The Moral Madness of Modern Television: The Hidden Cost of Revolving-Door Morality in Storytelling

Storytelling is emotionally powerful. Hollywood learned long ago that creating compelling characters and working certain storytelling gimmicks through them could get their viewers rooting for villains and booing heroes. Those who are monsters in real life are made sympathetic in our favorite shows and those who are the very sustenance of thriving community are cast there as villains to be despised. A rude remark demands death for one character while no level of personal evil by another makes the slightest dent in their popularity by addicted viewers.

Dexter, for instance, had audiences rooting for a serial killer and hoping for the overthrow of the police officer who was pursuing him… relieved when that officer is finally killed so Dexter can continue his own crusade without interference.

Revolving-Door Morality

In this vein, I’ve noticed another trend… a revolving door of good and evil in many of the most popular shows in the last couple decades. Yesterday’s murderer is today’s hero. Yesterday’s hero is tomorrow’s monster. And somehow, by next Thursday, everybody is friends again. They want evil without lasting guilt, redemption without lasting transformation, and trust without evidence of trustworthiness. Characters have no dependable character.

This is a type of madness that infects much of modern television drama. A character commits an act of breathtaking evil—murder, betrayal, torture, perhaps the calculated destruction of innocent lives. The other characters respond with appropriate horror. Friendships are shattered, loyalties broken, and righteous indignation fills the screen. We, the audience, are expected to share that outrage… And we do.

Then something remarkable happens.

The villain sheds a tear, offers an excuse, reveals a painful childhood, or performs one conveniently timed heroic deed. Suddenly, forgiveness flows like water. Former enemies embrace. The perpetrator is welcomed back into the fellowship of the righteous, entrusted with precious responsibilities, and sometimes restored to a position of moral authority. Then, a few episodes later, the same character commits another atrocity. The cycle begins anew. Nobody learns a lesson.

And we, the audience, are expected to celebrate… to forget. “Why that’s like soooo last episode, Dude!”

Meanwhile, another previously admirable character undergoes an inexplicable personality transformation and becomes the new villain. And once again, we are expected to be outraged.

All that Glitters is not Gold

The writers have discovered an apparently inexhaustible dramatic resource: evil without lasting guilt, redemption without lasting transformation, and trust without evidence of trustworthiness.

But perhaps the most disturbing element of this peculiar arrangement is not what happens to the characters. It is what is expected of us. The audience is expected to experience outrage and forgiveness without memory. We are invited to feel deeply about everything while thinking consistently about almost nothing.

The Why of It All

Is this simply bad writing? An inexpensive method of manufacturing conflict in an industry perpetually hungry for the next dramatic confrontation? Or might something more consequential be taking place, whether by design or by accident?

The What of It All

And what happens to our moral sensibilities when we repeatedly submit ourselves to this emotional merry-go-round by riding it again and again without realizing what is being done to us? Would you work hand in hand on Wednesday with the man who ruthlessly murdered your sister on Monday and apologized on Tuesday with some lame excuse for why he did it? Would you forget?

Unlikely, but we do this again and again and again when watching shows like Heroes, Under the Dome, and iZombie… and many many more of late.

These series differ considerably in premise, style, and execution, yet each provides opportunities to examine the shifting moral status of recurring characters.

Big Jim Under the Dome

In Under the Dome, Big Jim Rennie (A consistently deceitful villain in the book) repeatedly moves between public leadership, ruthless self-preservation, manipulation, violence, cold blooded murder, and cooperation with those he has endangered. He is not simply an evil man occasionally doing something useful. His position within the story continually raises questions about how much previous conduct other characters are expected to overlook.

Blaine Zombie-Sometimes Debeers

In iZombie, Blaine DeBeers is a particularly intriguing example. Charming, dangerous, self-interested, and occasionally useful, Blaine moves through relationships in which practical cooperation can coexist with a history of appalling wrongdoing. His charisma complicates the audience’s judgment, while his usefulness complicates the protagonists’ decisions.

Sylar the Well Meaning Serial Killer

In Heroes, Sylar begins as a terrifying serial killer whose appetite for power makes him one of the show’s principal threats. Yet his story eventually incorporates repeated attempts at change, sympathetic explanations, shifting alliances, and cooperation with people who have every reason to fear him. We might make similar charts for many of the other recurring characters, like Nathan, Angela, Noah, Elle, Daphne, Mohinder, Meredith, and Adam… as well as with more stable characters like Peter, Matt, Tracy & Nicki. Even villains like the puppet master, Eric Doyle, and the murderous mob boss Daniel Pine are given their turn at hero… and not even general good guys like Micah, Claire and her adoptive mother, Sandra are safe from moral confusion.

So What? Who Doesn’t Love a Good Villain?

None of these descriptions, by themselves, proves bad writing. A villain may be charming. An evil person may occasionally do good. A murderer may genuinely repent. Enemies may reasonably cooperate when confronting a greater danger. Indeed, some of the greatest stories ever told involve precisely these complications.

The problem arises when the narrative demands that we accept a transformation that has not been earned, when forgiveness and memory failure with it, leaves the characters repeating the same mistakes again and again and again.

When a character’s established convictions, personality, loyalties, and moral boundaries can be rewritten at the convenience of the next episode, we are no longer watching character development. We are watching character replacement… psychologically dishonest moral confusion.

The same face appears on the screen, the same actor speaks the lines, and the same name appears in the credits. But the person we thought we knew has vanished, replaced by whatever personality the current plot requires. Long seasons of the show pass while mere hours unfold for the storyline and what is like so last episode a week or weeks ago is, for the characters, supposed to take place from one day to the next.

And when the narrative subsequently reverses course, the original personality may return just as mysteriously.  Character in these stories is not destiny as it is in real life… character is a wax nose in the hands of tawdry storytellers. This is not moral complexity. It is moral discontinuity.

The Good, The Bad, and the Poorly Conceived

A well-written character generates the story through choices consistent with an intelligible personality, even when those choices surprise us.

A poorly written character becomes a puppet whose personality changes whenever the writers need another crisis.

Love in the Afternoon?!

To understand this phenomenon, we should look backward.

The practice of endlessly rearranging moral loyalties did not originate with modern science fiction or supernatural drama. It has a long and undistinguished history in the soap opera.

Let us not forget that in 1979, Luke Spencer (Anthony Geary) raped Laura Webber (Genie Francis) on the floor of a disco in the revolving story line of General Hospital. Astonishingly, the storyline subsequently transformed Luke from sexual predator into romantic hero, with Laura eventually falling in love with him. Their 1981 wedding became a television phenomenon, attracting approximately 30 million viewers, one of the largest audiences in daytime television history.

Cheap & Comic Drama

Daytime television, cheap storytelling of the first order, perfected the art of keeping characters in perpetual emotional circulation. Lovers became enemies. Enemies became lovers. Marriages dissolved and reappeared. Children discovered previously unknown parents. Betrayals were exposed, forgiven, repeated, and rediscovered. Characters returned from apparent death, suffered convenient amnesia, concealed identities, and underwent astonishing changes of heart. The machinery had to keep moving.

A soap opera running five days a week could not afford to resolve every conflict permanently. Genuine resolution, which normal people demand in real life, closes narrative possibilities. A marriage that remains faithful, a villain who remains imprisoned or gets the ultimate justice earned, a family that learns from its mistakes, or a character who achieves lasting emotional maturity may be satisfying storytelling, but such developments also remove convenient sources of future conflict.

Consequently, the soap opera developed a remarkably effective formula: generate emotional investment, disrupt relationships, offer temporary resolution, and then dismantle that resolution to begin again. The formula was not necessarily concerned with moral philosophy. It was concerned with keeping viewers returning tomorrow.

Evening Soaps & Who Shot J. R.?

Consider the machinations of J. R. Ewing in Dallas, or Alexis Carrington in Dynasty. Their betrayals, schemes, and shifting alliances became engines of continuing drama. There is, however, an important distinction. Those programs generally understood their schemers to be schemers. J. R. might occasionally demonstrate genuine affection or perform a decent act, but his underlying character remained recognizable. The audience was not always expected to mistake temporary cooperation for permanent moral regeneration.

Soap Methods Go Mainstream

The more troubling development occurs when soap-opera machinery is imported into dramas that present themselves as psychologically sophisticated and morally serious.

A modern serialized drama may depict murder, torture, genocide, or other atrocities with extraordinary emotional intensity. It invites us to treat these events as morally consequential, only to borrow the soap opera’s convenient mechanism for erasing their consequences when the next storyline demands it.

The result is a peculiar hybrid: the emotional gravity of tragedy combined with the moral memory of a house plant.

So… what are we learning to forget?

The most troubling question is not why television writers repeatedly manufacture these moral absurdities—I don’t need conspiracy theories, though Hollywood has a poor record when it comes to the intentional unraveling of the moral structures of nations—the most troubling questions is what happens to audiences who consume this storytelling patterning year after year in show after show. And I ask this as a fan of good storytelling.

If we repeatedly watch murderers become heroes through little more than a tearful apology, are we gradually learning to confuse remorse with repentance?

If we applaud the restoration of trust where no evidence of trustworthiness exists, are we becoming less discerning about whom we trust in real life?

If we are encouraged to excuse atrocities committed by characters we are told to love while condemning lesser offenses committed by characters we are told to despise, are we rehearsing a dangerous habit of moral favoritism and moral relativism?

And what of forgiveness itself? Does its repeated reduction to a convenient emotional transaction diminish our appreciation for the genuine moral struggle involved in repentance, reconciliation, and restoration? Does it unravel the very concern for real justice in society? Do we learn to accept reasons as excuses and then make excuses for the wanton evil of our favorites?

Might we eventually become less offended by evil, not because we have carefully reconsidered our moral convictions, but because we have grown accustomed to seeing evil explained away? “He should not be held accountable for his evil because you see, he acted in ignorance… confusion… passion… hurt… trauma, etc… ad nauseum.

The Sky Isn’t Falling But Still…

These are not accusations against every viewer, nor are they established psychological consequences of watching such programs. I myself am a big storytelling fan, and take great pains to consider storytelling methods in a variety of mediums throughout the history of nations. They are questions about the possible cumulative effects of repeated exposure to a particular pattern of moral storytelling.

But there is an even more uncomfortable possibility?

What if we are not simply becoming less sensitive to wrongdoing? What if we are becoming more easily manipulated in our judgments of wrongdoing? Learning to call real-life villains heroes and real-life heroes villains?

After all, the audience is not consistently taught that murder is acceptable or betrayal is admirable. Something potentially more insidious occurs. We are encouraged to condemn or excuse the same conduct depending upon the character committing it, the emotional atmosphere surrounding it, and the sympathies the writers wish to evoke. Let a character strike a level five emotional face of hurt feelings or honest regret and we are ready to burn the world down and clamor for the killing of whatever character drew such a pitiful response from that dear hurt soul… murderer or sexual deviant though he or she be.  

We are not necessarily being taught that there is no right or wrong. We may be learning to let someone else decide, moment by moment, what deserves our outrage and what deserves our forgiveness based on nothing less than hyper emotionalized and psychologically dishonest storytelling.

That possibility deserves serious consideration.

Returning to Why

Now, is This an Accident—or the Point?

The simplest explanation is commercial. Soap operas perfected the manufacture of endless conflict because endless conflict keeps audiences returning and returning audiences generate advertising dollars. Contemporary serialized dramas have inherited those techniques, often intensifying them with greater violence, darker subject matter, and more psychologically elaborate presentations.

A compelling villain is too valuable to discard. A stable relationship offers fewer opportunities for tension and sensational betrayal. A genuinely resolved moral crisis cannot be endlessly exploited through recycling.

From this perspective, revolving-door morality is simply cheap storytelling with an attractive return on investment. But does that explanation account for everything?

Might some writers and producers be deliberately challenging traditional moral categories? Is the repeated blurring of guilt and innocence, victimhood and villainy, forgiveness and exoneration sometimes an expression of the creators’ own moral philosophies and desire for social engineering?

Could the practice reflect a broader cultural tendency to replace universal judgments about conduct with tribal judgments about identity, sympathy, or group loyalty?

And if audiences become increasingly accustomed to having their morals emotionally directed by sympathetic portrayals rather than consistent principles, might that make them more susceptible to similar techniques outside the fictional world—in advertising, political persuasion, journalism, or social movements? Every fool turned into an activist for the cause of those telling the stories?

Let Us Consider

We should be careful here. The existence of a pattern does not prove a coordinated purpose. Nor does a possible psychological consequence establish that anyone intended to produce it. Such claims require evidence. But we should be equally careful not to assume that every recurring cultural influence is accidental simply because its intentions have not been confessed out loud, or revealed in a stolen diary.

There are at least three possibilities: 1. the effect is unintended, 2. the effect is recognized but tolerated because the technique is profitable, or 3. the effect is deliberately sought.

Different programs, writers, and producers may fall into any one of these different categories but the outcome will be the same for society. We may qualify 1^st degree murder, 2^nd degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and negligent homicide but all four result in corpses that should have been allowed to live out their days. When civilization crumbles from moral corruption it won’t matter which rationale one proffers for their participation in that demise.

The Most Important Character Is Watching the Screen.

Yes, we are the most important characters in the storytelling experience. So, we should pay closer attention to what these dramas are asking of us and what we are willingly bequeathing of our souls to them.

The next time a beloved character commits an atrocity, observe your outrage. When the writers offer a sympathetic explanation, examine your willingness to excuse him. When his victims welcome him back, consider whether their forgiveness is believable. When he becomes the hero once again, ask yourself whether you have witnessed genuine transformation or simply surrendered your judgment to the emotional demands of the scene. And when the inevitable betrayal arrives, consider how easily you can be persuaded to repeat the entire performance.

Are we thinking about what we watch, or merely feeling what we are told to feel?

Are we exercising moral judgment, or allowing the story to exercise it for us?

Are we becoming more discerning about the complicated nature of human goodness and evil—or simply more comfortable with moral contradiction?

And if we spend hundreds or thousands of hours practicing these emotional reversals in fiction, can we be certain that the habits never follow us into reality?

Perhaps revolving-door morality is nothing more than lazy writing, the exhausted machinery of the soap opera repackaged for modern audiences. Perhaps it is something more deliberate. But even if it is merely cheap entertainment, we should not assume that its influence is cheap.

They offer us evil without lasting guilt, redemption without lasting transformation, and trust without evidence of trustworthiness. They ask us to experience outrage without memory, and to deliver fury or pity based on nothing more morally substantive than a tearful eye in an overwrought character.

The question is not simply whether we are willing to keep watching.  The question is what we may be teaching ourselves to become as we do.

 ~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD