In 1993, 42.4 million households tuned in to the series finale of Cheers. Last Friday, almost 42 million people tuned in ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel or MSNBC to watch the last hour of the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old who today was charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and malicious destruction of property resulting in death in the bombings a week ago of the Boston Marathon. There’s no question that a national news event, particularly one centered on a spectacular and seemingly inexplicable crime, would draw an enormous audience. But the juxtaposition of those figures from twenty years apart serves to illustrate a useful point: national tragedies, particularly crime stories, are perhaps the last form of television that has a truly mass audience.

The extent to which the American television audience has fragmented is extraordinary, and not entirely a bad thing, driven as it has been by dramatic increases in the numer of offerings available to viewers, and a dramatic increase in their quality. In the 1952-1953 second season of I Love Lucy, for example, the show averaged a 67.3 rating, meaning 67.3 percent of American television households were tuned into the show during its time slot. It’s hard to come up with a directly comparable number for Friday night’s news coverage because ratings are done by show rather than in the aggregate, but if 42 million households tuned in to watch the manhunt, that would represent 36.8 percent of America’s 114.2 million television households. Similarly, n Cheers’ fifth season, its highest-rated, the show, which aired from 1986-1987, pulled in an average rating of 27.2, which averaged out to 23.77 million viewers per episode. Friends pulled in an average of 24.50 million viewers per episode in its eighth season, which aired in 2001-2002. But the last year a show that won the Nielsen ratings had a rating of above 20 was 1997-1998, when Seinfeld pulled in a 21.7 rating. In 2011-2012, NBC Sunday Night Football pulled in the crown with a mere 12.9 rating.

I’m not sad that we have so much tremendous television on the airwaves these days, and that people have so many options for terrific viewing that are specific to their interests. But I am sorry that there’s nothing narrative that unites us as much as television viewers as a manhunt like this did. The reasons we tune into events like the chase after Tsarnaev are clear. The crimes he is accused of committing are real, rather than fictional, which raises the stakes on our desire for resolution and closure. The events are unscripted—unlike crime shows, where familiar detectives have a particular knack of ending standoffs, real life encounters between criminals and the police are far more volatile. And this is programming with great potential for further violence that could be aired live. Particularly given the recent death of fugitive former Los Angeles Police Department officer Christopher Dorner in a standoff with police at a remote cabin, and the death of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Dzhokhar’s brother, in a fight with police earlier in the day, the chase for Tsarnaev seemed like it could easily have ended in a bombing or a shootout, rather than with the surrender that eventually took place.

It’s fear and morbid curiosity—neither of which are unjustified emotions—that draw us to this kind of chase. In the past it was possible to create enormous audiences through compelling characters and long-established relationships. Now, that seems impossible, and the reactions that bring us together are darker. That doesn’t mean our responses aren’t genuine or valid. But it’s a shame that we’re sharing collective terror and anxiety on a greater scale than we’re sharing joy, transport, and simple humor.

Alan Sepinwall has a great post up about one of the best problems a person can have, the fact that there’s too much excellent television airing right now, and that the number of shows overall, much less excellent shows, is growing far too fast for anyone to keep up. He’s got the numbers on just how big the television marketplace has grown:

Because FX keeps track of this, I asked their research department for some hard numbers on how many shows we have now versus then. In 2002 — the year “The Shield” debuted on FX — there were actually 28 original scripted dramas on premium and basic cable (some of it famous stuff like “The Wire” and “Monk,” some of it long-forgotten like “Falcon Beach” and “Breaking News”) and 6 original comedies. In 2007, there were 42 original dramas and 17 comedies. By last year, that number had ballooned to 77 original dramas and 48 comedies. And in the first four months of 2013 alone, there have been 34 dramas and 19 comedies. And that’s on top of everything that ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC and the CW are doing. That pace will slow down somewhat as we shift into summer, but I’d still expect 2013 to top the 2012 numbers, and to keep rising. Netflix is making its own original shows now, and releasing all the episodes at once. Amazon has pilots in development. The amount of television expanding, but so is our definition of what counts as “television.”

But while Alan is discussing this challenge mostly in terms of being a critic who is expected to keep up with as many things as possible, and as a consumer, I think these numbers hold the key to a larger business insight: the number of television shows has proliferated far faster than the amount of time we could dedicate to new programming could possibly expand.

I couldn’t find exactly comparable data, but television viewership doesn’t appear to have fluctuated enormously in response to this boom in content. During the 2006-2007 television season, the average American viewer was watching 4 hours and 34 minutes of television a day. Today, that number is close to five hours, 98 percent of which is watched on a traditional television. An increase of 26 minutes, give or take, isn’t bad, but it’s a rise of 9.5 percent over six years, even as there are 275 percent more original scripted drama on premium and basic cable. And 26 minutes is an increase of a single sitcom per day, which is not nothing, but not keeping pace with the rate of new programming development, either.

Or in simpler terms: the cable networks which previously relied on reruns, movie content, or other forms of programming have hours to fill with original content if they want to. But we don’t have hours to offer up to watch them—the networks seem to be responding to their own schedules rather than to ours. Five hours a day is a lot, and for most employed people, it’s hard to imagine where they’d find more hours in the day to television watching than that. Maybe the ceiling is higher. But I wouldn’t put money on it being that lofty. It’s hard to imagine that oversaturation is totally unrelated to the ratings woes so many networks are facing now. As a viewer, it’s great to have more options, an embarrassment of riches, really, though the diffusion of the marketplace means I have fewer people to discuss some of my favorite shows with. But the networks need to realize that it’s rare that they’re going to get a show like The Walking Dead that enters the marketplace and siphons off a truly impressive number of viewers. More likely, something depressing is going to happen: the product is getting better and better, but there are simply fewer people who have available time with which to consume it. There’s something tragic about the idea that television’s arrival at maturity as an art form could coincide with the implosion of its business model, and that one could directly contribute to the other.

The first number Variety’s reporting out of a new study by Motorola is the one getting all the headlines, that 41 percent of the content on DVRs never gets watched by their American users:

A new study by Motorola Mobility claims that 41% of the content recorded on DVRs in the United States is never watched and deleted. Worldwide, that stat is lower, at around 36%. Still that’s a significant number as networks increasingly want timeshifted viewing through DVRs, VOD and web-streaming platforms to be counted as part of Nielsen’s Live-plus-7 ratings measurement — or viewing captured within seven days of a program’s premiere telecast — when they broker deals with advertisers. At the start of the fall TV season, 46% of U.S. homes had a DVR, up 30% over the previous year…The U.S. has the highest weekly TV consumption at 23 hours of TV and six hours of movies watched, while Sweden and Japan have the lowest at 15 hours and two hours, respectively, the study found. Worldwide, 29% of weekly TV viewing is recorded content, with 76% of those surveyed saying they watch news broadcasts live.

But it’s that second-to-last number that’s really important. And the critical question here is how long the shift is: is all of that 29 percent happening in the three days after episodes air? Seven days? Longer? Whatever the answer, if almost a third of television viewing is happening on DVRs, that’s an enormous figure, and it’s a huge argument for moving out the window of recorded watching that’s being measured in the Nielsen ratings. The fact that 41 percent of recorded content isn’t being watched doesn’t suggest that Nielsen ratings shouldn’t expand to +7—just the reverse. They suggest how much intention there is to watch television in a time-shifted way. That 29 percent seems like a number that’s likely to grow, rather than to shrink, particularly as long as networks are scheduling shows with unpredictable gaps in between episodes.

There are a lot of details that have yet to be reported, but this is big: according to The Hollywood Reporter, Nielsen, the company that measures the ratings of television shows, is reportedly planning a significant shift in its ratings measurement system that will capture data about television viewing not simply through broadcast, but through streaming.

By September 2013, when the next TV season begins, Nielsen expects to have in place new hardware and software tools in the nearly 23,000 TV homes it samples. Those measurement systems will capture viewership not just from the 75 percent of homes that rely on cable, satellite and over the air broadcasts but also viewing via devices that deliver video from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, from so-called over-the-top services and from TV enabled game systems like the X-Box and PlayStation.

While some use of iPads and other tablets that receive broadband in the home will be included in the first phase of measurement improvements, a second phase is envisioned to include such devices in a more comprehensive fashion. The second phase is envisioned to roll out on a slower timetable, according to sources, will the overall goal to attempt to capture video viewing of any kind from any source.

The details here will be important. Will Nielsen measure viewing on Hulu, the streaming service set up by the networks? And if so, will it be capturing that data through user’s devices, or through reporting from Hulu? Will the pool of people who are measured be adjusted to account for people who don’t have televisions but watch substantial amounts of television through subscription services on devices? How will Nielsen measure clips of news shows embedded in network sites like MSNBC’s versus streams of full shows? What time period will streaming ratings cover? Will the ratings be adjusted based on a three-day viewing period, the way viewing from DVR recordings are now? Or will both streaming and DVR watching over the seven days after an initial broadcast count? That’s something that CBS president and CEO Les Moonves has been pushing for, and in a November earnings call said “we think it will happen in a short time.”
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In Hollywood, executives are notoriously reluctant to admit that they’re on the lookout for viewers of color. For some reason, it seems to be conventional wisdom that, say, the kind of content that African-American audiences are looking for overlaps in no way with anything any white viewer might be engaged by, ever. And so expressing a wish for a black, Latino, or Asian audience is apparently to express a wish to make a niche product.

So there’s something really refreshing about seeing MSNBC president Phil Griffin tout the fact that his network, which was already number one in cable news for African-American viewers, grew their African-American viewership in 2012 by 60 percent, in a year when CNN’s grew 23.7 percent and Fox’s declined by the same number.

“I think we made a commitment, we decided, that in order for this channel to succeed, that we had to reflect the country. This meant that we had to be part of the country in ways that the other channels weren’t,” he told Mediaite. “People want to know that we reflect their world. And it’s not just a single show – its across the board. You look at the guests every hour and we make sure that we have women, African Americans, everything, and I think to spend a day watching MSNBC is to see America as we have seen it.”

It’s not just a relief to hear Griffin say this—it’s smart strategy. I don’t know why it’s surprising to anyone that as a nerdy lady, I enjoy seeing a reflection of that identity in Rachel Maddow when she’s on the air, rather than needing the news delivered to me by an authoritative white dude my father’s age. And I’m not sure why it’s surprising either that people might like to see an African-American woman like Melissa Harris-Perry lead discussions of, among other issues, race, because we’re interested in the particular perspectives she brings to the table that we don’t happen to possess on our own. Enjoying seeing myself on screen, and enjoying the insights and experiences of people who are not like me, and whose perspectives I can’t magically situate myself into are not actually mutually exclusive impulses.
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I’m always up for modernizing Nielsen ratings, but this new measurement the organization is rolling out isn’t exactly what I was looking for:

Nielsen Twitter TV Rating will measure the total audience for social TV activity, including participants and users who are exposed to the activity. According to Nielsen, this will provide the “precise size of the audience and effect of social TV to TV programming.”

“The Nielsen Twitter TV Rating is a significant step forward for the industry, particularly as programmers develop increasingly captivating live TV and new second-screen experiences, and advertisers create integrated ad campaigns that combine paid and earned media,” Steve Hasker, president of global media products and advertiser solutions at Nielsen, said in a statement. “As a media measurement leader we recognize that Twitter is the preeminent source of real-time television engagement data.”

According to Nielsen, the Twitter TV Rating will serve to complement Nielsen’s existing TV ratings. The tool is described as “giving TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity.”

I get that networks want to see what kind of buzz their shows are generating. But it’s a measure of real-time engagement, which is the same measurement that’s been rendered so much less useful by the rise of DVRs and high-quality, legal streaming sites. And as anyone who has been dismayed by the gap between, say, the volume of Twitter conversation about a cult sitcom like Community and the actual ratings for that show, I think it would ultimately be much more useful to the survival of beloved but low-rated programs to measure the real viewership of those programs more comprehensively. To incorporate more data, Nielsen would have to trust self-reporting from legal streaming services like Hulu, and would have to work out windows for those reports to be delivered and combined with DVR data. But it would be much more useful for networks, and for those of us who love shows where we fear enthusiasm for them isn’t being captured by the current ratings system, especially those like the CW with younger audiences who are watching more television streaming and on mobile devices, to be able to sell package ad deals across platforms, than to know what people talk about Twitter on any given night.

I’m always interested in who television networks try to cater to, in contrast to who their actual audiences are. If networks were solidifying their core audiences on traditional set-top viewing, according to a new set of figures released by Nielsen, they should be courting women and African-American viewers. Women ages 18-34 are watching 4:04 hours of television each day, in contrast to men the same age, who watch three hours and thirty-eight minutes of television per day, though they spend more time on gaming consoles. African-American television viewers substantially outpace viewers of every other race or ethnicity: they watch 210 hours and 7 minutes of set-top television per month, in comparison to white viewers, who spend 152:57 per month, Hispanic viewers, who watch 131:19 hours of television per month, and Asian viewers, who watch 100 hours of television per month.

Of course, networks tend to chase what they don’t already have, but even if that was the case, Asian and Hispanic viewers have more hours to add in their schedule, and particularly in the case of Hispanic viewers, who are among the fastest-growing demographics in the country. The New York Times noted in an August story that networks want to reach Hispanic viewers, but it’s self-evidently bizarre that they think that using exaggerated tropes, like Sofia Vergara’s performance on Modern Family or Rob Schneider’s Rob, about his character’s marriage into a Mexican extended family, would be the way to do that. It’s one thing to cater to white audiences who are adjusting to the fact that they have more Latino people in their lives, and another to make programming that’s designed to appeal to Latinos themselves.

I also wonder if networks are more comfortable, for whatever reason, with shows that have African-American characters who are allowed to just be people, while they still rely on Latino characters to represent tropes. I’ve mentioned Go On a couple of times as a show that I think is doing diversity right, and that holds for its Latina character, Fausta. She speaks Spanish some of the time on the show (the Times story noted that Latino viewers show some preferences for Spanish-language programming over English-language programming), but not because it’s a way for her to be exaggerated. Rather than presenting her as exaggerated or overemotional, Fausta’s actually somewhat subdued, which makes sense, given that she’s in the show’s support group after losing much of her family. She’s both just a person, and blessedly, a full person, or as full as a character can get after two episodes of a sitcom dominated by Matthew Perry. But it’s a promising start, and I’ll be curious to see what happens to Go On‘s Latino viewership if the show lasts and the character gains some traction.

Over at the Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg argues that the move to an electronic voting system could allow the Academy Awards to move dramatically earlier in the year, putting pressure on the competing awards shows that have sapped the Oscars’ momentum in the run-up to the big night. I actually wonder if what would help even more than the schedule change would be that electronic voting might make younger Academy voters more likely to participate.

This year’s Academy Awards nominations seemed decidedly creaky in most of the major categories, whether it was the odd nods for War Horse or Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or the fact that Jonah Hill was almost bizarrely young in comparison to the other men up for acting awards. A movie like Bridesmaids, which probably resonated much more with younger viewers than with older ones, picked up some smaller nominations but didn’t make the cut for Best Picture — it would also be interesting to see whether comedies in general would do better with younger Academy viewers than older ones. And Shame, which I imagine would have been a hard sell to get the Academy’s most conservative older viewers to even watch, was shut out entirely.

I’m not saying that the Academy should become the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Awards or anything. And paper ballots should be available to older voters who want to use them. But if you’re worried about declining viewership for the Oscars, it’s not just a matter of timing. It’s a matter of viewers in the demo feeling like they have skin in the game.

The bridge is yours.

-Reading Rainbow is coming back for iPad!

-The Sail Barge industry just got a big boost from science.

-Richard Schiff will boss around Kristen Bell and Don Cheadle. And I will subscribe to Showtime so I can watch him do it.

-I don’t really feel compelled to smell like Tim Allen.

-Breaking down the Nielsen ratings — with puppets!