CAUTION LONG POST AHEAD:
Here's a column I did during our time as a Nielsen family:
Don't like what's on? You can blame me
November 28, 2003
I have a confession to make. My wife and I are a Nielsen family.
At least, we were this week. Our jottings in a little diary will help decide the future of television.
Heaven help us all. Or y'all, as my wise Georgia wife would say. To twist a line from Fox News, "I decide, you watch."
It was a heavy responsibility, one that would have weighed upon us had we not fallen asleep in our chairs.
It started a few weeks ago with a call from the Nielsen folks. A nice lady asked if we'd keep a diary of our TV viewing. As much out of curiosity as a need for the $5 they send (in singles), I agreed.
The diaries arrived a week later. They list every hour of a week, broken down into 15-minute increments. Watch a show for at least five minutes, it gets entered. Mark when the TV's on, off, or on with nobody watching. (I have a feeling that happens a lot.)
And there's a separate line for each viewer; male head of household, female head of household (does that get a lot of use when "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" is on?), and extra blanks for kids, visitors and, I guess, people who look through your window.
What's weird is that they have chosen two abnormal viewers. I'm not one to sit down and watch a movie or a long drama. Instead of feasting, I graze; a nibble here, a nibble there. Most women would identify me as a typical male, afraid to give up his control of the clicker, lest disaster happen.
And with digital cable, there's a lot of grazing territory. I roam the vast telegenic plains, finding morsels here and there, turning away from the poison of Lifetime Real Women or the rotting carcass of QVC's Diamonique Hour, occasionally stopping from hunger to devour a "Simpsons" rerun.
My wife, on the other hand, has a thing for real crime - the type of things that fill Court TV or the late hours of MSNBC. She decompresses with cute cuddlies on Animal Planet.
It's a good thing we have separate lines in the diary, or the folks from the Mental Health Center might be looking for me. (As if these columns weren't enough of a tipoff.)
We come close enough on some things to stay peaceful (bull riding has animals for her, the possibility of random violence for me) and she grants me Packers games as I grant her long stretches of country music videos.
All this ended Wednesday, as we entered the last item in the diary, sealed it and sent it to a faroff land with people who have to read my scratching. If they don't ... well, heaven only knows what you'll be seeing next year.
I've always been a little worried about the rating system. As somebody once said, "if one Nielsen family shuts off the set and goes to visit its grandmother, does that mean a million other families are shutting off the sets and visiting their grandmothers?"
And yes, there was temptation. Part of me wanted to spend the week exploring PBS, staring blank-eyed at Bravo, or otherwise acting cultural. But if I had, it wouldn't have been right - and frankly, I couldn't have taken much more of those pledge drives.
So it was strictly middlebrow - no opera, but no Smackdown! either. And, thank goodness, no infomercials.
