Programmers Find Older Is a Wiser Path in Casting

Broadcast TV programmers work relentlessly to keep their finger on the pulse of popular culture, traveling as far as Aspen to discover what new trend has the public in its thrall. You might even remember some of the series that came out of some of those earlier revelations:

· 110 pounds is the New Fat.

· Drama is the New Comedy.

· Tokenism is the New Integration.

Well, about a decade ago, having seized upon "28 is the New Middle-Aged," programmers set about purging their prime-time landscapes of all crow's-feet in hopes of luring back all those young viewers (particularly young men) who'd abandoned broadcast TV -- young viewers on whom advertisers had put a bounty.

But this fall, in a surprising about-face, programmers are serving up a slew of new series starring people who in seasons past would have been cast as in-laws in the early stages of dementia. Which brings us to this year's Shocking New Trend:

Old is the New Young.

Of all the networks, NBC -- which spent years not acknowledging the existence of viewers older than 49 in its ratings reports -- has embraced the Old is the New Young trend most dramatically. NBC suits have gone and hired John Lithgow, 60, and Jeffrey Tambor, 62, to star in its new odd-couple comedy, "Twenty Good Years."

(Presumably, NBC, which is in fourth place among those 18-to-49-year-olds, has decided -- as CBS did a few years back -- that sometimes it's best to forget demos and go for tonnage.)

ABC, meanwhile, hopes Ted Danson, 58, will get the network back into the sitcom game. The "Cheers" veteran plays a shrink with his own midlife crisis in "Help Me Help You."

And at CBS, James Woods, in his first TV series at age 59, stars as a brilliant sleazoid lawyer in "Shark," and Ray Liotta, 51, leads a double life in the new drama "Smith." And in CBS's "Jericho," Gerald McRaney, 59, and Pamela Reed, 57, playing husband and wife, try to calm the folk in a quaint Kansas town when they see a nuclear blast rising from the Rockies -- the Rockies having mysteriously jumped a couple of hundred miles to the state's eastern border.

And did you know that billboards are the eyes into the soul of a network? If you want to figure out which of a batch of new shows a broadcast network is really hellbent on ramming down the throats of the public, you need only drive around Los Angeles -- the nation's billboard mecca and the country's second-largest television market -- and count which of those shows got the most billboards.