Evil stories

Leif Furhammar is a film professor and columnist writing about TV in Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. In today’s column he asks why evil has become popular. Crime shows on television, he writes, used to “end in harmony, [with] order and societal comfort restored, and … evil only being temporary disruptions in the fundamental balance of existence.” Today, he writes, crime and murder shows are dominated by evil. “If any good forces exist, they are hopelessly inferior.”

He wonders where the attraction lies in society being portrayed as utterly evil. He writes that the explanation is unsatisfactory that “reality itself has become more evil during the last twenty years” since that would increase the demand for TV shows satisfying the “need to feel secure at least in escapism.” I’m not sure about that.

I wonder if a crime show where society felt generally good, with occasional elements of evil, would convince you as the viewer. Maybe people today generally feel that the world is evil? So a crime story – be it a TV show, a movie or a book – would have to be “purely” evil to attract people.

There are numerous shows, movies and books that are more positive about existence, as well, although they aren’t about crime. This genre is called “feel-good”, with feel-good movies being the dominating category, I think. Perhaps feel-good stories balance evenly with evil ones? That for every About a Boy (which I guess is a feel-good movie; I haven’t seen it) there’s a Seven?

He notes that a series currently running on Swedish television, about Conan Doyle’s early years, is characterized by evil, whereas in the original Sherlock Holmes stories, evil was the exception. (Or so I guess. Svante or Kjell will probably correct me if I’m wrong.)