Steven Johnson in a New York Times article from 2005 wrote about the increasing complexity of television programs:
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the "masses" want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that "24" episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of "24," you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like "24," you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.This was a point that Johnson further developed in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson was telling us that watching television was no longer a passive activity. Instead, we were being called upon to become active participants in following the plot line. He suggested that the demands being made on us as active watchers, even when quite a bit was undecipherable to us, was at least part of the explanation of the Flynn effect. In general he claimed that modern life demanded that we become smarter.