Violence and Television...Go Figure

I watch way too much television. There's just something comfortable about eating dinner, settling in on the couch, and flipping channels until I go to sleep. I'm one of those people who is almost impossible to watch TV with. I can't stand commercials; I tend to watch several different shows at once, changing the channel during every commercial break. Annoying, I know.

But during my endless weekend channel surfing, I came across an observation. At one point in time, almost every single channel (I don't have cable, so there are only seven) was playing a crime or law related show. CSI, LA Law, Law and Order, Medium, Numbers, Without a Trace...some of these even have their own spin-offs in different cities, like CSI:Miami and CSI: New York, or they explore the different facets of a police department like Law and Order: CI or SVU. Obviously, being the couch potato that I am, I've watched all of these shows at least once and come to the conclusion that they're all pretty much the same. Sure there are different characters and arching story lines, but the general setup--somebody died, let's figure out who did it--tends to stay the same.

Often the plots of these shows are "ripped from the headlines" as the commericals dramatically announce. They parallel real current events, but change them just enough so that they won't get sued.

My question is this: Why are we, Americans especially, so fascinated by crime? Why do we enjoy watching people get shot, bludgeoned to death, drowned, suffocated... Why do we enjoy seeing their bodies picked apart as some ridiculously gorgeous scientist searches for forensic evidence? Well, maybe we don't enjoy it, but we can't stop watching it.

And it's not just television. Most bookstores and libraries have "true crime" sections, filled with books on various murders and violent crimes. In some ways, I think that books are more affective than television in conveying the horror of murder. I've seen dead bodies so many times on television that I've grown numb to them, but after reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, I dread being at home by myself.

Maybe it's because watching crazy people makes us feel more normal. We can see a serial killer shoot five people and think, Wow. I'd never do that. And then there's just that weird thing that humans do...you see a car wreck, and you slow down to look at the battered cars and people or ambulances beside them. You hear a siren in your neighborhood and you go to watch the fire.

As humans, we're obsessed with tragedy. I was in the sixth grade when 9/11 occurred, and I remember sitting in my second period class at school, watching the towers fall over and over as they replayed it on the news. At one point someone gasped, and we realized that there were people actually jumping from the building to escape the fire. We were captivated. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I watched the news almost nonstop, unable to believe that something like that could be happening in a city that I had visited and fallen in love with.

When you think about it, the television networks really know what they're doing. If everyone is obsessed with violence and the tragedy that it brings, it makes sense to make as many shows about these things as people will watch, and then some.

Something bad happens, and we can't help looking. Someone gets shot on TV, and we just can't stop watching.