The 263 programs we reviewed contained a total of 250 criminals who committed 417 crimes. That works out to almost one criminal and 1.7 crimes per show across the entire evening schedule. There can be no question, then, that crime is a prevalent activity on television entertainment shows.
Nine out of ten crimes occurred on dramas like CHiPs and Dynasty, although that genre accounted for only a minority of the programs viewed. The prevalence of comedy shows during prime time is accounted for partly by audience taste and partly by scheduling constraints. Many more sitcoms than dramas fit snugly into 30-minute time slots. So there are more comedies scheduled, although proportionately more time per program is given over to dramas.
Some crimes did occur on situation comedies, such as a Barney Miller episode where an irate restaurant customer assaults a waiter who demeaned his looks (3112). Most crimes, however, were committed on adventure series. These included programs like an episode of The Greatest American Hero where a business executive who manufactures "classified" equipment for the government commits treason by selling secrets to an enemy country (4/15), as well as cops and robbers shows like Hill Street Blues which features a variety of crimes ranging from common pickpockets (4/4) to a rapist who stalks his victims in a local park (3/28).
Just as striking as the sheer number of crimes are the types of crime portrayed. Television scripts rarely deal with the mundane and humdrum activities that occupy the cop on the beat. Real policemen spend much of their time dealing with such "low-profile" crimes as drunkenness, disorderly conduct, breaking and entering and vandalism. By contrast, their television counterparts are confronted with an overwhelming tide of murders, muggings and assaults.
In short, the bulk of crime on television is far more serious than in real life. It consists largely of vicious attacks by calculating criminals on innocent victims. This is shown graphically by Table 1, which enumerates the various types of crimes portrayed on television. Murder, the most serious crime of all, is also by far the most common crime on television. Our study recorded over 100 murders, or roughly one homicide every two and one half programs.
The ingenuity of scriptwriters never seems to flag when it comes to concocting settings for homicides. Thus, a psychopathic hairdresser on the now-defunct Vegas murders several of his female customers (3/4). On Hart to Hart, a ship's captain, who uses his pleasure cruises to distribute counterfeit money to unsuspecting passengers, similarly disposes of a private investigator who infiltrates his operation (4/14).
Overall, such murders accounted for almost one crime in four shown on prime-time television. The preponderance of homicides sets the tone for television's portrayal of illegal activity. All the commonly depicted crimes involved the threat or use of force against other people. In addition to murder, these crimes included robbery, kidnapping and aggravated assault. Together these four categories of crime added up to 57 percent of all those coded. No other single category made up as much as 5 percent of the total.
After murder, robbery was the most prevalent form of unlawful behavior, accounting for almost one crime in six. For example, a team of muggers accosts the elderly on an episode of Mork and Mindy (4/16), while an armed teenager holds up a grocery store on Hill Street Blues (3/28). Robbery, as defined in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, always involves force or the threat of force. This reliance on actual or threatened violence distinguishes robbery from simple larceny (theft) and burglary.
The other two most common offenses during prime time, kidnapping and aggravated assault, each accounted for about one crime in 12. The former was illustrated by a Fantasy Island segment on which a young man kidnaps his own girlfriend to extort money from her wealthy father (4/18). The latter is exemplified by a Dynasty script that calls for a hired thug to administer a brutal beating to an adversary of series star Blake Carrington (3/9). Just as robbery is a more serious and violent crime than simple theft, aggravated assault is quite different from a simple fistfight or shoving match. It consists of an attack aimed at inflicting severe injury, often involving the use of a weapon. Simple assault, by contrast, involves neither a weapon nor serious injury.
In sum, the majority of crimes shown on prime-time television were quite serious, involving personal attacks that carried at least the potential for serious injury or death Of course, many other crimes were portrayed, some more serious than others. Nine additional categories each comprised between 2 and 5 percent of all instances of televised crime. In descending order of frequency these categories included bribery, burglary (breaking and entering), drug-related offenses, blackmail, fraud, gambling, larceny or theft, extortion and rape. Combining these with the "big four" of murder, robbery, kidnapping and aggravated assault results in 13 categories that account for 86 percent of all televised crime.
By contrast, such everyday "garden variety" crimes as prostitution, drunk driving, receiving stolen property, minor sex offenses and weapons offenses each accounted for less than one half of 1 percent of all prime-time crime.
Relatively few types of crime (and the more serious crimes at that) account for most of the illegal activities television uses to entertain its prime-time audience. To indicate the extent to which this behavior is weighted toward the most violent and dangerous crimes we can compare these findings with FBI data on actual crime in America.
Direct comparisons are not easy to come by since most FBI statistics are based on arrest records, rather than reports of crime. Unlike much real-life crime, however, televised crime usually leads to arrest; the figures are roughly comparable in this regard.
The relative frequency of real life crimes is indicated by Table 2. It suggests that, after an evening spent watching television, a trip to the precinct house might be something of a letdown. At the top of the FBI's list are drunk driving, larceny (theft without violence), drunkenness, disorderly conduct and drug abuse, which together account for a majority of all arrests nationwide. Compared to TV's concentration on murder, robbery, kidnapping and aggravated assault these transgressions seem positively prosaic. In descending order of frequency, the drunk and disorderly, thieves and drug abusers are followed by such relatively minor malefactors as those charged with burglary, simple assault and fraud.
The first of TV's high-visibility crimes to appear on the list is aggravated assault. It ranks ninth, accounting for only 3 percent of all arrests. Even so, serious assaults are far more common than robberies. Forcible thefts comprise only 1 percent of all arrests in real life, compared to one in every six crimes on television. Yet even robberies are far more common than murders, which dominate crime on the airwaves. In 1980 only one-fifth of 1 percent of all arrests were for murder or non-negligent manslaughter. As a proportion of all crimes, therefore, murders are over 100 times more frequent on television than in real life. As for kidnappings, they occur so infrequently that the FBI does not bother to list them as a separate category.
Of course, a policeman's life may not be dull, but neither is it always entertaining to others. One could hardly expect many television plots to revolve around cases of vandalism and littering. And while drunkenness may be a major health problem, how many ways can you film The Days of Wine and Roses? Nine hours of nightly prime time quickly consume an awesome amount of plotting and dialogue, and it's easier to maintain audience interest with dastardly deeds than with the relatively humdrum stuff of everyday police work. Over the long run, Dragnet's Joe Friday just can't compete with James Bond.
And yet, given the need to entertain and titillate an audience increasingly jaded by the whirl of modern life, television's fantasy world remains a surprisingly dangerous place. Even when we restrict our attention to the most serious crimes, television selects out the darkest and most violent side of human behavior for its stories.
To demonstrate this, we need only examine the relative incidence of the most serious categories of crime in real life Serious crimes are those which comprise the FBI Crime Index, which serves as the basis for most of the FBI's yearly reports on the crime rate. Included in the Crime Index are murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft.
In 1980 these serious crimes accounted for 23 percent of all arrests excluding minor traffic offenses. In the programs we viewed from the 1980-81 television season the same offenses accounted for a majority (57 percent) of the crimes portrayed. With the addition of kidnappings, which are too infrequent to even appear on the FBI's list, serious crimes make up 66.7 percent or precisely two-thirds of all primetime crime-. Even more striking is the discrepancy between the relative proportion of violent crime on television and in real life. Violent crimes (murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery and kidnapping) accounted for only 5 percent of all arrests in 1980; on television they accounted for 59 percent of illegal acts. So televised crime was almost 12 times as likely to be violent as was real-life crime, as measured by arrests during roughly the same time period.
The ultimate violent crime, murder, ran through a variety of series. A stockbroker on Vegas who "owns" a high-class call girl ring kills two of his employees because they want out of the operation (4/1). On Walking Tall an industrialist orders the murder of an employee who discovers that he has been illegally dumping toxic wastes (3/24). And on The Greatest American Hero right-wing terrorists kill an FBI agent who investigates their plot to seize control of the country (3/18).
The more mundane but pervasive real-life crimes are largely neglected. In fact, drunk driving was portrayed on only one program in our sample, an episode of CHiPs (4/19). According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates, alcohol is implicated in as many as half the traffic fatalities each year.4 That means that mixing driving and drink is responsible for more deaths each year than the total number of homicides yet on television, murders are portrayed about 100 times as often as drunk driving.
To fine tune these comparisons, we can examine the frequency of each major offense as a proportion of all serious crimes on television and in reality. An advantage of this procedure is that the FBI publishes totals of all reported offenses (not simply arrests) for serious crime only.
Table 3 reveals the very different proportions of major crimes that appear on television and in real life. It shows that most serious crime is directed toward property rather than people and does not involve the use or threat of force. On the 1980 FBI Crime Index, almost nine out of ten offenses are burglaries or thefts that involve no physical danger for the victim. Only one serious crime in ten involves violence. Murder, rape and kidnapping each account for less than 1 percent of all serious crimes. Aggravated assault and robbery, i.e. theft involving force or its threat, each account for only about one serious crime in 20.
On television, the proportions of crime against people and property are almost exactly reversed. Crimes of violence make up seven out of eight serious offenses, while theft and burglary together account for only one crime in eight.
The audience does witness a few crimes of the sort that usually occupy law enforcers, such as a simple purse snatching on Hill Street Blues (4/21). However, they are far more likely to be treated to such fare as a Magnum, P.I. episode in which a man kills his girlfriend when she tries to leave him (4/2), or a Flamingo Road segment in which a woman tries to murder her own sister to resolve a romantic triangle (4/2).
The differences between fantasy and life are sharpest at opposite ends of the Crime Index spectrum. Simple thefts alone account for nearly two-thirds of the FBI Crime Index but only 6 percent of serious crimes on television. At the other extreme, murders alone make up over one-third of all serious crimes on television but only a miniscule one-sixth of 1 percent of the FBI Crime Index figures. Thus, even after all but the most serious crimes are excluded from the comparison, prime-time crime is over 200 times more likely to involve homicide than is real-life crime.
In summary. crime on television is more dangerous, more violent and crime likely to be directed against persons than is actual crime. The latest FBI statistics indicate that the most common offenses are rarely seen on television, while the most brutal and injurious crimes appear far out of proportion to their occurrence in everyday life.