Jeffrey Sconce is a professor and cultural historian of media and film. He is an associate professor in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern University... (wikipedia)
Many shows this season ... had gruesome shots of women being brutalized and terrorized in very graphic and extended ways,
TV had always been the forbidden bad fruit in academia,
disproportionately the number of crime victims in movies and television.
They are always terrorized and chased by sadists and psychos,
The study resonated because I was writing at a time when people were making amazing predictions about new technologies, such as computers -- saying they could save us from everything,
Sadistic is the only word to use for some of these shows.
are much more artistic and vibrant now than the cinema.
You see people taking storytelling more seriously, ... Shows like 'Lost' and '24' have complex narratives you couldn't think about doing in film.
For a long time, we only asked questions such as, 'Does TV make kids stupid? Does TV make kids violent?' So the field was understudied.
For a long time, no one ever wanted to admit that television was anything but this horrible, horrible contagion in society.
The networks have gotten into trouble when trying to show nudity, so the other avenue to get viewers is to increase the violence.
But ignoring TV is like trying to ignore a 2-ton elephant.