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Exactly four years ago, almost all of the big TV networks launched a new series about the CIA and their ilk. It was kind of weird. I took it at the time as prime evidence that the Cold War was really over, and we'd entered a new cultural era in which the CIA was more interesting as a fictional venue than a real thing.
In the show we aired the first week of September, 2001, this is what I said:
"Today there's no raging foreign policy debate, or any great ideological divide between the anti-communists and the anti-anti-communists. Today the CIA just doesn't matter as much as it used to. Maybe it will again."
We all know what happened a week later. Suddenly the CIA and all kinds of spooks and soldiers and agents once again mattered very much.
Two of those new series from that 2001 season, Alias and 24, are still on the air.
But for a long time after 9/11, the entertainment business declined to gin up any more TV series or movies along the same lines.
Until now.
The period of mourning, or wimpiness, or reluctance to seem exploitative, or whatever it was, is officially over in Hollywood.
Half the major studios have films about 9/11 in the works.
And on cable we'll soon get two docudramas about Flight 93, the hijacked plane the passengers brought down in Pennsylvania on 9/11.
And on ABC this fall we'll also have Commander-in-Chief, about a female president dealing with, among other things, Islamic terror threats. And a new show called E-Ring on NBC -- Dennis Hopper as a Pentagon general dealing with Iraq and Islamic terrorism.
I could go on.
The head of NBC Entertainment actually said this: quote, "It just makes you feel like lemmings. These are paranoid times. That was one of our themes,” he said, as they were developing shows for NBC's new season.
We have several cable news channels filled with real war and rumors of war. As we mark the 4 th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks this week, every news medium will be dealing with the subject.
Does the public really crave a dramatic diet that reflects the unrelieved anxiety and paranoia of the real world so literally and relentlessly? All terror all the time?
The conventional wisdom is that at moments like this, people want fun, fantasy, escapism – like they wanted screwball comedies were during the Depression and Bugs Bunny during World War II.
But maybe the truth is in between. Look at the movie box office from this summer: what were the two biggest hits? Two fantasies… but fantasies about terror and doom and fighting the good fight -- the final Star Wars installment, with its anti-Iraq-war subtext…and the War of the Worlds, the ultimate paranoid apocalypse tale.
So these days we're pretty terrified in real life…but apparently we really do want our entertainment to make us even more intensely terrified for an hour or two…as long as in the end the good guys – the Jedi, the humans, the Americans -- win.
