Bored to Tears, America Hurls TV Out Window

Perhaps the story about the woman who threw her TV out the window wasn't a fluke after all:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 25-year-old German woman enraged over
another Saturday night of boring television programs and dull re-runs
hurled her TV set out the window of her fifth floor apartment window,
police said Monday. "There was nothing decent on so I just threw the
thing out the window," the woman identified as Veronika K., told Bild
newspaper. No one was hurt in the incident in Potsdam. She later calmed
down and watched another television with her children.

Now it seems that there's a greater trend going on. People just aren't watching TV this season.

Network executives are baffled by a season unlike any seen
before. Returning hit shows like "Friends" and "E.R." are losing
significant numbers of viewers from previous years. New shows have
performed far worse than almost anyone expected, a result capped off
Monday night when the Fox network started two shows that had received
huge promotional pushes during the baseball playoffs, "The Next Joe
Millionaire" and "Skin," and they posted crushingly disappointing
numbers. And men between 18 and 24 are apparently deserting television
in droves. So far this year nearly 20 percent fewer men in that
advertiser-friendly demographic are watching television during prime
time than during the same period last year.
The drop-off in these viewing figures tabulated by Nielsen Media
Research is inexplicable to industry executives. "Frankly what we're
seeing strains credulity," said Alan Wurtzel, the president of research
for NBC.

It "strains credulity"? I, for one, think it's breathtakingly credible. I'm stunned that people ever
watched such mind-numbing crap in the first place. I mean, Joe
Millionaire? Come on. Here are the explanations they came up with:

• Jack Loftus said Nielsen was examining several
  possibilities to explain the decline, including some unexpectedly high
  use of video games and DVD players by the young men now absent from
  television, and even the possibility that a certain number of the young
  men who are supposed to be in the sample may have been called to duty
  in Iraq by the National Guard.
• Another factor might be the improvement in Nielsen's techniques for
  selecting viewers, so that some people who signed up might not
  necessarily be heavy television viewers, where earlier the Nielsen
  sample was dominated by those who watched a lot of television.
• Nielsen tends to skip homes where the equipment may be extremely
  complicated to wire, and that with more homes now adding digital boxes
  and satellite dishes, those homes might be skipped more often, meaning
  heavy viewers of television are being systematically excluded.

Wait, I have an idea. This might sound crazy, but maybe the shows just
suck. I know, it's out there, but perhaps if the media actually started
treating people like sentient beings then they might not be
hemorrhaging viewers. Go nuts guys. Put some intelligent shit on Network TV
instead of relegating it to fucking Bravo like Michael Moore's The
Awful Truth. Wouldn't that be something? I won't be holding my breath:

Mr. Sternberg summed up the state of television at the moment: "No one knows what's going on."

Posted by flow Frazao on October 22, 2003 at 10:35 AM | Permalink