Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
The most common theme in TV show finales this year is child endangerment, writes Tim Molloy.
Shows from Dexter to The Walking Dead have made kids in danger the dramatic thrust of their finale storylines. The Walking Dead even killed a child – not once but twice – and had another suffer a near-fatal shotgun wound.
FX’s newest show, American Horror Story, didn’t even wait for its finale to start dispatching kids, violently offing a pair of young twins in its first minutes.
Viewers will find out on Sunday’s Dexter season finale whether Dexter’s son, Harrison, will also perish at the altar of TV drama. Previews of the episode show bad guy Colin Hanks threatening the toddler.
No harm, of course, came to any actual children in the making of the shows. But whether harm could come to kids who watch them is an open question. (Assuming any parents are clueless enough to let their kids watch surefire nightmare-inducers.)
Many studies have linked violence on TV to actual aggression in children. But violence against children – or at least so much of it at once – is new territory.
Thou Shalt Not Kill a Child has long been one of the unspoken commandments of horror movies, to say nothing of TV shows. (Teenagers are fair game, as Wes Craven spelled out in 1996’s Scream.) Putting young people in danger is one of the cheapest ways to shock an audience – but it can also be a legitimate way to explore serious ethical questions.
Child deaths also play heavily into the plot of Showtime’s Homeland, which concludes its first season after the Dexter finale on Sunday.
Freshman ethics classes love to pose questions about children in danger to explore the concept of utilitarianism – the idea that the right course of action is the one that brings about the most overall happiness.
Shane’s decision to kill the hunter in The Walking Dead is another utilitarian calculation brought on by child endangerment: He decides the hunter’s life is worth less than his own, and that of the boy the hunter shot. The entire search for Sophia also comes down to a cold calculation: Should all the survivors risk their lives to look for one little girl?
After she is discovered as a zombie, it leads to another ethical debate about who deserves our empathy. The survivors take a fairly strict us vs. them approach to zombies – until the most vulnerable of ‘us’ becomes one of ‘them’.
FX’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which also toys with audiences’ boundaries, played with the no-harm to children rule this season in an episode in which a character pretended, for tax purposes, that her baby had died.
“I will say this,” show creator Rob McElhenney said. “That there has never been, nor will there ever be, a sitcom on TV where they have a baby funeral. We’re the only one.”
The only sitcom, sure. But not the only show, the way things are going.
