Your editorial is complete assumption.
While the violence and T&A might draw and keep young viewers, it doesn't exclude the possibility that young men also follow the plot, even if it's secondary for them.

Their being young men watching television does.

Thus spake the elitist.

Amen, brother.

Bonanza had all kinds of complexity. Ben Cartwright was a three time widower, having one son with each woman. What are the chances of that? I think he was actually a serial wife killer. Or else he kidnapped the boys and made up the story about their mothers dying.

Lots of shows have violence and jiggly daughters, so those effects net out.

It's better than 4 jiggly mothers, is it not?

The only reason anyone watches that one though, no?

Look, guys have always enjoyed a form of long-running serial entertainment that required following the fortunes of a multitude of characters with extensive back stories and complicated "story arcs."

It's called baseball.

I can't find it now but I remember reading a great article entitled something like "The Bonanza Rules." It was written by someone who'd viewed all eight thousand or so episodes in grad school and had distilled the series down to its essential wisdom. Most of the Bonanza Rules were just conventions, such as Little Joe Always Gets Shot in the Left Shoulder, but there was one timeless classic : Don't Ask Hoss, Because Hoss Doesn't Know.

Well, speaking as a young man who watches very little TV, what I do like to watch is shows like "24" -- by which I do not mean "shows featuring graphic violence and jiggly young women," but "shows with a great deal of narrative complexity and three-dimensional characters with evolving personalities and relationships."

I haven't gotten around to watching "24" yet -- I prefer to rent TV series I like on DVD and watch them at my own pace and on my own schedule, rather than structuring my life around the TV schedule -- but I seriously doubt that I will have any difficulty following the plot, as long it is internally consistent (one reason "The X-Files" never held my interest is that it's plot was not -- every time he painted himself into a corner, Chris Carter would escape by smashing through some established detail of the show's canon, until the whole edifice was too rickety to support any but the most blindly credulous fan's suspension of disbelief).

My favorite series, "Babylon 5," was not particularly rich in either graphic violence or jiggle -- although Claudia Christian's Commander Susan Ivanova was certainly a fine figure of a woman, her uniform was rather more utilitarian than revealing, and any male who treated her with less than complete respect would be courting serious injury. The same held true for Mira Furlan's Ambassador Delenn and Pat Tallman's Lyta Alexander. Although it's been some years since I saw it, I would have no problem explaining the various major characters' story arcs and relatioinships at great length, if you were willing to listen. I could also, incidentally, give you the key points of Middlemarch, at least as adapted by Masterpiece Theater; I haven't read the novel, having taken to heart Russell Baker's earnest advice that nobody should attempt to read it before the age of forty (I'll be waiting another ten years).

Speaking of "great" (in terms of word count, anyway) books, I subscribe to the heretical positions that the art of novel-writing has materially improved over the last three centuries or so, and also that the best of it is not to be found among the pretentious practitioners of what Jonathan Franzen refers to as "the High Art Literary Form," but rather among the "genre fiction" -- especially science fiction and fantasy -- frequently derided by critics. That's not to say that a lot of it isn't junk -- Sturgeon's Law still holds true -- but I think the work of writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and Guy Gavriel Kay compares favorably with most of the so-called "classics."

Gillian didn't jiggle.

Gillian didn't jiggle.