We Are Watching More TV Than Ever

by Liz Colville

We’re watching more TV than ever before: an average of 34 hours per week, according to new data from Nielsen Company, which would suggest people are lugging their TVs into the shower and other places TV shouldn’t go, like brains, JK, or just aren’t showering. The other day I saw a woman watching a TV show on an iPhone while driving across a bridge during rush hour! So this is how people fit it all in.

Herewith, some highlights from the Great TV Watch of 2010.

-Generally speaking, TV “remains a refuge in the media revolution” (and perhaps a refuge from the media revolution, TV being not all that revolutionary).

-CBS’s Hawaii Five-o, a remake, was the top new show of the year. The network’s Blue Bloods and Mike and Molly also did really well, in the top 20 of new shows.

-ABC basically died after Lost ended.

-A telenovela called I’m Your Owner did really well.

-Fox News is still “#1 With Racists,” while MSNBC beat CNN in all age groups for the first time. But cable news declined overall, because no one cares about oil spills or elections. Anderson Cooper’s charms failed to bring in the big numbers; CNN’s prime time ratings sank 34 percent from 2009.

-The History Channel’s audience grew, but not because of history, unless people pawning things is historic.

-A Discovery channel called Investigation Discovery had some of the biggest gains, because people are obsessed with anything that has the words ‘crime’ or ‘investigation’ or ‘mystery’ or ‘unsolved’ or ‘disappeared’ or ‘torched car abandoned in the desert’ or ‘husband who seemed really nice but then started raping the whole neighborhood’ or ‘forensic evidence suggested 40 years later that they’d nabbed the wrong guy’ or ‘the tree was just too tall to be climbed’ or ‘I never thought much of her obsession with owls until’ or ‘she hid the stolen jewels inside the body’ or ‘she left her husband for her gym instructor and then they decided they would have kill the husband in order to be truly happy and at peace’ or ‘she was the sweetest child, but then’ or ‘chilling text messages’ or ‘we never thought our dog could do something like this’ or ‘while out motor boating on the river he heard a sudden thud’ or ‘while out walking her dog she was overcome by the stench of death, and fell the ground, from where she proceeded to dial 911’ or ‘it turned out not to be her sunglasses, so it would appear the crocodiles ate her, sorry we made you watch this whole episode only to find that the disappeared person for whom the show is named never actually reappeared.’

-Skating With the Stars did a triple salchow into a trash bin by the side of the rink.