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Are TV Viewers Too Segregated?

The age of the shared television experience is over, and it has been replaced by the age of personal gratification.

By Eli SanzaPublished 7 years ago 3 min read
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Carnac the Magnificent, aka Johnny Carson, on The Tonight Show.

Late night talk shows have been an American staple since Steve Allen first hosted The Tonight Show in 1954. That show has been airing on NBC ever since, and it established a formula that has been emulated by countless other talk shows. Johnny Carson was the gold standard for many. His everyman persona endeared him to the nation and watching his show before going to sleep became a nightly ritual. But with so many talk shows on so many channels these days, have they lost a bit of their personal charm?In many ways, we can't talk about Jimmy Fallon the same way people talked about Johnny Carson in the sixties. Not only are the chances of late night viewers watching the same talk show host at 5-to-1 odds, but many people don't watch talk shows on TV from beginning to end anymore. Most people go to streaming sites like Youtube to handpick the clips they care about. Fallon and James Corden are the viral kings of late night (probably no coincidence that they are the most friendly and game-oriented late night hosts) and as a result, they are the most popular. These days the barometer for measuring success can be pinpointed by whichever video gets the most hits.

One of the results of the personalization of media throughout the years is that it is dividing us instead of uniting us. The kind of person who enjoys Jimmy Fallon might not like Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel fans may boycott both of those two, unless you were on Team Coco or are a Daily Show loyalist. The same can be said of most scripted television as well. Popular TV series like The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and Rick and Morty are safe bets, but the days when it was guaranteed that everyone was watching a show like Roots at the same time are over.Many people continue the late night ritual with their favorite talk show hosts. Kevin Smith, for instance, has revealed to Stephen Colbert that he is a religious viewer of The Late Show, just as Sharon Osborne has said Ozzy Osborne watched David Letterman's monologue every night before going to bed. So the connection is still there. Just not the connection with each other.In theory, personalization is better because it caters more to your own sensibilities, but I kind of long for the days when you could talk about any show and you knew everyone else in your life would have an opinion about it the very next day. There are so many shows on so many networks these days, more often than not it is a crapshoot that any fellow TV fans I talk to will have seen the same shows I've seen. I spend more time recommending shows and having shows recommended to me.This kind of detached television viewing has a more toxic effect than we think, because watching people on TV who share your beliefs validates your opinions, even when they are wrong. I am of course talking about the news networks and how they cater to their fanbases. Rather than treat the television medium as an opportunity to spread enlightenment, TV executives show little interest in anything other than high ratings, and news outlets like FOX would likely lose viewers if they actually reported the truth. News networks are networks that report news. FOX and MSNBC only tell conservatives and liberals what they want to hear, and that is not real news.So the age of the shared television experience is over, and it has been replaced by the age of personal gratification. But television is not the only thing at fault. Film and TV executives are notoriously averse to taking risks, but societies evolve with or without TV, and TV will always evolve with it because Hollywood always follows the money. That's why Bill Maher is always yelling about politicians and Johnny Carson was always wearing a funny hat.

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About the Creator

Eli Sanza

Eli Sanza is a media critic and film historian from California. He posts film and TV news on Twitter and discusses Hollywood history on his podcast and his blog. He is also a Disney geek and currently stuck in the '90s.

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