The Boomer Effect
-
- January
- 31
“In another intriguing network competition, NBC’s new serial “Heroesâ€?
returned from a hiatus last Monday with 14.9 million viewers, beating Fox’s “24â€? (14.5 million) in the same time slot. Neither show, however, could beat CBS’s “Two and a Half Menâ€? (15.8 million) at 9 p.m.”
My boss sent me this little tidbit from the AP yesterday. It was in an e-mail and had the subject line “Hmmm.”
Hmmm is right.
For all the fan dedication … on Remote Access and across the Web … maybe we’re missing something that obviously 15.8 million viewers aren’t. That the pseudo-seriousness and detailed (read “over intricate”) plots of some shows just aren’t as compelling as a half-hour of jokes.
Now, I’m not a regular watcher of “Two and a Half Men,” but I know a few people  my Ma and Pa, for instance  who love it. It’s a little raunchy and there’s some really good chemistry between Jon Cryer and Charlie Sheen. All in all, not a bad show.
But it’s a lot easier for people who like to dissect things down to the smallest detail to embrace shows like “24” and “Lost.” I should know, I’m making a good living in part doing it with “Heroes.”
But my gut tells me that a good chunk of Joe Public just doesn’t have that kind of time or interest to try and catch up with these serialized shows after they’ve failed to get in on the ground floor.
I dub this The Boomer Effect. People of a certain age  like Ma and Pa Sartwell  don’t have TiVo, don’t want it and won’t be tied down to the TV on a certain night. (In my Dad’s case, he might have bowling league that night) Some Baby Boomers just aren’t interested in investing the time to figure out what’s going on with all the characters, backstory and what have you.
And forget about loading old episodes off the networks’ Web site. A mpeg4 file might as well be a flux capacitor to some people.
I can see this hapopening to me, also. In a few more working years, I (now a fairly tech savvy dude around LoHud HQ) will be staring glassily into the face of someone younger as they wax about how to use “this” or “that” unfathonable technology to further my job. Ahh the indignaty of age … and my beer belly.
Of course these are mass generalizations and I have no hard data to back it up … but I’ve learned to trust my news judgement over the years and to me The Boomer Effect rings true.
On the other hand, the joke could be on me … and my belly.
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 4:34 pm by Matt Sartwell.
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Ah, but those ratings don’t account for time-shifters. And Heroes is the second-most time-shifted show (after Studio 60). Lots more people watch Heroes and 24 later in the week (or even saving up multiple episodes for mini-marathons).
Those Nielsen ratings are just those who watched the show at the time it aired or within the same day it aired. Nielsen does look at +7 ratings, which are ratings for shows that are watched within a week of it airing, but those aren’t the ones they generally release.
So, yeah, Two and a Half Men is for folks who don’t time-shift. Honestly, would you use up DVR space to record it?
A very good point.
What I haven’t heard yet, and maybe we won’t before the May up-fronts, is whether advertisers are going to pay big bucks for heavily time-shifted viewership. I know that whatever I watch on my DVR is essentially commercial-free because I can’t fast-forward through it fast enough. Shows like The Office seem to be trying to compensate with product placement (Staples lettuce-shredder anyone?), but I wonder how impressed the people writing the checks will be with that.
What I want to know is, how can anyone wait to watch Heroes?
And hasn’t everyone given up on Studio Smarmy by now?
Not at all. We enjoy Studio 60 a great deal in our house. It’s gotten better with each passing week. The first coupla episodes were a little slow, but it’s become quite a good show.
Love the Danny/Jordan budding romance and Matthew Perry has really come into his own as a totally un-Chandler character.
And Ed Asner’s had a great run as a guest star on the show.
As for Heroes, it’s on at the same time as “24,” and as I’m blogging on that, I kinda need to watch it that night.
And, as you’ll find out soon enough, once you have children, you don’t necessarily get to watch things when you want to.