American TV is not popular.

The population of Great Britain is somewhere around 60 million.

In the year 2000, 19.8 million people watched a 'two-hander' episode of EastEnders on BBC One - essentially a one-act play featuring just two actors from that long-running British soap opera.

Take out the very young, the blind, the TV-less, the tragically hip, and you've got well over a third of the TV viewing audience tuning in to the equivalent of As the World Turns. Indeed, a 1986 episode of EastEnders drew more than 30 million viewers (at the time the population of the UK was roughly 57 million).

The most-watched one-off broadcast in BBC history, according to Wikipedia, is the 1966 World Cup final (England 4-2 Germany). I believe my dad can name England's starting 11 in that game; 400 million people watched the game on TV, 32 million of them in the UK.

The 2008 Doctor Who finale drew more than 13 million viewers - nearly a quarter of the human beings in the UK (not a quarter of TV viewers, a quarter of living domestic apes) tuned in to the broadcast.

Now.

Elvis's first Ed Sullivan appearance was watched by 60 million people - more than 82% of the households in the entire nation. The Beatles drew more than 73 million in the US on their first trip to see Mr Sullivan, but by then there were many more domestic TVs, and the viewership share fell to 45%.

Since the year 2000, the most-watched non-sports event on American TV - not counting the various news reports on 9/11/01 - was the finale of Friends, which drew 52 million viewers - roughly 1/6 of the population of the US. The finale of M*A*S*H drew more than a hundred million viewers in 1983, and 76 million white people watched the finale of Seinfeld fifteen years later.

In a nation of 300 million, the finale of The Sopranos drew 12 million viewers, while 'The Truth,' which closed out The X-Files's soggy final season, got more than 13 million viewers.

In other words, while event-driven TV broadcasts can still command the world's attention - 2.5 billion people watched the funeral of Diana Spencer on TV, for instance - only a single American theatrical production has been watched on TV by even a sixth of the U.S. population in the last decade, and only a small number of TV shows have ever done better in terms of overall population percentage. And the most-watched episode of Seinfeld drew a smaller percentage of TV viewers than several regular episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies.

In still other words: American TV costs and makes great gold-plated bucketloads of money, but scripted TV drama and comedy just aren't that big a deal anymore. TV no longer unites Americans of all ages. And we are not hearing - and very definitely not telling - the same stories. No wonder we've got so many problems!

Comments

[Omri]

May be, but if getting on the same wavelength as the rest of the country requires me to sit while corporate America takes 22 opportunities to tell me that the measure of a good husband is in his willingness to take on large expenses on the spur of the moment (how else to be deemed "priceless"?), then I'll take a pass, and drop out and tune in to the cacophony of 500 different channels, the Internet, and Borders.

[flashheart]

It's the product of diversity. British TV is less diverse, so each show has more market share.