Cultural Common Ground Gets Harder To Come By : NPR →

Another in the unending series of pieces on how we have no shared culture any more because we don’t all watch “The Cosby Show” on Thursday nights. Seriously:

What makes us laugh on TV isn’t as broad-based as it once was. At its peak in the mid-1980s, The Cosby Show had 30 million viewers. Today’s top-rated sitcom, Two and a Half Men, gets more like 15 million.

Since we’re not all watching the same shows, “water-cooler moments” are harder to come by. Dan Schneider, a TV veteran and executive producer for Nickelodeon, says a show like Modern Family is a perfect example. “[It’s] a really great comedy that’s popular and new that’s on the air right now,” he says, “but if you go walk around the mall and say, ‘Did you see last week’s Modern Family?’ how many people out of 10 are going to say, ‘Yeah, I saw it?’ ” Schneider believes not that many. “The TV markets are so nichey that even a popular show isn’t watched by most people you’re going to run into.”

Catch the flawed argument? Even at The Cosby Show’s peak, almost 90% of the 250 million Americans weren’t watching it. “Most people you’re going to run into” has never been equal to “most people.” Most people I run into probably did watch Mad Men, even though it gets barely gets 2 million viewers, because I hang out in snooty liberal Cambridge. They’re not equal to the norm, but “the norm” has always been stuffed with variety.

Anyway, I hate most of these common-conversation arguments, because they assume that their pre-Internet, pre-fractured experience was the norm, when it was always the exception. Most people never read The New Yorker, most people never watched Hill Street Blues, most people never bought a C+C Music Factory album, and that’s okay!