Over For Broadcast Telebision: "Judge Judy" In Prime Time For The Institutionalized & Their Keepers Is Our Best Guess As To What's Next

Bring out your dead, the paradigm has shifted!

Broadcast television, for decades an oligarchy of three networks, was once the locus for most of the nation’s shared cultural moments — almost 83 percent of households in the United States watched Elvis Presley’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in September 1956, which is said to be the largest audience when measured by that metric. In terms of number of viewers, the final episode of “M*A*S*H,” in 1983, set the record with about 106 million viewers. In the last three months of 2008, broadcast networks lost nearly three million viewers, or about 7 percent of their total audience. Overall television viewing is up, however, and some big cable networks, like USA and TNT, are attracting new viewers.

To damn well tell you so, we first sensed morbidity a few yrs. back, when CBS (the erstwhile "Tiffany network") started running per inquiry ads (800 # ads for Oxy-Whatnot, Shamwho, etc.) during the wknd. editions of the CBS Evening News.