Trust everyone over 30
Grown-ups are in the ascendancy on TV, in movies and in life.
Conan O'Brien lost out to Jay Leno, Diane Sawyer has more viewers than Katie Couric, Brett Favre drew millions to the NFC championship and Meryl Streep is burning up the box office.
For years the all-powerful 18-25 demographic has held America captive, forcing things like Twitter, skinny jeans, vampire love and "The Hills" down our throats, threatening to upend art and media, to dismantle the networks and force everyone over 40 (except Steve Jobs) into cultural retirement.
So what's with all the old people all of sudden? Between the David Letterman sex scandal (a sex scandal! At 62!); the brouhaha over Leno (59 to O'Brien's 46); the defection from "American Idol" of Simon Cowell, who miraculously manages to be a pop czar at age 50; and the sheer inevitability of James Cameron and George Clooney, recent covers of Entertainment Weekly et al could be mistaken for the AARP magazine.
On television, Minnesota's quarterback Favre may have lost the title game, but the sight of a 40-year-old outplaying men half his age made a game between two small-market teams a ratings winner. Meanwhile Fox News just became the reigning champ of cable thanks to its overwhelmingly (as in 69%) 55-plus audience.
And it's not just "real-life" imagery that's aging rapidly. The average age of TV characters has increased as well. With a few exceptions -- "Glee," for instance, and "Life Unexpected" -- the shows debuting this fall and winter were a lesson in maturity, including "Cougar Town" and "Men of a Certain Age." Even the wonderful "The Good Wife" is unapologetically much more fortysomething than thirtysomething.
At the cineplex, there's a similar trend. While Streep is turning 60 into the new 30, the dreamboat formerly known as George Clooney plays a guy so far gone into late middle age that he shares the screen with the young and tasty Anna Kendrick without there being even a hint of intergenerational romance. "I don't even think of him that way," her character says at one point. "He's old."
Clooney's not the only one. Jeff Bridges and Colin Firth likewise turned in gray and haggard Men of a Certain Age performances and Sherlock Holmes, entering his third century, re-emerged as an action hero, courtesy of Robert Downey Jr., who, at 44, is well past puberty himself. Even the phenomenon that is "Avatar," for all its youthful appeal, is the vision of a 55-year-old.
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CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
January 30, 2010|By MARY McNAMARA, Television Critic LA Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/30/entertainment/la-et-oldsters30-2010jan30
