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pelling show on the air, given its
relentless aim to expose the selfish
delusions of a man who won’t admit how much damage he’s done to
everyone around him. The consequences of Walter White’s increasing brutality are never ignored.
Violent encounters, murder and
the harm done to human bodies —
all those things are and should be
tools in the storytellers’ arsenals,
but those tools grow dull with
overuse. Dexter started out as
an interesting exploration of the
moral grey area in which a “good”
serial killer resided, but the show
is now a cautionary example of
how violent fare can come to
feel rote and mechanical. After a
while, all those bloody acts become little more than white noise.
The Walking Dead, on the other
hand, has improved — and its ratings have increased — not because
it kills more zombies in every
episode but because it made the
audience care more about the desperate survivors at the center of
the drama. Contrast that with The
Following, which generally presents various murder victims as
naive dupes and a “charismatic”
serial killer’s acolytes as blankfaced empty vessels. As I wrote
in my review, the whole enterprise
TV
HUFFINGTON
03.03.13
adds up to little more than a collection of serial-killer clichés.
Nobody wants to see stories
told inside a plastic paradise in
which people’s uglier instincts
are never acknowledged. But TV
may be reaching the point of diminishing returns when it comes
to on-screen gore and artificially
pumped-up stakes. Violence is
part of who we are, but so are
love, altruism, selfishness, ambi-
At a certain point, violent
scenes become empty calories
that offer nothing nutritious or
tasty, even in the short term.”
tion, curiosity — there’s a whole
realm of subjects to explore, and
not all of them involve axes and
knives. There are lots of interesting stories to tell about human
nature, but it’s a lot of work to
create suspense and audience investment the old-fashioned ways
— through expert character development and storytelling.
It’s hard not to wonder if the
stories that make the most noise or
shed the most blood are a little too
fashionable these days —
and a little too easy to sell.