Sue Hartigan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Live death is Live death is win-win By Dan Bernstein The Press-Enterprise The very day Jerry Springer's producers agreed to delete fistfights and chair-throwing from his highly rated, highbrow show, a sick man blew his brains out on an LA freeway, and TV covered it live. Just like that, we made the seamless, inevitable transition. Springer's Chicago was just too small a burg for the new level of televised news-o-tainment we have been building toward since the early '90s. TV and its vast, voracious audience badly needed to ditch that Windy City studio in favor of a signature, on-location landmark: a curvaceous ribbon of SoCal freeway. What better stage for a televised suicide? Jerry Springer seems almost silly now. Kidstuff. Quaint. Yes, TV has rocketed to a brave new level, though there is still a ways to go. We're right on track for a televised homicide, and I'm hoping we can get there before the new millennium. True enough, a guy single-handedly shutting down a SoCal freeway is news. To Los Angeles TV stations, though, freeway action is not just news. It's the best news there is. It launches the choppers. It holds the promise of an unchoreographed chase with guaranteed results. Ever since the riots, the local TV stations have just gotten so good at live hoverage. They weren't bargaining on a suicide, though. Some stations actually pulled back. Loss of nerve, I guess. They'll do better next time. The thing we have to realize (and here I pause to acknowledge that newspapers, too, have been purveyors of illustrated death) is that televising live death is an absolute win-win proposition. The TV stations win-win because they can telecast live death, then tell viewers, "We've shown you some pretty graphic images. Now, we're going to talk about whether we should have done it." TV stations can thus get the unfiltered story (and the revenue-generating ratings) and convey a sense of somber, responsible introspection. Win-win! Viewers win-win because they can watch the live death, then call the TV stations and raise holy hell with them for putting it on the air. Win-win! Hollywood win-wins because these real-life dramas tend to stir the will-it-make-a-movie juices. And when TV airs live death, it gives Hollywood a certain amount of cover from critics who say there's too much violence in regularly scheduled programming. Win-win! There are a few losers, I suppose, including kids who, their cartoons pre-empted, get sucked into watching a guy blow his head off; and the poor saps who get stranded on the freeways. By the time they get home, it's merely taped death. But we must press on. We've been preparing ourselves for live death for years. We're bored with taped death. We see it on the news night after night. It is sanitized, dull. So is the nightly slaughter on regularly programmed TV, even if it is accompanied by luscious soundtracks. So are the body counts on the big screen, even though movies have unselfishly done as much as they could to get us ready for the next frontier in TV viewing: live death. A few cautionary notes: The transition from taped to live death might not be that easy. It will be more like an acquired taste. Ideally, we'll get a few more live suicides under our belts before we move onto to the big daddy: the televised homicide. But if we just remember to draw on our collective viewing experience, to remember that we've put in a great deal of time diminishing the value of life and blurring the line between pretend, taped and actual death, we should be fine. And even though raising holy hell with the TV stations is just part of the equation that makes live death so win-win, let's not go overboard because, darn it, TV wouldn't show it if we didn't watch it. (That doesn't mean we like to watch it. Why, we can hardly stand it.) Finally, to you history buffs who say we rung up a live homicide in '63 when Jack Ruby snuffed Lee Oswald, I say you may be technically correct. But you'll recall there were no choppers in Dallas. And, if memory serves, they only got it in black and white. Our best days of live death are ahead of us. Ladies and gentlemen, click your remotes. -- Two rules in life: 1. Don't tell people everything you know. 2. Subscribe/Unsubscribe, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In the body of the message enter: subscribe/unsubscribe law-issues
