Why old people are suddenly watchable on TV
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 25, 2011 - 0 Comments
Networks are discovering their most loyal viewers like over-60s like Ted Danson
Photo by Robert Voets/CBS via Getty Images
When Ted Danson was chosen as the new lead on CSI, the surprising thing wasn’t that a comedy actor (Cheers) was going to star in TV’s most famous gory forensic mystery. What stunned people was that a major U.S. show will have a hero who’s over 60. Danson, who was born in 1947 and has been bald since his sitcom days, had been playing character parts on shows like HBO’s Bored to Death. That’s what older actors usually do in television, where advertisers care mostly about reaching young viewers. But Bill Newcott, entertainment editor for the American Association of Retired Persons magazine, told Maclean’s there’s an increased awareness that “the longer the star has been out there, the more comfortable we are with them.” Older people are in.
Mark Harmon, who will turn 60 this year, is the star of the most-watched show on television, NCIS. Larry David is 64 and getting some of his best ratings on Curb Your Enthusiasm. And the recently announced Emmy nominees included 63-year-old Kathy Bates, whose Harry’s Law was one of the few successful new shows last season, and Betty White, who now specializes in jokes about her advanced age.
What’s causing this influx of people who are 60 and up? It may help that reality TV, which always seems to influence its scripted cousin, has been proving that you don’t need youth to get young people watching. American Idol has almost matched the success of the Simon Cowell years thanks to Steven Tyler, a man in his 60s who gets flirty with young contestants; he has completely overshadowed Jennifer Lopez, who is 20 years younger but much less popular with her own age cohort.
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How did NCIS get to be so cool?
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 10:46 AM - 29 Comments
Unlike other crime procedurals, this No. 1 show doesn’t waste time on how it happened
Why is one episode of NCIS, a forensic murder mystery with a military setting, more popular with young viewers than an entire season of Mad Men? The JAG spinoff, in which Mark Harmon investigates crime in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps (Tuesdays on Global at 8 p.m.), has seen steadily rising ratings since it premiered in 2003; this season, it became the No. 1 show on TV and launched its own spinoff, NCIS: Los Angeles. But it’s also in the top 10 among the 18 to 49 age group, and gains an extra two million viewers from new-media formats. Shane Brennan, who runs NCIS and created the spinoff, says that there are even “college parties where they sit and watch NCIS reruns.” How did this show become cool when no one was paying attention? Maybe because it’s not a procedural like CSI; one of NCIS’s stars, Michael Weatherly, described it to the Los Angeles Times as a throwback to Barney Miller. NCIS is secretly a sitcom with dead bodies.Brennan, who has also worked on CSI: Miami (as well as the teen drama One Tree Hill), says that other procedural shows spend a lot of time “putting the clues together in a scientific way.” NCIS spends less time on science and therefore has “more time to develop character.” The mysteries on NCIS are sometimes perfunctory or pointless. A recent episode had Agent Gibbs (Harmon) solve the crime at the last minute without explaining how he figured it out; the culprit was a guest character who had only one scene in the episode (and who, inexplicably, confessed right away). Brennan says that on NCIS, “it really doesn’t matter so much what the story is: it’s how the character reacts.” That makes it different from shows where the characters are secondary to plot twists, or procedurals like Law and Order, where topical issues dominate. NCIS has more in common with young-skewing comedies like The Big Bang Theory, which also has simple plots. Like those shows, NCIS is an excuse for viewers to hang out with characters they love. Continue…
