• by October 11, 2010

We all complain about how little time we have in our lives. I find myself rushing everywhere I go. I rush to work, rush home, rush through airports, rush through lunch. It can sometimes be exhausting to accomplish everything I want and need to get done.

However, with the new fall season starting on television, I wanted to make sure I made some time to sit down and watch what the networks have to offer. I decided to look specifically at the most popular TV shows for the M/A12-34 demographic to see if I could understand why in a culture where nobody has free time anymore. These are the shows everyone in the office is talking about. "Jersey Shore," "Lie To Me," "Gossip Girl," "Keeping up With The Kardashians," and several others topped my list. I settled in and checked them out, asking myself throughout the experience, "Am I really going to spend what little free time I have watching these shows?" And the short answer was: yes!

The result of my experiment was that I found myself immediately locked in. Every enticing interactive opportunity mentioned throughout the program led me to my mobile phone and my laptop, so I could text my friends, and check out who these characters are and what additional "sneak peak" footage and info on the shows I could find online. To reiterate the phrase NBC coined some years ago with shows like "Seinfeld," this is the new "Must-See TV"!

I have a hypothesis about why they are so popular. The multiplatform experience is, in my humble opinion, one of the main reasons why the shows are so successful in gaining and retaining an audience. These shows are woven into the media-hungry fabric of our society. Anything and everything viewers want to know about the background of the shows, character back stories, etc., is all right there at our fingertips and splattered across every media. There's infinite content to search, explore, and consume on the Internet, mobile phone, iPad, etc.

For example, consider the show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." It was only doing OK when it launched on TV, but when it launched on Hulu, it took off. Read the full story as reported by the L.A. Times: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-sunny-20100926,0,7400781.story?page=2.

It's no longer just "Must-See TV" that offers the most fulfilling entertainment experience, but "Must-See TV, Internet, Mobile" and viewing across every other multiplatform device that has and will be invented. I just need to find a few extra hours in my day to keep up with it all.