I’m Not a Cat Lady

Shocker: Kids Love Watching Good Old-Fashioned TV

You know how you're always hearing from media analyzers and pundits that TV is dead because nobody sits and watches it like people did in the olden days anymore, but streams on their computers or iPhones—especially The Kids? Guess what? Not true.

Hannah Montana, Jonas, iCarly, Drake & Josh and Zoey 101 are among the top shows on cable, they're often the most-watched shows in all of broadcast in their time slot, and they're No. 1 among a demo that includes ages 6 to 11 and 9 to 14. The Disney channel is the No. 1 choice for tweens. But here's what's really interesting. The writers on these shows are veterans of old-school sitcoms like Roseanne, The Jeffersons and The Facts of Life. And these shows all stick to the tried-and-true multi-camera/laughtrack formula made popular by golden-age-era TV shows like I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners.

I heard this report on NPR's All Things Considered tonight, and it totally stopped me in my tracks. The writers on these shows model them on those they consider the classics: Taxi, Bewitched, The Brady Bunch, Cheers, Dif'frent Strokes, et al. In an episode called "I Love Sushi," Drake and Josh do an updated version of the old Lucy-and-Ethel-at-the-chocolate-factory gag. But with sushi. And it killed. Still funny after 50 years.

At a time when everyone is panicking about how to keep up with the new-fangled whims of Kids Today—their wee brains wired so very differently from their parents, what with all that growing up with computers and cellphones and iPods and whatnot—here they are, perfectly happy with cheesy old-fashioned TV shows just like the ones their great-grandparents watched. Written by people who are considered too old to hire for primetime broadcast and cable shows.

Deliciously ironic, don'tcha think?

Old-School Sitcoms Find Fans Among a Younger Set

All Twitter, All the Time

  The New York Times' obsession with Twitter is getting a little creepy. Since May 1st, it has racked up seven articles about Twitter, including, confoundingly, a blog entry about how a U.S. commander in Iraq doesn't use it. And that's not even counting the references: In his Bits blog entry What Annoys Me About Twitter on April 22, Saul Hanson provided his own count of 32 references that day—one of them being, serendipitously, Why I'm Obsessed With Twitter. What might have pulled the proverbial finger from the dyke—oops, dike—was Oprah Winfrey's decision to become a late adapter a few days earlier—live! AND ALL IN CAPS!—which caused Twitter traffic (Twaffic?) to jump by 43 percent.

It's okay to get all excited about new-fangled phenomena, but this is a little extreme. Yesterday's Sunday Styles piece, A Night Out With the Twitter Guys, is like the New York Times starring in an episode of MADE called "I Want to Sit at the Cool Table!" It's The Real Housewives of New York's Ramona dressing like her daughter. It's a little pathetic. The average age of the NYT's reader is 45.9, which falls in the age range that makes up 5 percent of Twitter's demo. The average NYT reader doesn't need 24-hour bulletins on Twitter, nor to hang out with the Twitter Guys, who, by the way, seem like fabulous dinner companions—they spent most of the evening staring into their phones, tweeting. (And, um, look at them. This is the cool table?)

The NYT needs to calm down already and to stop trying to be as hip as its kids. Their brains are wired differently, they're moving faster than you are, don't be so desperate to keep up. You might rip a tendon.

photo via New York Times

UPDATE: Browsing through Gawker this morning I came across this item about writer Dan Baum Twittering his experience of getting hired and fired by the New Yorker. Unfortunately, Gawker's also gone all breathless over Twitter in recent months too—no doubt a result of its shift into its more advertising-friendly corporate environment of late—and applauds this gimmicky move as the future of journalism, right here right now. Except: Come on. He's just writing an essay 140-characters-at-a-time, creating serial tweets that can't possibly hold up individually but require a separate forum to string each tweet together. It's an embarrassingly transparent gimmick. It ain't tweeting, it's twatting.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Dan Baum explains his rationale behind the micro-serialization here. It's an interesting argument. Still, I call bullshit.