Everyone has their own definition of comfort viewing — the TV shows one might watch after a long hard day, or right before bed. The familiar rhythms of a 30 Rock long since memorized, the latest soapy installment of Grey’s Anatomy, or… a show about rape and murder, like Law and Order: SVU.
Watching a dark crime drama as relaxation might seem counterintuitive to a good night’s sleep. Yet it makes sense to a wide range of experts who study the ways pop culture impacts the way we see reality. As Dr. Lisa Kort-Butler tells Consequence, “It’s a grim universe. Some folks want to escape from that in some way. Comedy does that, but some of us want to know there’s something steady in the world. These crime shows, although they are grim, are steady on the side of right.”
As a sociologist who studies media representations of crime and justice, Kort-Butler has observed that a big factor in the comfort we associate with these shows comes from their inherent formula, one that “is comforting because you know the story. It’s the same reason kids watch the same things over and over and over again, because they know what to expect out of it.”
That basic formula is something University of Florida professor Dr. Andrew Selepak describes in terms those aforementioned kids can understand: “We like the fact that within an hour there’s a crime, and by the end they catch the criminal. The bad guys usually get caught and the good guys win. The classic white hat cowboy defeats the black hat cowboy. That, in a way, is comforting — as opposed to real life, where the majority of murders in a city like Chicago don’t even get solved.”
A show like SVU goes beyond that bad-guy-good-guy narrative as well, as the rhythms of the investigation — a crime is committed, the cops investigate, a suspect is identified, “dun dun” — remain overall very similar. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Susan Hatters-Friedman says, “It’s comforting because we know how it’s going to end up, and you feel mastery over that.” The result is that the viewer ends up “feeling safe in this potentially traumatizing environment by watching those shows. Even though every episode is different, there is this pattern of how they’re presented.”
Dr. Sharon Lauricella is a communication and digital media studies scholar who has specifically studied the impact of watching crime procedurals on viewers, and says that 25 years ago, research in this area was largely focused on the impact of crime procedurals on the audience: “Do they make people more paranoid? Do they make people feel unsafe? And then most of the research found that it didn’t really make people feel unsafe. It didn’t give people paranoia, locking their doors, things like that. So then the focus of media research changed to, well, why do people watch these things anyway?”
In Lauricella’s research, she found that half the participants in her study population said they watched crime procedurals because of curiosity: “How do the police work? What are the steps in figuring out a crime? How does the legal system work? Things like that.”
Accordingly, there is legitimate reason to worry that people accept what they see on TV as reality. Hatters-Friedman mentions “the CSI effect,” named after the 2000-2015 series and its spinoffs, which refers to how real-life juries today “are so used to all the evidence they bring to court [on TV shows] to prove someone’s guilty. It’s all this pseudoscientific stuff — like they come back with a DNA test the next day, whereas in real life, it takes time. That’s not how the real world works.”
Along similar lines, when people watch crime procedurals, it’s not that they don’t understand it isn’t real, but Hatters-Friedman says that “they take away these lessons from it, as if this is how it is and how quickly you can solve it. Anecdotally, working in forensics, people will ask me things that are just impossible things. But they just presume it would easily happen because they saw it on TV.”
