Aging TV stars at top of their game

How much do television executives lust for young viewers? Enough that they dared to ask Judy Sheindlin if she'd mind doing her famously cantankerous "Judge Judy" show from a Florida beach one spring break, laying down the law in a lush landscape of Jell-O shots and overstuffed bikinis.

"You laugh, but they were serious," Sheindlin recalls. "They said, 'You'll be in there with them all around, doing stupid things, and you can keep them in line. Judge some of their contests. It'll introduce you to a whole new audience.' I told them, 'I HAVE a whole new audience. I have teenagers, 13-14-15, writing me fan letters.' But they wouldn't listen to me."

They should have. Not only does Sheindlin have the top-rated daytime syndicated show in America, she often whips her competition in the 18-to-34 age group that makes TV executives — and, even more importantly, their paymasters, the advertisers — grow faint with longing.

In a TV universe that worships youth, 65-year-old Sheindlin is not the only heathen god. Oddly and counterintuitively, the industry's landscape is increasingly dotted with senior-citizen stars:

--When CBS, in search of younger viewers for its evening newscast, knocked 20 years off the age of its anchor by dropping Bob Schieffer for Katie Couric, ratings plummeted. ABC went in reverse, replacing 40-something anchors Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff with Charles Gibson, 65. Result: ABC's evening news rocketed to No. 1 for the first time since 1996.

--Television's top Q score, a rating of a star's name recognition and likability, belongs not to any of the buff young cast members of "Grey's Anatomy" but "CSI's" comfortable old shoe of a leading man, William Petersen, 55. At that, Petersen is a mere pup compared to the No. 4 actor on the list, "Law & Order's" 67-year-old Sam Waterston.

--Older stars are a formidable presence in practically every time slot and channel on television, from the relatively sedate world of morning talk shows, where 76-year-old Regis Philbin has been the undisputed king for nearly two decades, to teeny-bopper prime time. When 54-year-old pro wrestler Hulk Hogan's reality show "Hogan Knows Best" premiered on VH-1 in 2005, it was the most-watched debut in the network's history. MTV's most popular show ever remains "The Osbournes," whose rocker star Ozzy, 59, was making records 40 years before most of his viewers were born.

Older stars say there's nothing surprising about their appeal, only that TV executives give them a chance to demonstrate it.

"In movies, this wouldn't be anything new or shocking," says David Carradine, 71, who has a starring role in a new Hallmark Channel action movie, "Son of the Dragon." "Spencer Tracy was working two weeks before he died. Cary Grant stopped only because he wanted to. John Wayne didn't get his Oscar until his second-to-last movie. But TV has always been a young thing."

Since the mid-1980s, television has been a demographic battleground, with advertisers seeking to get their messages not just to eyeballs but the "right" eyeballs, especially young ones. Viewers past age 54 no longer count at all in TV ratings, and those over 35 are seen with increasing disdain.

The result has been an avalanche of teen soap operas and reality shows that appeal, so advertisers believe, to the self-important narcissism of a young audience that doesn't want to watch anybody who doesn't look like themselves. But a growing body of ratings data suggests that's not true. "I don't believe there's any correlation between the age of your stars and the age of your audience," says Steve Leblang, VP of planning and research at FX cable channel.

Leblang's network has amassed one of the youngest adult audiences in television with shows peopled largely by characters in various stages of middle-age burnout. Among the most popular: "Rescue Me," starring 50-year-old Denis Leary as a fireman whose midlife crisis was triggered by the Sept. 11 attacks. Median age of its viewers: 37. Even more pronounced is the age gap between the star of cranky-old-man sitcom "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," 63-year-old Danny DeVito, and his audience, more than half of it under 35. Concludes Leblang: "There is something to be said for the idea that people of any age want to watch compelling television, no matter who it stars or what it's about."

That's supported by the rankings of Q scores among television personalities compiled by the New York's Marketing Evaluations. Of the top five men in prime time, the youngest is "CSI's" George Eads, 41. Among actresses, where the conventional wisdom is that age is a curse, the top three are "Law & Order: SVU's" Mariska Hargitay (44), "CSI's" Marg Helgenberger (49) and sitcom's Reba McEntire (53).

"You can have older leads attracting younger audiences," argues Henry Schafer, Marketing Evaluations' executive VP. "Age doesn't necessarily matter for some of these people. It's the type of programs they've been associated with over the years that, in some ways, dictates the potential for their future success."

Nowhere is that more apparent than in TV news. The ratings flops of younger anchors include not just the publicized cases at ABC and CBS, but in cable news, too. If you judged from the number of magazine covers and inside-media gossip Web sites, the new face of CNN is soulful Anderson Cooper, 40.

The ratings say otherwise: CNN's top show is hosted by craggy Larry King, 74, whose broadcasting career began when Eisenhower was president and Elvis Presley was on top of the record charts. And the only CNN show to beat its head-to-head competition at industry leader Fox News is "Situation Room," hosted by the unglamorous Wolf Blitzer, 60. And when AOL recently polled TV viewers about which anchor they'd prefer to see as president, Comedy Central's hip Jon Stewart, 45, finished a distant second to ABC's 61-year-old Diane Sawyer.

Convincing advertisers, the people who really run television, may take a while. "If advertisers were putting together a forum on who should be the next president," fumes Sheindlin, "they'd want Paris Hilton, Christina Aguilera and Nicole Richie, instead of Diane Sawyer, Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters."

But many TV executives believe a change is under way. The single-minded pursuit of younger viewers, they say, runs counter to the nature of not just TV but demographics. With 80 million baby boomers, more than a quarter of the U.S. population, moving toward old age, the median age of viewers is going with them.