Ratings for Tuesday night’s season premiere of American Idol were down 9% from the 2008 opener, but another number is probably making the show’s higher-ups even more nervous: The median age of people watching the show crept up to 40.3, despite the age cutoff for warbling hopefuls being way below that. (The 2002 season premiere of the show had a median age of 29.5, so the audience is aging about four years faster than Idol itself.) I would imagine that the producers kind of figured this was going to happen—our own Chris Molanphy predicted the Millionaire-ing of Idol’s audience shortly after David Cook’s victory in May—and tried to work the pre-premiere press so that it skewed a bit younger (hello, Kara DioGuardi and Bikini Girl), but it didn’t quite work, given that anyone even vaguely familiar with the show knows about its reliance on music from years ago all too well. [Show Tracker]