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same old storytelling conventions
may bore their audience. What’s a
sure-fire way to dramatize a story? Threatening to kill or actually
killing a character. Life-or-death
stakes are far more common than
they used to be on television, as
are cliffhangers, big twists and
surprise deaths. When 24 killed
off a key character at the end of
its first season, it was a huge deal,
and rightly so. But now that kind
of thing happens weekly, on both
prestige dramas and pot-boilery
soaps, as writers and producers
scramble to garner the kind of buzz
that social media exists to feed.
One recent visual trope comes
to mind again and again: A character being held down, tied up,
interrogated, tortured, menaced,
taken hostage and terrified in
some way. These kinds of scenes
occurred in Homeland, Revolution, American Horror Story, Revenge, Sons of Anarchy and Arrow
— a very wide range of programs.
That’s to say nothing of the time
Don Draper strangled a woman in
Mad Men (in a dream, but still) or
the multiple deaths that occur on
shows like Boardwalk Empire and
Breaking Bad. There’s a brutality at the center of many current
dramas that may indeed reflect
TV
something dark and festering in
our culture, and the damage that
people do to each other is absolutely an idea that writers should
be exploring in all kinds of stories.
But when is enough enough?
Everyone will draw the line in
a different place, but one thing
is clear: At a certain point, violent scenes become empty calories that offer nothing nutritious
or tasty, even in the short term.
A better analogy might be drugs
— nothing really matches the intensity of that first hit, and eventually a much bigger dose barely
has any impact at all.
The approach to violence is key
to working out whether it’s being
used to advance a show’s plot and
themes or merely to bludgeon the
viewer. A significant death near
the end of the first season of Game
of Thrones was heartbreaking because it was told from the point
of view of the victim and victim’s
family members, and very little of
the actual death was shown. People often end up dead on Justified,
but the show is often about the
attempt to resist the easy solution
of violence and its greatest joy is
the verbal combat among various
characters. And for its part, Breaking Bad is the most morally com-
HUFFINGTON
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