Don’t Blame Us for Not Watching

I really hate all the blaming of “so-called” fans of Conan O’Brien. It was constantly repeated in Oprah’s discussion with her audience after the Interview with Jay Leno. Ninety-seven percent of her audience was on Conan’s side, and she asked several times, “Where were you when he needed you?” Two of the fans in the audience admitted to not watching him religiously.

It’s our fault, they would have you believe. But it’s not, stop blaming us. Old people watch TV because that’s life. You wake up at 6:00 am. If you’re a woman, you fix breakfast, maybe do some laundry, watch the soap operas that come on during the day and then the Oprah Winfrey Show before your man gets home. If you’re a guy, you head off to work. After work, and after Oprah, it’s supper time! It’s time to eat something and talk about your day. Then, head into the bedroom and begin the daily wind down. Turn on Primetime TV and watch whatever show is your favorite for the given day of the week. Then, it’s your local news as you prepare for bed. After the news, it’s late night TV as you lay in bed.

That’s life, when you’re old. The new generation doesn’t do that. There is far less structure to our lives, and you see that reflected in Conan’s comedy as well. It too lacks structure. We enjoy the unexpected, the creative, the new. We really even will resent the mundane.

So, don’t expect us to watch TV when it’s airing. We don’t eat lunch at 12:00. We don’t have supper at 5:00. We don’t make our way to bed at 11:30.

But we still watch TV, just in a manner that fits our lifestyle. Unfortunately, that usually involves breaking the law. Again, it’s not our fault. The industry is refusing to accept that this is the new way of life. They’re not adapting. That’s why we weren’t there for Conan. We were watching his show, but TV ratings won’t reflect it. They’re defunct. We downloaded his show or watched it on Hulu or watched clips on YouTube of it.

How is it our fault that the geniuses that run television have done so little in the past 10 years to adapt their business model to deal with us? Do they not realize that the old people are going to die? It’s a ticking time bomb here. You don’t have a lot of time to get this figured out. TV advertising is already extremely worthless these days, compared to the glory days of yore. You have so much to watch and do that a measly 3 million viewers can be considered good.

It’s not Conan’s fault, and it’s not our fault. The Tonight Show will never have over 7 million viewers regularly. It just can’t anymore. Those days are gone. Accept it and adapt. Bringing Jay back is just putting a bandage on the wound in the TV industry. Someone needs to revolutionize the business model soon, or the old people are all going to die, and TV will be left with an audience that it has no way of profiting from.