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Nothing in our 24/7 entertainment universe, including the programming intended to at least partake of some reality, matched the cold-blooded horror of the Hamas attack on Israel. There’s plenty of violence on TV and video, but it takes place in a context mostly divorced from the worst realities of the world we live in. It is either absurdly staged — e.g., the John Wick series — or, if intended to be believable, it is still, well, contained. Remote. Viewers feel safe from it even if they know such things go on “out there,” beyond their living rooms.
Our entertainment barons, naturally, are driven by a desire for audience and profits and a mandate to, well, entertain. “Gritty” sells — but not mayhem on the level of 10/7. After 9/11, producers recoiled from depicting anything like the terrible events of that day and only slowly returned to terrorism-driven themes. Now the challenge will be to represent the reality of the fanaticism we saw explode out of Gaza without reducing that horror to a cliché.
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There’s no denying that what we watch affects how we view the world. Huge, hard-edge shows such as “The Wire,” “Homeland,” “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul,” “Ozark” or “Fauda” — all these change our understanding of the world, the way we look at it, the threats we perceive as urgent. The assumptions of such shows become part of the national conversation and inevitably part of the national consensus on the way the world operates.
The ubiquity of the drug trade in both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” as well as in “The Wire” and “Ozark,” has created a general belief about the flow of narcotics into the United States: That it is massive, destroys many lives, powers corruption and violence — and cannot be stopped. That’s all true, save the despair over solutions, but the insidious effect of those shows is a belief that the evil of the narcotics trade isn’t likely to touch most viewers — that participants must go looking for it.
“Fauda,” an Israeli series based on the country’s elite counterterrorism operatives, may have contributed to the general belief — the “conception” is how Israelis refer to it — that Israel could not be surprised by massive terrorist attacks like 10/7. A similar “conception” was fractured by the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. It wasn’t a false sense of security but rather a shared set of assumptions about the nature of the threats we faced — assumptions that shattered in a moment.
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“Homeland,” “Jack Ryan” and “Fauda” have more than a few villains of cunning and patience. Certainly, the cartels of Netflix and Prime Video are every bit as ruthless as those of Mexico and Bolivia. But the villains of the streaming universe leave you, the viewer, alone because they are almost always thwarted. On screens large and small, citizens of the West have to almost purposely seek them out for these cadres to ruin their lives. The real-world villains are in fact both worse in intentions and more able in capabilities than we ever imagined. None of the on-screen killers, to cite the most recent hideous example, has been portrayed as capable of turning thousands of ordinary young Palestinian men into fanatical killers.
It’s not the savagery of just Hamas that was rendered unthinkable over decades of viewing but that of other evildoers as well. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has committed war crimes too numerous to count, but the wanton bloodlust of Putin simply never made it onto screens even after his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The United States is in a new Cold War with China, but Xi Jinping’s crushing of freedom in Hong Kong and the Uyghur genocide have never become a backdrop to a streaming hit.
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This is self-censoring in part and also a failure of imagination among producers, writers and directors. Certainly studio executives worry about losing the lucrative Chinese box office. But when it comes to the fanatics of Iran’s proxies — whether Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis — there’s been an inexplicable failure among the creators because there is no box office to lose.
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“Fauda” has featured dozens of terrorists over its four seasons — but thousands of them crashing through the fence to murder, rape and torture?
Our streaming reality has unlimited numbers of predatory villains who are sometimes charming and always malevolent, and the legions of flawed protagonists usually prevail, but collectively it’s all a PG illusion of what we are dealing with when it comes to evil circa 2024.
We need to start visualizing the world as its worst case might be. It would be useful if the West got reality television of a different sort — and soon. The villains aren’t getting less evil, less competent, or less lethal or brutal. The opposite is true in fact.
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Americans will have spent more than $8.5 billion at the box office this year. We watch hours and hours of network television and streaming video. And yet, did anything we’ve seen on-screen in recent memory prepare us for Oct. 7 — the “GoPro pogrom”?
Nothing in our 24/7 entertainment universe, including the programming intended to at least partake of some reality, matched the cold-blooded horror of the Hamas attack on Israel. There’s plenty of violence on TV and video, but it takes place in a context mostly divorced from the worst realities of the world we live in. It is either absurdly staged — e.g., the John Wick series — or, if intended to be believable, it is still, well, contained. Remote. Viewers feel safe from it even if they know such things go on “out there,” beyond their living rooms.
Our entertainment barons, naturally, are driven by a desire for audience and profits and a mandate to, well, entertain. “Gritty” sells — but not mayhem on the level of 10/7. After 9/11, producers recoiled from depicting anything like the terrible events of that day and only slowly returned to terrorism-driven themes. Now the challenge will be to represent the reality of the fanaticism we saw explode out of Gaza without reducing that horror to a cliché.
There’s no denying that what we watch affects how we view the world. Huge, hard-edge shows such as “The Wire,” “Homeland,” “Breaking Bad,” “Better Call Saul,” “Ozark” or “Fauda” — all these change our understanding of the world, the way we look at it, the threats we perceive as urgent. The assumptions of such shows become part of the national conversation and inevitably part of the national consensus on the way the world operates.
The ubiquity of the drug trade in both “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” as well as in “The Wire” and “Ozark,” has created a general belief about the flow of narcotics into the United States: That it is massive, destroys many lives, powers corruption and violence — and cannot be stopped. That’s all true, save the despair over solutions, but the insidious effect of those shows is a belief that the evil of the narcotics trade isn’t likely to touch most viewers — that participants must go looking for it.
“Fauda,” an Israeli series based on the country’s elite counterterrorism operatives, may have contributed to the general belief — the “conception” is how Israelis refer to it — that Israel could not be surprised by massive terrorist attacks like 10/7. A similar “conception” was fractured by the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. It wasn’t a false sense of security but rather a shared set of assumptions about the nature of the threats we faced — assumptions that shattered in a moment.
“Homeland,” “Jack Ryan” and “Fauda” have more than a few villains of cunning and patience. Certainly, the cartels of Netflix and Prime Video are every bit as ruthless as those of Mexico and Bolivia. But the villains of the streaming universe leave you, the viewer, alone because they are almost always thwarted. On screens large and small, citizens of the West have to almost purposely seek them out for these cadres to ruin their lives. The real-world villains are in fact both worse in intentions and more able in capabilities than we ever imagined. None of the on-screen killers, to cite the most recent hideous example, has been portrayed as capable of turning thousands of ordinary young Palestinian men into fanatical killers.
It’s not the savagery of just Hamas that was rendered unthinkable over decades of viewing but that of other evildoers as well. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has committed war crimes too numerous to count, but the wanton bloodlust of Putin simply never made it onto screens even after his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The United States is in a new Cold War with China, but Xi Jinping’s crushing of freedom in Hong Kong and the Uyghur genocide have never become a backdrop to a streaming hit.
This is self-censoring in part and also a failure of imagination among producers, writers and directors. Certainly studio executives worry about losing the lucrative Chinese box office. But when it comes to the fanatics of Iran’s proxies — whether Hamas, Hezbollah or the Houthis — there’s been an inexplicable failure among the creators because there is no box office to lose.
“Fauda” has featured dozens of terrorists over its four seasons — but thousands of them crashing through the fence to murder, rape and torture?
Our streaming reality has unlimited numbers of predatory villains who are sometimes charming and always malevolent, and the legions of flawed protagonists usually prevail, but collectively it’s all a PG illusion of what we are dealing with when it comes to evil circa 2024.
We need to start visualizing the world as its worst case might be. It would be useful if the West got reality television of a different sort — and soon. The villains aren’t getting less evil, less competent, or less lethal or brutal. The opposite is true in fact.
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