Why US TV Sucks?

I’d like to start out this post with a little story. I used to watch CNN every morning to catch the news before heading off to the day’s business. One day I got up a little earlier than usual and caught the end CNN Worldwide broadcast rather than the usual CNN America broadcast. This day had been a particularly bad day in Iraq, a particularly important Golden Mosque had been bombed. CNN Worldwide was covering the attack, explaining the importance of the mosque and how the attacks would mean further setbacks to the piece process in the area.

Then the broadcast switched to CNN America. They were covering the death of Anna Nicole Smith. For the fifth day in a row. No mention of Iraq or the bombing at the mosque. That was the last time I watched CNN.

I understand why they do it. They need to be entertaining because, while informative is their job description, entertaining pays the bills. Entertainment brings in viewers, those viewers show up on ratings, advertisers use those ratings to justify the price of their advertisements. But, do you know how the ratings system works?

The principle rating system in the US is done by Nielsen Media Research. Many people assume that whenever you watch a program, Nielsen (if people actually know their name) or some other company records this information, aggregates it, and then reports this information to the advertisers. People may believe this because it seems obvious with the extensive use of digital satellite or cable boxes. But I’ve seen people who believed that ratings could be collected over analog as well.

However, this is not how Neilson collects their ratings.

Neilson will call up, at random, households and ask if they would be interested in participating in their ratings service. These families receive a box and the demographic information for each family member is added to the box. In total 25,000 families are used in the study. There are 114,500,000 households in the US with TVs. That means that 0.03%, the 0.03% that picked up that call and agreed to be tracked, of US household have direct control over what shows stay and go on US TV.

And boy does that 0.03% love their cheesy sitcoms, crime dramas, and reality shows. And their love for those perticuar shows are the reason you see wresting on SyFy or the Jersey Shore on MTV or one of the other hundreds of networks become just another Spike TV. It’s called network decay.

I should mention, that some good came out of my ban on CNN, I began getting my news from BBC America. And because of that, I discovered Top Gear. Even though I’m not that into car, I love Top Gear. In a way it’s similar to Giant Bomb. You watch it for the chemistry, to see 3 guys hang out just hang out. You would watch it even if the show was about kitchenware.

I guess it’s a bit unfair to say only US TV sucks. Perhaps, other countries have bad TV. Perhaps, all TV is bad.