2013-08-01

Extra violent, extra brutal: TV in an age of declining social mood

Declining social mood is good for horror, violence and brutality. TV is catching up quick.
Murder Inc.
While the extremity of the violence — and the violent removal of extremities — is new, it's worth noting that the brutality isn't. Procedurals, the money-printing bedrock of network television, have long had body counts comparable to a land war in Asia. Even the genteel Murder, She Wrote, in which Angela Lansbury solved crimes between warming cups of chamomile, operated like a well-appointed charnel house; the quaint Maine town in which it was set was eventually revealed to possess a murder rate higher than that of Honduras. The difference is that, for the majority of these shows, corpses are essentially props, personality-free grist for the weekly case-solving mill. On the opposite end of things is The Walking Dead, a genre-wallow in which the no-longer-living have been intentionally stripped of humanity to justify all manner of video-game ultraviolence on the part of the show's putative heroes. It's a brilliant way for the producers to both have their cake and stab it in the forehead with a screwdriver too.

The real difference these days, the one that has me standing up, mildly retching, and crying "no more," lies between the two extremes. As the amoral ambiguity of the great Golden Age dramas recedes in our rearview mirror, network executives are unflipping the scripts and restoring some familiar storytelling order. This means less cheering for criminals and a renewed focus on the law-and-order types charged with bringing them to justice.
The heroes are returning, but in a gory pile of bodies, which fits the mixed mood of a stock market rally amidst the ashes of the post-2008 economy.

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