80s joke. Rosanne Rosannadanna: “never mind”.
Anyway, being couch bound with an unending cold recently, I have watched more TV than usual and have noticed an amazing increase, at least for me, in the violence on TV dramas. I suppose a bit part of it is that the violence is in the present. For the first chunck of this decade most US TV drama was about deadly events in the past, in the form of various detection and forensic shows such as the Law and Orders and the CISs and our own wee DaVinci’s Inquest. In two opening shows of this year, however, there has been an incredible level of present moment violence.
First, in the Third Watch opening show, the bassist from Kiss as bad criminal seeks revenge and sends machine gunning thugs out to kill and be killed all over “the city”. It was an hour of bullet spray without plot, going even into an ER, though, sadly, none of the character actually from the also unending ER were picked off. It was the sort of thing that I would have never thought would be on broadcast TV. Then, on Saturday night I watched bits of the opening show of Lost. Holy Freeg-holy! Repeated rehashing of the inside of a passenger jet full of people as it breaks up in flight (note to self: take the train), repeated showing of the results of said break up after the chunks land (ie “I see dead people”) and, then, people getting eaten by oversized and geographically misplaced carnivores – including one particularly blood-enriched consumption of an airline pilot through a window complete with chomping sounds and buckets of red paint being splashed back onto the neighbouring cockpit windows in time with the chomps. It is a potentially groundbreaking show having an actual original premise…oh, but the gore. Mixing Survivor with Edgar Rice Burroughs while riding the pop culture terror wave it could spawn a flood of copycat exotic pointless fear-mongering shows to kill off reality shows and cop shows and maybe Jamie Oliver for good measure.
I am not suggesting that these shows should be off TV or that you should not watch them. Maybe I have just been stuck watching a world of tedious home redecorating shows, wardrobe renovation shows, stuff storage renovation shows, dating life renovation shows…and sports for the last seven years and forgot how much blood is on TV if you want to find it.