The Ancient Problem of TV Violence

The arrival of "The Sopranos" marks the ongoing trend, wherein ultra-violent, ultra-sexual programming made for pay-cable channels oozes into basic-cable syndication. It began with "Sex and the City" reruns on TBS and now includes "Six Feet Under" on Bravo. And with basic cable now sliding into the muck, it is dragging over-the-air broadcast TV with it. Reruns of the vile bad-cop drama "The Shield" have gravitated to the new CW network. All of television is sliding into the violence swamp.

Broadcast TV has grown more violent in recent years, thanks in part to the gore in "CSI" and its different versions and imitations. A new study by the Parents Television Council finds that the 2005-2006 TV season was the most violent in recent history. In fact, there has been a 75 percent increase in primetime TV violence since the 1998 season. Even TV critics have noticed, calling the new trend "horrific on purpose" and finding the body count "rivals that of a war zone."

Violence has increased in every hour of primetime, and it's especially graphic in the last hour. Imagine children watching the episode of NBC's "Law & Order: SVU" where the detectives raid the house of a serial pedophile and find a series of dead children lying in pools of blood. Or try the episode of NBC's "Crossing Jordan" where one of the doctors is held at gunpoint to accomplish the mission of removing a 12-year-old's testicles.

Some scenes just seem designed for maximum creepiness. One episode of the forensic drama "Bones" on Fox had the heroine finding a mummified corpse. To get the fingerprints, she cut a hand off, soaked it in water, and peeled the skin off like a glove and put it on her hand.

This isn't what they worried about in 1954. I suspect there wasn't a leader in this field who predicted that television would ever feature something as noxious as what is to be found on television sets today.

But what they did predict was the slippery slope of cultural decay, and that's precisely what's happening before our eyes. Even worse, the slide hasn't been halted, even slowed. It is accelerating. Where are we headed? It's a frightening thought.