Fox's "House," boomers' influence can be seen in programming. On "NCIS," TV's No. 1 drama with an average viewer age of 57, strapping young naval investigators turn to wise 59-year-old Mark Harmon for advice.

TV is just older. The accompanying graphic shows how key shows, have increased their average viewership age, over the years. While Friends and Seinfeld explored the idea of being young, single, and open to all sorts of relationships, or "Summer of George," in various comic formats, today's shows such as Blue Bloods are about the duties and responsibility of family. A remarkably conservative message, and one diametrically opposed to that of Friends or Seinfeld or much of anything else in the 1980s through the 2000's. The idea of family and duty, in the person of a patriarch, hasn't been seen on TV since the 1960's and Bonanza.

This change is being driven by economics:

Currently, networks still charge advertisers more for shows with younger viewers. A 30-second ad on "The Good Wife" cost, on average, $108,000 in the fourth quarter of 2010, or roughly $25 per thousand viewers, according to SQAD Inc., a Tarrytown, N.Y., media-research firm. In contrast, on a Wednesday night on top-rated "American Idol," where the average age is 44, Fox can charge $435,000 for 30 seconds—or about $46.75 per thousand viewers. "Glee," one of prime-time TV's youngest shows but whose audience is nowhere near that of "American Idol," gets $47 per thousand viewers.
…
The networks want marketers to ignore age and pay for viewers based on income and other factors—in effect paying more for affluent viewers who are 55-plus. CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler says the network has always created shows that appeal to all ages. But "boomers have always been a priority customer for us," she adds.

"Rather than saying a 22-year-old is more valuable than a 58-year-old, we're saying, 'Look, the fact is an affluent 58-year-old is certainly more valuable than a 22-year-old who is just getting by,' " says David Poltrack, chief research officer at CBS Corp., parent of the CBS network.

Still, most marketers prefer to reach young consumers, whose buying preferences can make a product or service cool so that it eventually catches on with older buyers. "Young people are still prime targets for mortgages, car loans and investment advice," says Joe Abruzzo, head of research at Havas SA's MPG unit, with clients such as Dannon, Carnival Cruise Lines and Sears Holdings Corp. Networks are selling advertisers on older consumers "because that's what they can offer."

Pharmaceuticals, luxury-car makers and financial firms are on board. "This isn't a wave, it's a tsunami," says Jim Speros, chief marketing officer at Fidelity Personal and Workplace Investing, a unit of Fidelity Investments. "[Boomers] have to feel like they're seeing themselves in the [TV] spot."

Marketers are on the trailing edge of the change. Cruise ships are not filled with 20 somethings, they don't have the money. Neither are twenty somethings going to buy Viagra, or Diabetes drugs, or financial planning products, or retirement advice, or luxury cars, or much of anything in that class. The twenty-something will spend on electronic stuff, movies, and clothes, but his/her ability to do so is under tremendous pressure. The twenty something earns far less than a fifty-sixty something. Gas prices, food prices, and clothing prices can all constrain the twenty something's ability to spend on consumer goods beyond the basics in a way that older consumers with cushions are less constrained. Inflation and prices rises hurt all consumers, but the twenty something is hurt the most.

And … there just is not that many of them, counting Whites. Given that a good portion of the younger residents of the US are Hispanic, with far lower household income (and illegals live in gripping poverty), the growth of young Hispanic consumers is an economic dead zone. Consider an illegal alien, making around $3.50 an hour, the going wage rate in the LA area (minimum wage is $8 an hour). He will not pay taxes, but assuming he works 2080 hours a year (40 hours a week times 52 weeks) that is only $7,280. Assuming he works 80 hours a week, every week, that is still only $14,560. Out of that, he must pay his room/board, his meals, and very likely a crossing fee to coyotes, compounded continuously, with retaliation to his or her family should he fail to make scheduled payments. He or she also needs to send money home (most illegal alien workers tend to be male, however). That's not a lot of free cash.

What are the likely outcomes of a shift therefore, in TV and culture to an older, more affluent, and increasingly numerically inferior White group?

The first is the end of open-ness to Mexican culture. Punk and Pop bands in the 1980s, from Wall of Voodoo ("Mexican Radio") to X, the Blasters, Los Lobos, the Minutemen, all incorporated various Mexican themed sounds and songs. It is remarkable, with Mexico such a huge influence on America's future, and comprising essentially a great deal of America's population, how absent Mexican culture is in current American music, films, TV, and so on. Only in food, has Mexican influence been felt.

This is not surprising. Open-ness to another culture depends on not being threatened by it. With the population replacement/displacement characterized by defacto ethnic cleansing, no-go areas, Whites as minorities in their own nation, the ability to be open and accepting of other cultures, let alone the one doing the replacing, is pretty low. White elites that listen to NPR currently don't feel threatened, and find their "real enemies" are ordinary Whites in the suburbs. But culture is not made by NPR or PBS. Young White kids find themselves isolated and outnumbered, and so unlikely to adopt Mexican musical culture, or much of any other parts of Mexican culture. At any rate, there are not enough young White kids to provide an audience and the critical mass for experimentation followed by commercial break-throughs.

There is is no equivalent to a modern day Elvis, putting together the dance elements of Western Swing music, the soul-fulness of gospel, and the simplicity and emotional power of the blues. There are not enough White kids to supply a critical mass of young boys noodling around on their guitars in a garage, in off hours, and not enough White kids to provide the few that have anything new with an early, accepting audience (and early commercial success), and even less open-ness to borrow from other cultures when your own is under constant threat.

Instead, all musical innovation essentially stopped sometime in 1988. The model is now conservation of what exists, rather than creating something new. That cultural message, one that is accepted by both young and old, mostly, is of itself extremely conservative.

You can see this work itself out in what new electronic products generate buzz. Ipads are just another form of a computer. They might be cheaper, more mobile, and more handy for things on the go than older computers, but they are still just a computer. They aren't flying cars, or laser weapons, or teleportation devices, or invisibility cloaks, or anything like that. And the cultural content on them tends to be re-runs of the A-Team, from the 1980's, or other nostalgia fare. Aimed at wealthy boomers as much as young twenty somethings.

Economically, power is shifting, from companies catering to young people, Facebook and Twitter valuation bubbles aside, to those who create products aimed at the middle aged and middle class. With evolutionary changes not revolutionary changes in the offing. A better phone, not a flying car.

America has become, in one sense, a very conservative nation, culturally. And that change is driven by demographics. We just ran out of young White people, and that change is likely to work itself out in business, politics, and culture. Mostly in an aversion to change, risk, and all the brave new hype of a post-White America. The people who watch Kathy Bates and Tom Selleck are not interested in "Machete." If anything, they are focused on maintaining the character and aspect of America as it was in 1984 or so.
...Read more

Hollywood's Heroism Deficit: Wealth, Drugs and Divorce

James Bowman in the American has an article describing Hollywood's heroism deficit. [Hat tip: Dirty Harry.]

Bowman believes that Hollywood's slow abandonment of heroism and heroes on screen was a result of the post-WWII consensus that heroes were no longer needed, and then dark nihilism envisioning a war of "all against all" in the post 1968 era:

The point of all three of the kinds of hero in which Hollywood has specialized over the last 35 years has been to make sure that heroism can continue to exist only on a plane far removed from the daily lives of the audience. It is hard not to speculate that this is because of a quasi-political aversion on the part of filmmakers to suggesting to the audience that real-life heroism was something to which it, too, could aspire. The subtext of films featuring the whistle-blower hero, the cartoon hero, and the victim hero is that heroism—heroism of the, say, Gary Cooper type—belongs to the public and communal sphere, now universally supposed to be cruel and corrupt, and therefore is really no longer possible or even, perhaps, desirable.

Here Bowman is more right than he knows. The rest of the piece argues that broad social changes in the post WWII era influenced Hollywood. Moving it away from depicting heroism in terms of ordinary people living ordinary lives, and acting heroically within the community, to one of socially isolated anti-heroes (merely cool and cooler villains), whistle-blower heroes, victim-heroes, and super-heroes. Bowman is wrong, on that, of course.

Bowman misses the biggest force driving Hollywood's depiction of heroism, or more accurately, it's refusal to depict it in anything other than cartoon/superhero form, for the last forty years or so. It is not the broad social changes in America. Rather, the changes in Hollywood. Which along with other economic elites has become far wealthier, with a greater percentage of wealth, and the inevitable social isolation that comes with it. But the wealth effect alone cannot explain why Hollywood is so socially isolated. Two important developments that hit Hollywood earliest and hardest also played major roles.

Hollywood cannot create movies in which ordinary people are heroes within the social context of ordinary heroism. The way that Bowman compares the 1957 version of "3:10 to Yuma" with Van Heflin and Glenn Ford displayed an ordinary man acting heroically, for and with his ordinary community. Part of the reason it cannot is because Hollywood is comprised of people who are far wealthier than ordinary people. Who lives removed socially and physically from ordinary people. Who don't understand at best and despise at worst the ordinary people who make up their potential audiences.

It is not America as a whole that has rejected heroism, rather it is Hollywood. Which is a very strange and inward focused place.

Recently, UC Berkeley Professor of Economics Emmanuel Saez has released a study of income inequality and wealth. You may find his papers and date here. Graphs included below derive from his data, in Excel format, which the good Professor has helpfully provided! I highly urge everyone to read his summary for the Lay Public, which is fairly intriguing. Below is a graph showing the percentage of income of the top income earners for the period 1913-2006.



What Prof. Saez points out is that two key changes shaped how the very wealthiest people in America gained wealth and how much of America's wealth they had. First, the very wealthy in the pre-Depression years had most of their wealth from investment income. The classic "rentier" deriving wealth from previously generated capital. This changed radically in the 1980's, when wages and business income generated most of the wealth. In lay terms, moving from say a person like Paris Hilton, who's wealth derives from investments made generations ago by the Hilton hotel dynasty, to say Demi Moore, who's wealth derives from her work as an actress and producer.

Next, in the Depression, World War II, and immediate post-War years, the top income earners did not have larger shares of wealth, compared to the pre-Depression, and post 1985 eras. As Prof. Saez notes, this distribution looks like a U. With profound implications showing for how the wealthy elite relate to the rest of us.

Hollywood is a good example of this dynamic. In the heyday of the Westerns, both in movies and TV, while Hollywood stars might live lives of luxury and social isolation, this was not the case for most of Hollywood, including work-a-day writers, directors, and producers who while well-paid, would live in largely middle class neighborhoods, associate with middle class people, hold middle class values, and earn middle class livings. It was this great mass of Hollywood's writers, producers, directors, and lesser actors that shaped Hollywood's culture. Which was solidly middle class. Of course they could conceive of themselves as heroes, and heroes fighting to preserve, protect, or extend the existing middle class social order which they found essentially good, if in need of periodic reform.

So what happened, in the middle to late 1960's, to destroy the social fabric that created a solid defense of middle class values and "middle class heroism?" Since clearly, Saez shows the income disparity did not really hit full stride until the mid 1980's. The era of the computer revolution, and as Saez notes, rising income among the top 10% from wages/business income instead of inherited capital gains.

It's simple. Hollywood got stoned. Then divorced.

Drugs, historically, have always been a problem in Hollywood. Screenwriter Robert J. Avrech has noted that the silent era had massive substance abuse problems, including drugs. The studio system ruthlessly stamped it out, with great effort, in the 1930's, in order to maintain their popularity among a suddenly impoverished nation. With greater wealth, and more permissive attitudes alongside that wealth, and a weakening studio system, drugs came back into Hollywood, slowly. This is not surprising, poor people who don't wish to be poorer and want to climb out of poverty embrace discipline and morality. They need a strong social structure. Wealthy people can afford to be dissolute.

By the late 1960's, drugs were common, and Hollywood experienced a "snowstorm" of cocaine in the 1970's that wrecked careers and reached to every levels of Hollywood's hierarchy. Including the middle class writers, directors, producers, assistant producers, and character actors.

Along with this permissive attitude came the Sexual Revolution. The pill and the condom, being cheap, available, and above all reliable, led to a lot of affairs all over Hollywood. Again critically extending throughout Hollywood's middle class base. Predictably, this led to divorce. Hollywood has always been a more socially permissive place than say, Ross Perot's EDS, or IBM in it's 1960's heyday (when everyone wore dark suits and white shirts). It's one of the factors that allowed it's creativity full reign. However, this social permissiveness led it to become far more vulnerable to drugs and divorce.

Which in turn led to middle class people, often struggling with drugs and divorce, turning away from middle class values. Their families in ruins, or that of those around them, it was hard for the middle class creative people, who do the bulk of the work in Hollywood, to endorse middle class society, much less a heroic, middle class defense of that society. It's interesting that the last gasp of the "ordinary" middle class hero, DIE HARD's "John McClane" (Bruce Willis) is a NYC cop, separated from his wife and heading for divorce, as a fish-out-of-water in a ritzy LA Highrise. His fight to save his wife is his way of competing in her glamorous, rich, wealth, and very pointedly socially isolated world. That very deliberately didn't have much use for "cowboy" McClane who liked Roy Rogers.

If McClane fought for his family, to preserve it, most of Hollywood by the late 1960's was struggling with the end of their family. This pattern has continued, with Hollywood's legendary long work hours, permissive attitudes towards sex and affairs, and constant bed-hopping acting as a destroyer of families. It's hard to write or create a hero defending a society that has in effect denied or destroyed one's own family. Even if the destruction of said family was entirely the predictable result of affairs.

The situation got even worse in the 1980's, when a hit movie could transform an ordinary screenwriter into a "superstar" millionaire. Joe Eszterhas (BASIC INSTINCT, FLASHDANCE) being a good example. Now, even a journeyman screenwriter like Stephen Gaghan (Traffic, Syriana) can live in a Malibu mansion, with several Porsches in the driveway. The money is that good. Naturally, with that kind of money, social attitudes are very different than that of ordinary Americans. During the recent writer's strike, writers who formerly would have been obscure and unnoticed by anyone but Hollywood insiders, such as Jane Espenson (staff writer for cult TV shows like BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER), had fans approach them on the picket line and gush their admiration. Probably the only time such writers would ever experience talking to a middle class person. Even then it was the kind of hero-worship an acting superstar gets.

Screenwriters making that kind of money spend very little time and effort trying to understand what ordinary people want and then giving them what they want. Instead, they act the way writer Joss Whedon (BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) recommends, giving the audience "what it needs" instead of what it "wants." What it needs of course as filtered through the wealth, power, social isolation, and inevitable condescension for middle class people and values that characterize Hollywood's power brokers. Who have the power to hand out million dollar plus paydays to writers, directors, producers, assistant producers, and even character actors, or not. All of Hollywood is oriented towards finding out what powerful, capricious, and often decadent men want and giving it to them, instead of of course, the audience. Men like former CAA head Michael Ovitz, or former head of New Line Cinema Bob Shaye don't want middle class heroes.

Which is Hollywood's dirty little secret. Wracked by decades of divorce and drugs, wealthy beyond belief, destroying even casual middle class values and associations for the great bulk of Hollywood, the creative class there cannot even conceive of middle class life being desirable. Much less a middle class hero acting in concert with society to protect and defend both it's values and members.

The "whistle-blower" hero of course is the direct result of Hollywood writers being totally immersed in Hollywood society, actually caring about their relatively low position on the social totem pole (despite which they belong to the top 1% of income earners in America), instead of focusing on the challenges of preserving middle class society.

If you're Stephen Gaghan, or Joss Whedon, or Alan Ball (AMERICAN BEAUTY) and you actually care that a studio exec was rude to you, or cheated you out of an extra million that was due you (leaving you only $8 million on the deal), and that forms your whole social environment, then yes, of course your view of heroes would be either nihilistic, middle-class society rejecting anti-heroes, or whistle-blowers who show "how corrupt the system is." Of course Hollywood is corrupt. But Hollywood is not America.

The social isolation of course leads writers/producers to make that error. Which results in the victim-hero ("poor me") by people with far too much money concerned about Hollywood status instead of creating good stories that people will pay to see. Which leaves the cartoon/superhero as the only venue for heroism, and that far removed from both ordinary society, but embodying the "Big Man" jerk-style personal behaviors that Hollywood writers and producers have adopted as the norm. HANCOCK's grade-A jerk embodies how Hollywood's creative people see themselves. BETTER than you and me, and the rest of America.

However, no situation is stable forever. Hollywood is about to get a rude awakening. Essentially answering the question, what if during the Depression Hollywood acted like it was still 1925?

More on that later.

But for now, it's pretty clear that Bowman is wrong. America certainly did change, but still likes and wants it's middle class, ordinary heroes. DIE HARD's classic status is proof of that. No, the reason Hollywood has s heroism deficit can be reduced to these reasons: too rich, too stoned, and too divorced.




...Read more