Execs defend and debate TV violence

Is TV too violent? That’s the decades-old question that received fresh scrutiny at last week’s Television Critics Association conference, where journalists pressed top network execs on whether brutal dramas like Dexter and Sons of Anarchy go too far in the wake of last month’s Connecticut school shooting. NBC’s Bob Greenblatt insisted that quality TV programming can actually be a ”tonic” after a tragedy, saying viewers should ”go watch an episode of Parenthood…a show about a family who love each other and grapple with all of the issues in life,” and knocked CBS’ gory crime show Criminal Minds. CBS’ Nina Tassler said Minds ”is not for everybody” and objected to the ”my show versus your show” discussion, declaring, ”Nothing that is on [CBS] is inappropriate.” Fox’s Kevin Reilly defended upcoming serial-killer thriller The Following (”[We are] putting on an excellent thriller…not glorifying killers”) and said, ”We all like a scapegoat, [but] we’re just in the age of complex issues.” Indeed, the jury’s still out on how much influence, if any, violence in entertainment has on real-life behavior, a point that FX’s John Landgraf embraced while citing gun-violence stats in Great Britain and the U.S. and offering an actual — gasp! — opinion: ”We consume the same…movies, same tele-vision shows, same videogames,” he said. ”Anything and everything that bears any responsibility for these kinds of tragedies, up to and including what we do in the media, should be fair game, [but] if you want to look at the major difference between England and the United States, it’s access to and availability of guns.”