Let us comfort you

Posted by Craig on June 25th, 2008 filed in Demographics, Television

Source: David Dale, Sun Herald blogs

Australians are crawling back into their cocoons. The age of adventure is over. You can tell from the way they’re watching TV. Don’t try to show them anything edgy, surprising or demanding. They want slow, reassuring, and predictable.

The programs that symbolise the national mindset right now are Domestic Blitz and Better Homes and Gardens. We demonstrated enough bravery by watching The Chaser boys and electing Kevin Rudd. Now we’re pulling up the drawbridge.

This behaviour pattern seems to go in three year cycles. From 2002 to 2004, as we retreated from September 11 and the Bali bombings, the top shows reassured us that every problem had a solution. Messy garden? A team of fairies will fly in for a weekend and redecorate it. Messy crime? A team of scientists will shine a blue light on it and find the culprit within an hour. Our favourite sitcoms came with cues to tell us when to laugh.

In 2005, we started to take a few risks, tolerating and then embracing shows that kept us in suspense from week to week.

Who will survive the island? What secret will be revealed about which desperate housewife? Who will be voted off the dance floor? By 2007, our favourite comedy was about a hyperactive boy with reading difficulties and a drama teacher exploiting a student dead from a drug overdose. And we needed no laugh track to give us emotional prompts.

Now George Bush has ruined the world’s economy and the Arabs keep putting up the price of petrol. Once again we want television to tell us that everything will be alright. In Domestic Blitz, a team of experts fly in and take 48 hours to renovate the home of a needy family. Better Homes and Gardens shows us how to survive rising prices, feed the family and paint the shed. Safe sitcoms are back, with How I Met Your Mother and Two and A Half Men apparently sharing the same canned laughter track.

Nostalgia is what it used to be, with 20 to 1 drawing 300,000 more viewers than it could manage last year (when we preferred to look forward). And football, the ultimate in escapism from the chaos of reality, is getting record audiences.

Even the edgiest new hits are predicated on reassurance. Your restaurant is failing? Gordon Ramsay can fix it with a kick up the arse. Worried that commercials are conning you? The Gruen gang will explain how to spot the mind tricks.

The only difference between 2008 and 2002 is that there is no longer such a thing as the mass market. The buzzword this year is fragmentation, which means the programmers have to work harder to offer equal doses of comfort to every demographic niche.