Sorry you don't like any of the theories or explanations offered so far, Christopher, but you asked us for our opinions, not just the opinions that you personally find acceptable. I think it's a little rude for you to reject all of our reasons just because you don't agree with them.
Huh? "Liking" has nothing to do with it. I'm trying to contemplate a mystery here, and mysteries are solved by considering the evidence and employing deductive reasoning, not by personal feelings or likes. If the evidence goes against a hypothesis, even my own hypothesis, I'll reject it no matter how much I may like it. After all, reality doesn't conform to what we want it to be. So don't take it personally. It's just logic.
It's also incorrect to say that I don't agree with
any of the explanations. As I clearly said in the paragraph immediately after the one you quoted, I do find the explanation that it's based on sales department preferences to be highly plausible. This is how the deductive process works: You consider a variety of hypotheses, weigh them against the evidence, discard the ones that don't work, and thereby narrow in on the most likely ones. Most of the suggestions will be rejected, but that's the way it's supposed to work, because there can only be one right answer. Making a wrong guess is nothing to be ashamed of; it's part of the process of searching for the truth. So you're wrong to think I'm attacking anyone by questioning or challenging their hypotheses. I'm simply participating in the process of debate and analysis along with everyone else.
More than just Trek comics, the American television industry has also followed this trend.
The movie era featured a cast of middle-age actors. Television shows in that same period (1980-1995) would also have casts that featured actors in that same age group. Off the top of my head: Golden Girls, Matlock, Murder She Wrote, Newhart, etc.
Fast forward to present day...
Shows with predominately older or middle-aged casts are absent from the majority of TV. A token older actor or two may be included in the regular cast, but they are often regulated to the roles of elder authority figure or parent. There are, of course, exceptions that can be found of primarily older casts (Hot in Cleveland, for instance) but not too many of these exceptions exist on American broadcast television.
I'm not sure that's true.The
Law & Order franchise tended to skew fairly old, or at least to have a mix of older leads and younger sidekicks.
Person of Interest's three male leads are aged 46, 52, and 60, and their current leading lady is 39.
Gotham's lead cast doesn't skew particularly young outside of the two child leads -- Ben McKenzie and Robin Lord Taylor are 36, Jada Pinkett-Smith is 43, Donal Logue is 46, Sean Pertwee is 50, and John Doman is 70.
Agents of SHIELD's two lead actors are in their early 50s, although the rest tend to be younger. I'd say actors in their 40s and 50s are still quite well represented on TV.
Take the CW network. Of their scripted fare, the oldest cast (on average) is Supernatural with two actors in their thirties.
Well, I can't resist doing some math to check for myself... If the two brothers are the only leads in
Supernatural, then the average age of that cast is 34.5. On
Arrow, the regular cast is Stephen Amell (33), Katie Cassidy (28), David Ramsey (43), Willa Holland (23), Paul Blackthorne (45), Emily Bett Rickards (23), Colton Haynes (26), and John Barrowman (47), giving an average age of 33.5.
The Flash has Grant Gustin (25), Candice Patton (26), Danielle Panabaker (27), Rick Cosnett (31), Carlos Valdes (24), Tom Cavanagh (51), and Jesse L. Martin (46), for an average of 32.8.
I don't want to go through all the shows, but most of the others seem to skew similar in age to
Supernatural or younger. You may be right about the average, but I think that's misleading, because
Supernatural has no regulars at all above age 37 (though I gather it had a recurring actor, Misha Collins, who's 40, and another, Mark Sheppard, who's 50), while the two DC superhero shows have a much broader range, each with at least two regulars over 40. If we're talking about inclusion, averages aren't the best measure. Also, the averages seem to vary by only a couple of years, barely enough to be statistically significant.
Still, you have a point that there is a tendency to favor youth, even if I think you overstate it a bit. And now that I think about it, that might be particularly true in comics. It seems to me, from what I read on comics sites, that the problem in the comics industry today is that it tends to skew to a very narrowly defined audience, and thus tends to exclude those readers that don't fit the target demographic, such as women, children, and minorities. There's some improvement in representation in recent years -- and in fact I saw an item just today that the best-selling comics at bookstores, as opposed to direct-market comic shops, are dominated by ones that skew toward female and child readers, so the industry had better catch up with that if it wants to survive.
But that's getting off-topic. What I'm thinking is that the very narrow demographic focus of comic publishers may explain why Trek comics have become more narrowly focused on the 5YM era than Trek novels have. Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. I've been wondering why the comics were different from the novels, and this is a distinct difference between their cultures. True, Pocket's sales department doesn't exactly embrace the movie era with open arms (don't I know it), but they've been willing to bend on occasion, particularly in this past year where we've gotten three movie-era e-novellas (
Seasons of Light and Darkness, The More Things Change, and the upcoming
Shadow of the Machine) and a movie-era novel (
Foul Deeds Will Rise). So it's not as strict an avoidance as it is in comics. But comics seem to have become unusually inflexible in their demographic focus in the past decade or so, and have only recently begun loosening up. So that could account for it.
