- Crime on TV v crime in reality;
- Conspiracy theories on TV v conspiracy theories in reality;
- If stories mislead about reality, then what is science fiction about?
I’ve mentioned before that my understanding is that there are more crimes depicted in movies and TV shows, especially the latter, than there are in real life, though I don’t have citations for relevant statistics. But here’s an item from today’s NYT Magazine that, offhandedly, supports the notion.
NY Times Magazine, John J. Lennon, 16 Jul 2025: Everyone’s Obsessed With True Crime. Even Prisoners Like Me., subtitled “As the genre has boomed on cable, the incarcerated have found themselves watching more and more of it.”
The writer is himself currently a prisoner at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. And he’s recounting how, even as a prisoner, he was able to purchase a small TV to watch from his cell, and how he can sit and watch crime dramas all day.
Prisons do get cable: Normally, the population pays via things like fund-raisers and the profits from visiting-room vending machines. At Clinton Dannemora, a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border, I bought a 13-inch television from the commissary, and it felt like a privilege to watch what I wanted, alone in my cell. In Attica, where I transferred in 2007, we had the Oxygen channel, on which everyone would watch reality shows like “Bad Girls Club.” …
Here’s a key statistic, and here’s the point that struck me.
More than half of Americans now watch true crime, according to one YouGov poll. (The F.B.I. reports that between 1993 and 2022, meanwhile, the rate of violent crime in the United States fell 49 percent.)
Cable TV is so much bigger now than in 1993, that there are whole channels devoted various flavors of true crime.
As true crime exploded in popularity, the demand for fresh content had producers searching for stories to tell, exhuming murder cases from years and even decades ago.
Meanwhile, *crime has fallen.* Despite what the Republicans tell you; they just want to scare you into voting for them, while painting Democrats as “soft on crime,” a tune that hasn’t changed in half a century. During which, *crime has fallen.*
Two broader points here.
First is how this writer ends.
True crime is essentially a kind of reality TV, but it is the worst kind. Instead of vicariously experiencing people’s competitive drive or desire for love, you grieve with victims, hate their victimizers, soak in stories of infidelity and betrayal and murder. It’s hard for me to picture why people sitting safely at home tune in for this carnage. But I imagine that, as voyeurs of our worst deeds, they feel reassured: Their own flaws, shames and secrets can’t seem so bad in comparison.
Why people watch this stuff? Because it appeals to base human nature. Just as all the soap opera stories of romance and infidelity and childhood abandonment play to deep human emotions that are sensitive to all manner of survival issues. We’re highly attuned to such stories, and to such incidents in real life, because they keep us alert to situations we need to address to manage for ourselves.
Second broader point: there should be something in schools about media literacy. Covering issues like this, about how local TV news follows a “if it bleeds it leads” policy, and so how the crime you see in TV dramas and on TV news is dramatically exaggerating the amount of actual crime out there. (I think one country, maybe Finland?, has such a class.) But conservatives would frown on such a class, as they do anything about critical thinking….
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And here’s a second example of how TV implies a reality that doesn’t exist.
NY Times, James Poniewozik, 19 Jul 2025: How TV Trained Us to Be Conspiracy Theorists, subtitled “Pop culture didn’t create the real-world mythologies roiling our politics, but it helped write the scripts.”
“The X-Files,” the alien-invasion conspiracy thriller, had one of TV’s most memorable taglines: “The Truth Is Out There.” It was both a promise and a tease.
Read one way, it’s a slogan of hope: The truth has been hidden from you, but you will find it. Read another way, it’s a taunt: The truth is always out there, a mirage, coming tantalizingly close but then slipping through your fingers, goading you to press further.
I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that I never had any interest in that show, and never watched it. I’d been through my brief UFO fascination phase, then read Isaac Asimov and Martin Gardner and Larry Kusche and came to understand why some kinds of people were fascinated by that stuff, while actual understanding of the real world would virtually always undermine the conspiracy theories.
But put enough such stuff out there, and people will believe it, or absorb as part of the cultural zeitgeist. Like stories of all sorts,
Conspiracy stories make the world seem more sinister and opaque but also more sensible. Like religious myths, they offer an explanation for bad things happening. They suggest the existence of a grand plan, even if an evil one. They turn you from a victim of random forces into a rebel against a depraved elite. They suggest that the world’s ills can be sleuthed, gamified and — with enough string and enough bulletin boards — solved.
Leading up to Trump and Epstein yadda yadda.
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And the broadest observation of all is: stories of all manner, whether novels or plays or songs or movies, are designed to appeal the concerns of base human nature, which are ultimately about threats to survival (including issues of social class). Harari calls these “biological dramas” in contrast to, say, novels like Kafka’s THE TRIAL which was about the nature of bureaucracy, a necessary phase of a complex society that people love to hate on because they don’t understand it, or them.
And beyond even this… is science fiction, which is ultimately not about immediate survival issues, but about human engagement with the objectively understood universe that we live in. It has to balance such engagement with human stories (i.e. biological dramas), and to the extent it does not do so is why traditional literary critics have dismissed SF as non-literary. Because to them, literary means biological dramas. The human heart in conflict with itself, as someone said (whom Harlan Ellison quoted). The school definition of a story is about a character who changes, through some life-changing event. And so on.
Then what is science fiction about? This is the great question that I am still pondering. I think it’s about engaging with the world, the universe, in ways that don’t involved mere survival. As if there is something beyond mere survival that is worth understanding.
