In an article "Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch", Klein explained that viewers consume the medium of television rather than television shows, treating the medium as the end of their consumption itself rather than using the set as a means to access specific programs they like the way they might choose a book from a shelf to access the story within. Since the introduction of television, the same percentage of sets are in use on, say, a Thursday evening at a certain hour, year after year, regardless of what content is broadcast. This is because unlike the way people use books, museums, or the cinema as means of consuming desired content, audiences consume television, the medium, as the desired object. TV viewers turn the set on, deciding to "watch television", and then seek out something to watch from what is available, flipping around, not until they find "something they like" - because television programming is in fact very rarely satisfying, and viewers rarely watch anything they actually like - but until they find something that doesn't offend them enough to make them flip to the next channel. Thus, for programmers of television channels, Klein recommended understanding that audience attraction was a matter not of pleasing the greatest number of viewers but of offending the fewest. The television audience is in a kind of partial trance. A network will do better worrying less about not giving an audience enough to like, to be surprised and delighted by, and to engage their attention, than about avoiding, as Klein said, "disturbing their reverie" with something that causes them to change the channel. Thus, even as channel choices proliferate alongside numerous easily accessed out-of-schedule viewing options, successful television programs remain, as they have always been, formulaic, cliché, "instantly familiar," predictable, and monotonous in tone.
Obsolescence of the theory
It has been widely suggested that the theory itself is obsolete thanks tohigh quality shows, top-rated options and viewers' choice of shows whether live or time-shifted alongside the advancements of DVDs and Netflix.
