TV’s Golden Age died long before his mob show ever aired.
From "Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch", an article published in TV Guide in 1971, Paul L. Klein, executive of audience measurement at NBC, explained that viewers consume the medium of television rather than television shows, not 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.
Viewers almost never turn off the set as a result of finding nothing tolerable and judging every program available boring or otherwise objectionable. Viewers commonly watch programs they describe later as unbearable, everything else on being even more intolerable.
Television has been in decline for decades, long before the "Reality-Competition" shows such as Survivor in 1997.
From the movie 'Network' in 1976:
"So you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamn amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troop of acrobat storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players.
"We're in the bordedom-killing business."
"So if you want the truth go to God, go to your gurus, go to yourselves; because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth, but man you're never going to get any truth from us. "
"We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We'll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer, and that nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in don't worry just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win."
"We'll tell you any sh_t you want to hear. We deal in illusions. Man, none of it is true but you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you; you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube."
This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of a sentence I'm speaking to you now. Turn them off!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbvpznUDhiQ