Advertising! Advertisers target specific age ranges.
I suspect they are ‘casting’ the audience because they show the audience on TV. The TV shows that tape before a live studio audience but never show the audience don’t ask for birthdates. Typically you just line up to get in to the taping. Game shows like Jeopardy! definitely ‘cast’. You rarely see an older person on Jeopardy! or Wheel.
You don’t type in an exact birthdate. It’s a range of age categories, e.g., 21-30, 31-40, etc.
We saw Jon Stewart (Daily Show) and Stephen Colbert several times. No age, no ID required. (And their pre-shows were as good or better than the actual shows!).
As @TatinG notes, they don’t show the studio audience at those shows.
I think this is it. However H and I have a whole lot more money to spend than our kids do. Just sayin’…
It may be discrimination, or it may be simply that those shows are hard to get tickets for (and I don’t know one way or the other). They may want to keep the audience from appearing too old because that can give a show, especially a talk show, a reputation for being fuddy duddy or something, and given when talk shows tape often it is older people who have the time to go to them, retirees mostly, so perhaps that played into decisions. It is true that older people often have a lot more discretionary income, but advertisers are looking at a much younger demographic, especially when selling products that they think would only appeal to younger people (it is why you also see Buick, who had the rap of being an old person’s car, putting ads in shows popular among younger viewers and showing young, ‘beautiful’ people in the ads driving the cars). On the other hand I watch some shows I like, and I see all these ads for medi alert, catheter sales and the like…
A dozen years ago, we were in LA to see colleges. We had tickets to the Jay Leno show. They put us in one line, which led to farthest seats in the semi circle, by the band. The young crowd , or was it the best dressed?, filled the seats up front.
That is not age discrimination - it is a holistic admissions process. You simply did not have the ineffable qualities they needed to craft a diverse audience.
Most of these shows have tickets reserved for each show, i.e., house seats that are kept available for friends/acquaintances/sponsors, etc. Years ago, on one of our visits to NY, our kids wanted to go to the Rosie O’Donnell show. My H knew someone involved with the show and we got a row of these house seats reserved when we told them what day we wanted to attend. We, and others who had reserved seats, were in a separate line from everyone else, didn’t have to get there as early as others, and got to go in earlier to our seats after a tour of the studio, and the seats ended up being the front center rows.
Plain and simple. These shows need a certain audience level to be able to sell advertising. The people watching afternoon shows are generally either retired or stay at home parents or unemployed. Retired people are not big shoppers. They already bought most of what is advertised. Folks in their 30’s are still buying a lot.
30+ aged people watching a TV program filled With " old" people in the audience may feel disenfranchised. Hence, they may not watch.
So it’s all about economics. Age selectivity occurs everyware. Pay attention to all the advertising you see, movies you watch, etc. But so is racial, ethnic and sex selectivity.
Also, don’t many marketers believe that old people will buy stuff marketed toward young people, but young people will not buy stuff marketed toward old people? If so, it should not be a surprise that products (including television shows) that both young and old people may be are marketed with a young bias.
The TV industry uses all sorts of strange/questionable marketing techniques, including engineering their audiences a certain way to (falsely) attract a specific demographic.
On the surface, this sort of thing is off-putting, but from an economics perspective, it makes sense.
I wish we age discriminate when we elect people into government. Some of them show the real signs of senility. I do not care about other aspects of our lives. I guess, I was not age discriminated when I found my last job at 58 and it happened to be my best job which I am still enjoying a lot and nobody in the office has accused me of senility (YET!!), When it happen and I am rightfully kicked out, I still say huge “Thank you!”. Just smile, life is OK even when we feel discriminated, it is not worth it to be sad for the littlest things!!
A group of my friends got tickets to see Kelly and Michael with no problem, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that this is true. It’s no different than the way some restaurants valet park the expensive cars prominently and hide the rest in the back.
I can guarantee that if a show’s format is to show the audience regularly, the audience is being “cast” to some meaningful extent.
Among discriminations, I consider age discrimination the least problematic since everyone regardless of race gender, gets old. That makes it universal discrimination instead of singling out ano one group.