TV viewership habits have changed a lot through the years. Think back, for instance, to the 1960’s, when Richard Kimble found the one-armed man, Tiny Tim married Miss Vicky and men walked on the moon. Or think back to the 1980’s, when we found out who shot J.R., Luke married Laura, and the first space shuttle was launched. Today, we have, well… Frank Underwood became the President, there was a wedding of sorts on Game of Thrones, and Steve Carell is in charge of the Space Force. Now, show of hands- how many of you actually saw any of those last moments on TV, or on a TV, for that matter?
According to Syracuse University professor of TV and popular culture, Robert Thompson, that’s the point: the TV experience is much more fractured today because of streaming. Other than perhaps the Super Bowl, you no longer have a quarter of the country sharing a cultural experience. Thompson appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to discuss how streaming has changed so much about the way Americans experience TV.
Thompson told host Larry Mendte that the streaming phenomenon feels like it’s been around awhile, but it’s actually relatively recent: “We used to think of TV as the thing we were all watching at the same time. That’s not the case anymore. In my class of 100 people, there are only two or three things that every single one of them have seen, and they’re all ‘old’: episodes of ‘Friends’, episodes of ‘The Office” and the original “Lion King”. Those are the only three everybody has seen. When I was a kid, everybody saw, you know, “The Brady Bunch”, whether you liked it or not; you couldn’t help it.”
In describing the glut of choices today, Thompson says streaming can be… well, as an old TV theme song might say, you take the good, you take the bad: “We’ve got more people, more voices, better shows- but… since we’ve got all these choices, nobody is sharing any of it together. I mean, we used to watch what we watched because there weren’t any other choices.”
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