In an alarming bit of synchronicity, or what some might call a lack of cultural imagination, two new series premiering on network television nearly within a month will revolve around serial killings, and serial killings by proxy: “Cult,” which begins Feb. 19 on the CW, and the similarly titled “The Following,” which premiered Monday on Fox.
BBC America’s period procedural “Ripper Street,” meanwhile, began its eight-episode run Saturday not with the Jack but a murderer — if such a comparative may be allowed — even more distasteful.
And NBC has “Hannibal,” concerning the early days of Thomas Harris’ cannibal killer, on its docket for a date to be announced.
This is nothing new. We are in Season 8 of CBS’s “Criminal Minds,” a weekly cavalcade of just such intricately devised horrors whose viewership has hovered pretty consistently between 12 million and 14 million, with its ranking improving as the overall size of the broadcast audience has shrunk; it is a palpable hit. And there is “Dexter,” on Showtime, whose protagonist serially murders serial murderers.
At the recent Television Critics Assn. press conclave in Pasadena, Calif., where TV violence was a hot subject in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting, CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler and NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt — a Showtime executive when “Dexter” was born — were called on to defend their series.
Each stood behind the product. Greenblatt defended “Dexter” by saying it isn’t as violent as “Criminal Minds.” Tassler defended “Criminal Minds” as something meant for adults, and a show she likes.
Former star Mandy Patinkin, by contrast, told New York magazine awhile back that the series was “the biggest public mistake I ever made. … I never thought they were going to kill and rape all these women every night, every day, week after week, year after year.”
What is it about these characters that bothers me so?
They are supposed to bother us, of course, on the way to providing some sort of entertainment. (Perhaps it’s the “entertainment” that’s my problem.) Partly, it’s that in spite of all the pathologies and florid particulars with which their creators dress them and the complicated manners of killing they devise for them, they are tediously alike.
Partly it is that, being deviant, they have nothing much to tell us about ourselves or the world, and partly it’s the way that they are glamorized.
I understand that terror has its uses and am not averse to a bit of frightful catharsis. Nor do I believe that, in a general way, violence in entertainment makes violent people.
But it does create violence in the culture, in the social air we commonly breathe, and objections to it should not be dismissed merely because it can’t be tied to a particular real-world act or because most of us are smart enough to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
I recognize, as well, that great art has been made on this theme: “M,” “Monsieur Verdoux,” “The Night of the Hunter,” “Peeping Tom,” “Badlands” (a murder-spree story, technically), even that comedy chestnut “Arsenic and Old Lace.”
There is violence in Homer and Shakespeare, and, Lord knows, there is violence in the Bible — both the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament and the feel-His-pain torments of the New. Dante was a great inventor of tortures.
But we are talking about somewhat lower horizons here.
In most popular fictions, the serial killer is often not just smart but brilliant: almost psychically sensitive to their opponents and prey, able to play the game 10 moves ahead.
“The Following,” in which an imprisoned serial killer marshals an army of like-minded murderers, multiplying the effect, does seem to represent some sort of watershed for network TV.
Its survival relies on the survival of its villain and, therefore, the continued failure of its hero, and an unending stream of variations on the central ritual — the stalking, the torture, the killing.
It strikes me as an odd, sad plan for a television show, at least in the framework of network broadcast TV.
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