Mature Audiences : Television and the Elderly

In Mature Audiences, Karen Riggs challenges traditional ideas about older viewers as passive, vulnerable audiences for television.

She tells the stories of seventy elder Americans who have worked television into their lives in specific and practical ways.

In particular, Riggs studies older women fans of Murder, She Wrote, the impact of news and public affairs programming in an affluent retirement community, the efforts of several older African Americans to produce and telecast their own public-access shows, and the role of television in the daily lives of minority elders, including gays, American Indians, and immigrants from Russia and Laos.

Although television's own images of the elderly are nearly nonexistent or frequently negative, this collection of interviews provides a portrait of viewers who are often deliberate, thoughtful, and seasoned in their responses to questions about the role of television in their daily lives.