TV Eye
By 
I was reading this piece about the potential but also pitfalls of more college football on Fridays. One reason for it isn’t just that the viewing audience for network TV is old–it’s so old that it is going to fall off a cliff in the next five years. Check this out:
Take the week of October 20, 2025, for example. That week, Game 7 of the ALCS aired on FOX, Monday Night Football aired on ABC, and the NBA had its opening night doubleheader on NBC.
According to data from the TV Media Blog Substack, the median age of people watching these events was 53.9 for the NBA on NBC, 57.8 for ALCS Game 7, and 60.6 for Monday Night Football on ABC. These were the three youngest median ages for shows that week.
For scripted programming that same week, the median age ballooned. 9-1-1: Nashville on ABC did best, with a median age of 62.9. But many shows had a median age over 70. On CBS, NCIS, FBI, Matlock, and Elsbeth all had a median age between 74 and 75.
For advertisers, the key age group they want to target is between 18 and 49. An 18-year-old will likely be buying Coca-Cola products for the next 50 years. A 75-year-old might only buy Coke for the next five years. Which would you rather invest in?
The thing about these scripted programs is that there’s no particular benefit to watching them live. You can enjoy the same experience watching a show on Paramount+ that you can on CBS, and you don’t have to work your schedule around it.
But, especially with social media, sports are still best enjoyed live. That means that sports viewers on television remain, relatively speaking, young—which makes live sports valuable to advertisers.
In recent years, Fox has given up on scripted programming on Friday nights in favor of live sports outside the summer. The NBA will dominate NBC’s Tuesday night schedule from October to April. ABC simulcasts almost all of ESPN’s Monday Night Football games on Monday nights. All of these networks once relied on scripted dramas in those same slots.
Now, I guess the question is who is watching CSI on streaming whenever they feel like it. Because the median age of sports watchers seems fairly old to me too (though I don’t have any historical context here), the median age of someone watching that CSI show is at death’s door. I mean….do the networks have any strategy here? They sure don’t in terms of programming. For whatever reasons, my parents turned on CBS sometime in 1965 and they will watch anything on that network ever since. And I’ve always thus internalized CBS as the network of the ancients. But I didn’t realize it was actually this old!