"The largest audiences possible"

This article has little summaries about this year's new television shows.

NRO: Red-State TV---

Network television programming doesn't necessarily tell us much about what the public thinks, but it definitely tells us what the nation's elites think we think. The people behind network television programs are trying to garner the largest audiences possible for their clients — networks, advertising agencies, and large businesses — and that means trying to figure out what we're thinking and then, well, pandering to it.

That, of course, means that very basic drives such as self-preservation and propagation will be at the center of things. That is why TV programmers gravitate toward sex and violence.

Context, however, is everything, and in network TV in recent years the unconventional has increasingly been used to make conventional moral points. Thus comedies today are bluer than ever before, but they indicate a serious longing for more order in the characters' romantic lives. Similarly, today's dramas are blood-red but express a positive view of conventional morals.

The new programs suggest that both elite and popular opinions about public morality are becoming more conservative, even as the surface content of the shows becomes more pungent. As usual, a few common themes emerge.

The author, NRO Contributor S.T. Karnick, has some interesting things to say about quite a large number of shows and their content. Read on here.