The Small Screen Generation Gap: Why Old Folks Go for Comfort Food

It is an old pop cultural cliché that CBS is an older person's channel, apparently rooted in how that channel was king in the '70s and early '80s (home of Dallas and MASH and Norman Lear's sitcoms and much, much else), and then saw other channels pretty much eat its lunch in the following years. This gave the impression that people still watching CBS were overwhelmingly loyalists from its boom years, with this reaffirmed by the way such hits as it managed to have in the late '80s and '90s looked like shows for the old folks--Murder She Wrote, Diagnosis Murder, Touched by an Angel (the kind of stuff that has since ended up staples of the Hallmark Channels), while the cool kids were watching FOX.

Now network TV's audience generally looks like that of CBS used to--one reason why, it would seem, that network that may well have catered to older viewers best is the current ratings champ.

Much of this generation gap may be a matter of simple habits--like, at the end of the day, when looking to relax, picking up the remote and turning on the TV and looking at a particular channel rather than going online and sifting through streaming offerings looking for something to watch, arguably a more choice-intensive process, reflecting the difference in what the old and young, respectively, look for from TV. Older people grew up on TV-as-comfort-food, which on some level remains their expectation and good enough for them for most of the time. This is all the more the case as they are more likely to find richer content elsewhere than younger folks--more likely to CRACK OPEN A BOOK, or just watch a movie that may not be a Big Dumb Blockbuster (such as they have so many of on, for instance, Turner Classic Movies), and, again, prone to treat TV watching as distraction rather than vocation, as younger folks seem to do.

It may also be that these generational differences are not just a matter of growing up in different media eras, but of being at a different point in their lives. I suspect that young people, especially if they have had relatively comfortable, sheltered, constrained existences, are particularly attracted to material which is the exact opposite--the bigger, wider world, the sensational, the intense. After all, even where those lives are comfortable they don't have much freedom or power, and freedom and power are what they want to experience vicariously, while the combination of a certain age with a certain mentality means trying to show off, if only to oneself, just how tough and worldly and mature one is (when they really aren't). The edgelord and grimdark have a certain appeal in that place.

It isn't quite the same for older folks, who may not be wholly averse to the bigger, wider world, the sensational, the intense, but probably mostly just want a break—the more for their having learned to find entertainment in the familiar, the everyday. (I couldn't imagine myself fining much pleasure in those fat "realist" nineteenth century novels, but a couple of decades on I was happily reading Balzac and Trollope.) Older persons have also moved past, and maybe become ironic toward, the fantasies of youth—not least, of freedom and power, seen through them to the illusions they are. And certainly they have nothing to prove to themselves or anyone else about how tough and worldly and mature they are--the wiser of them having realized they aren't that much of any of those things, that very few of us if any ever get to be so and that we'd be happier not going through what it takes to get there. ("Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world . . ." Neal Stephenson wrote in Snow Crash's most memorable line. Well, they're not twenty-five anymore and they're damned glad the "right circumstances" never came up even if they really could have been so bad.) Edginess? Darkness? At this stage of things they have probably had more edgy experiences than they would like--had their fill of darkness, especially if they have learned just what a dark place that everyday world is, noticed and processed the things the young don't notice and haven't processed. And so they may be up for an adventure or a drama every now and then--but perhaps more often would prefer to have a laugh instead.