Most of us understand that you can be too young to watch TV, but can you ever be too old? Well, according to the networks, yes you can. 

Right now, the median age for a viewer of live television on the five major American networks is 50 years old—just outside the coveted 18-49 year-old demographic. Ouch. Like we need more evidence that younger viewers are spending most of their tube time on the internet and PVR.

CBS is the geriatric of the bunch at 54 years. CW is the youngest, with 34 birthday candles. But it’s in cable that the numbers get funky. Dedicated news channels such as Fox News boast the oldest median viewers, at over 65. (Actually, the revelation that Fox News appeals mainly to people approaching dementia and Alzheimer’s explains a lot about its programming.)

So what does this mean, other than the intriguing fact that the median age for a live viewer of Family Guy is 29 while the median age for 60 minutes is, uh, 60?

Part of the issue is that these older viewers watch more TV than the younger ones. More viewing means more advertising exposure, which should make the guys in the corner offices happy. Except that it’s not making the geezers in the living room happy.

Research published in The Journal Of Social Issues indicates that the older viewers get, the more depressed they get about being old. Apparently all the hepcats and nifty graphics trying to appeal to Generation Why are succeeding in making their parents and grandparents feel like the butt of jokes. Apparently once you get your pension, you become stubborn, cranky, foolish, and eccentric—or, if you’re Jerry Stiller, you make a ton of money being all four on the screen.

It doesn’t help that there’s a sexist double standard on TV. The elder statesmen of television include... uh... Tom Brokaw? Their female counterparts seem to be relegated to Clapper commercials and shouting for help because they can’t get up. 

So you’ve got a large portion of the audience who watches late-night TV in bed while their dentures are soaking, and they’re not spending any money (or getting any of the jokes). And the young ’uns with the disposable cash are watching Jon Stewart on YouTube at the same time.

Now, before we throw the baby boomers out with the bathwater, let’s remember that they’re the reason that TV is the mega-gajillion moneymaker and cultural arbiter that it is. TV sets were marketed in the 1950s to lure postwar parents of boomers with easy babysitting in the form of kids’ programming. Forty years later, the internet was being sold on the same promise—to “educate” and distract kids, and to do it better than TV.

What I find amazing is that they can find so much worth watching. Then again, I spent last night watching half of four different movies on TV, all of which I’d seen before. Multiple times.

Maybe this is where the networks’ statistics are getting tripped up. Just because a 50-plus viewer has the TV on doesn’t mean they’re watching it. And remember: all this started because of the median age, not the mean. Technically, there could be 1,000 20-year-olds and 1,000 100-year-olds watching 60 Minutes. (Okay, maybe that’s a bad example.)

Bottom line: TV and audience numbers never fit together well. Either viewers are too old, too young, too poor, too rich. (Well, too rich is never a problem, actually.) And the information is based on a screwed-up system called the Nielsen ratings. So take it with several large grains of sea salt and blood pressure meds.

If you’re a real dork like me and find all this interesting, check out the book Mass Media, An Aging Population, and the Baby Boomers, by Michael L. Hilt and Jeremy H. Lipschultz (Routledge, 2005). I’d suggest waiting for the TV documentary version, but chances are that you’d skip it to play videogames anyhow.