Though baby boomers control the creative side of the television industry, a huge part of their audience is a lot younger, a divide that often results in stilted programming.
Fuji TV's special information show, "Dead Age" (Monday, 7 p.m.), attempts to bridge this gap by exposing it. "Dead age" refers to a temporal border where knowledge ends. The word tokkuri, for example, will be immediately familiar to people over a certain age, but at what age group does it cease to have any meaning at all? This age group would be called the dead age for the word tokkuri, which during the '60s was the common term used for turtle-neck sweaters.
This theory works the opposite way as well -- new terms and ideas that older people do not understand -- and the purpose of the show is to enlighten specific generations on the mores and vocabularies of other generations. Celebrities will show up to jog people's memories of the past and etiquette specific to young and old will be discussed.