People have very short attention spans in this era of continual electronic stimulation.
Who was it who said that the crawl at the bottom of the new shows that feed us continuous
bits of information during a show are not making us informed but is creating a society that
has attention deficit order as its baseline? Reality T.V. (an oxymoron, but that's for another
discussion) has made low cost voyeurism and low brow entertainment (people eating bugs and trying not
to vomit)the new standard for making money at the expense of quality shows with quality writing.
Essentially, we're getting the T.V. we deserve as long as we tune in to inferior programs that showcase
bickering and bug eating to get our voyeuristic jollies. How can good writer's compete with this?
The baseball strike also comes to mind. Has the sport ever truly recovered from their strike regardless
of whether it as warranted or not? Truth is, people do have short attention spans. If you take something
away long enough, we all learn to live without it. All you have to do is look at mainstream T.V. to
see that people aren't that picky. Or, as Brad has pointed out, they've gone back to older shows in order
to satisfy the need for quality.