Do your favorite TV shows seem less bloody disgusting than usual? There’s a reason for that:
Fans of network crime shows might be a bit confused this week as ABC’s Castle and NBC’s Hannibal skip regularly scheduled episodes and instead broadcast next week’s episodes, a move made to sidestep plotlines that might be deemed insensitive in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings and other events of real-life violence.
The reschedulings — and the removal from Fox.com and Hulu.com of an episode of Fox’s Family Guy in which a character inadvertently blows up a bridge while using a terrorist’s cellphone — won’t surprise anyone with a lick of sense. Popular culture has long since grown accustomed to moving quickly, if not always rationally, to account for horrific events.
In the last year alone, we saw Syfy pull an episode of Haven after the Sandy Hook massacre. Warner Bros. pulled the trailer and reshot scenes for its period crime movie Gangster Squad in the wake of last summer’s mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, amid fears that art imitated reality just a bit too closely.
This sensitivity to the audience’s sensitivities has the life span of an M&M at fat camp. Even Wired is skeptical:
While the immediate aftermath of tragedy tends to make audiences more sensitive to images of terrorism, history shows that the sensitivity rarely lasts long. By the time the Bourne Legacy was released less than a month after the Aurora shooting, a lengthy scene where a man slaughters everyone in his place of work was left untouched. Despite last week’s news, there was still heavy promotion for what appear to be the most anticipated movies of this summer, Iron Man 3 and Star Trek Into Darkness, both of which feature terrorists who wreak havoc on civilian populations with massive explosions.
Now comic-book violence is hardly the issue here, especially when you have to leave the house and pay for it. It’s more TV’s fetish for the lovable or dashing serial killer, or upping the adrenaline ante on detective shows by making the criminals sicker and their crimes more vividly rendered. It’s such “entertainment” that betrays a desperation on the part of networks: as if they knew no other way to get attention than by scattering dead and mutilated bodies around.
Which is the modus operandi of …. oh never mind.
Filed under: "Entertainment", Infinite Human Capacity for Stupidity, Please Stop Killing Everyone
