Kill Your Television

It's shocking the things I'm willing to watch in the name of a good crime drama. It's bizarre to realize that I'M the statistic (the average person sees x number of murders on television by the time they're 30, etc. etc.). What is it about crime drama that is so addictive? Jerry Bruckheimer owns our souls!!!

I'd like to justify my television habits by saying that it makes me, in my (sort of) white, "middle-class" existence, aware of the horrors of the world. I'd like to claim that it bursts my safe little bubble and makes me see what the world is really like. But I'm afraid it makes me more calloused than if I were to just watch college football and sitcoms. I know what's going on (in a weird, Hollywood-ish way), and I understand that people both do, and go through, horrible things, but in the end... I can change the channel, turn off the TV, or at least turn off my brain and decide that it's all Hollywood, after all, so it doesn't affect me and it's not real.

Have I become so hardened, that dead bodies don't affect me anymore? That I don't see them as human beings, but in a weird, post-modern sort of way, merely as actors liberally hosed down in ketchup? Or has my television become more real to me than reality? Is my television alive? Can I kill it? Murder it? Would Marg Helenberger come striding through my livingroom to sass me in perfect make-up and heels? Would I confess? Would it really lead to a strange plot twist that revealed that I thought my TV was really my great-aunt Marge who I once saw beating kittens, and thus my psychosis would justify my homocidal tendencies?

I'm kidding, people. And I have to go, anyway. Crossing Jordan is coming on next!