booooorrrrr-ring

family time at my parents house during the NBA playoffs usually involves watching the cleveland cavs play. maybe it won't be surprising then that i've seen some more commercials since that last post which have inspired some more thoughts. this time we won't get quite as deep into the impact of mass media on public consciousness, we'll just notice a few trends that must relate to thought and culture somehow.

the ads that caught my eye tonight were for a couple new shows coming out soon. if i told you that there were three broad categories of shows that come out, and that these ads were not for reality shows could you guess the other two categories? if you guessed doctor/hospital shows and police shows you'd be right.

if there's something we definitely don't have too few of, it's cop shows and doctor shows. we have fifteen different versions of csi, 20 of law and order, a host of military investigator and lawyer dramas, the closer, cold case, without a trace, and let's not forget about the spin-offs of the nypd blue archetype. in the doctor category we have of course er, grey's anatomy, house, heartland, general hospital, and many more i'm sure. for those of you wondering why i haven't mentioned any sitcoms with similar settings, for now we're just considering dramas.

there are a couple things that strike me about this saturation of doctor and police programs on television. one is, that it doesn't offer much diversity of programming if the only shows we can choose from on prime time are either in a hospital, or about the endless struggle between the law and criminals. personally, i don't spend much time in hospitals or antagonizing (or be antagonized by) the authorities. i'm not really relating to these characters and situations. the other, which is possibly much more profound, is that the plots of these shows are driven by really terrible things happening to people all the time.

in the hospital people are always dying. if it's not cancer or some other serious terminal illness, it's that's they're the victim of some violent assault - victim of mugging, casualty of gang violence etc. in the cop shows they're always chasing murderers, rapists, and pedophiles. so we sit at home and watch some of the most horrible things that people perpetrate against each other played out in graphic detail over and over again.

time to add something to the mix: as if it wasn't enough that so much of our television entertainment is centered about death and violence, when we turn on the news (local or otherwise) we see more of the same. with the news you can throw in a healthy (that's sarcasm) dose of political scandal and corruption, but mostly it's the same themes we see in the dramas mentioned above. so my question is - if our entertainment and news are so consistently reminding us of the tragic aspects of life in this world, can it be a surprise that our culture is so dominated by fear? we're afraid of everything! if it's not terrorists, it's kidnappers, serial killers, and rapists (by the way, the word rape/rapist is particularly painful for me to use because of the intensity of the violence against usually women that it calls to mind). when it's none of those things it's not having the right car, or an acne free complexion, not being cool enough, or not having the right clothes. the list is endless. how did we get to such a dark place as a society? and how do we find hope in this madness? once we've found hope, how do we share that with others?

when we focus on the negative evidences of the disintegrating society around us, it's overwhelmingly difficult to see the signs of progress and our growing sense of global solidarity and compassion. if we determine to look harder for the positive developments in the world, and start building communities around with a common purpose and vision, how long will it be before we see some changes in the programs we look to for entertainment?