Through fiction, viewers care about people far away because problems and issues are personalized and humanized. For example, the HBO program Oz about life in prison has generated compassion about the fate of incarcerated individuals and motivated calls for prison reform in a way that seeing someone in handcuffs on the nightly news cannot. The Sopranos was not simply a high-quality TV drama, its location in a suburban community also forced viewers to think more critically about their daily lives, like the lies, pain, and murder that lay behind the closed doors of affluent suburban New Jersey. The use of violence in these shows is designed to accurately...

For television dramas with ambitious and long narrative arcs, violence is inevitable as plot-lines grow increasingly complex. Thus, for television to aspire to art, to inform, and to maintain relevant and informative enough to challenge the viewer to leave the comfort of his or her living room, no television program can rule out the use of violence, even while it must not embrace gratuitous violence.