Aging & Wisdom Quote by Sharon Gless

Madison Avenue’s fixation on “18-35” isn’t just a marketing statistic in Sharon Gless’s line; it’s a quiet indictment dressed up as industry trivia. As an actress who built a career in a business that sells faces as much as stories, Gless is naming the hidden rulebook: attention is priced according to youth, and everything else is treated as diminishing returns.

The phrasing matters. “They say” creates distance, as if she’s quoting a mantra everyone repeats to excuse the system. It’s not presented as an opinion, but as received wisdom - a kind of corporate folklore that launders bias into “common sense.” “Will only pay high dollars” gives the game away: this isn’t about what audiences deserve, it’s about what advertisers can monetize. The subtext is blunt: cultural visibility is being purchased, and the purchase order has an expiration date.

Contextually, this lands in the long arc of American media where programming decisions, casting choices, and even what kinds of women get written as complex or desirable are tethered to ad dollars. Gless, speaking from inside the machine, is pointing at how ageism becomes policy without ever being announced as such. The quote’s power is its economy; by citing a single demographic bracket, she exposes the whole pipeline from boardroom assumptions to who gets centered on screen - and who gets quietly edited out.