SVU and Chill: The Science of Why Crime Procedurals Comfort Us
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.”
Hatters-Friedman feels that what viewers should keep in mind while engaging with shows in this way is that “a lot of things about the show represent the ideal. [In real life], services may be stretched, or police may not be educated as well as they should be about how one interacts with victims. We know scientifically that it’s hard for victims to come forward. They often don’t come forward straight away. When we see that on SVU, it’s believable and we understand the characters, but sometimes in the real world, there’s not as much understanding.”
Put it another way: You can’t expect every cop to be Mariska Hargitay.
As for why comfort viewing extends to uncomfortable topics like murder and rape, Selepak says, “It’s the car crash mentality, where we slow down to see [what happened]. I think as a species, we’ve always had a little bit of a morbid fascination with death and danger in different ways. You can go back to watching gladiators fight in the Colosseum, or public executions. All those types of events allow us to safely be in a world that we’re not really part of. It’s cathartic to witness violence from a safe distance, so even with the episodes that are more gruesome or ‘ripped from the headlines,’ it’s being able to witness violence through a screen at this very safe distance.”
As a viewer of crime dramas, I’ve always been fascinated by the scenes in which the cops interview a recently widowed person about their now-deceased spouse. The actor playing the new widow/widower has a remarkable challenge in front of them: Convincingly portray someone who is probably experiencing the worst day of their life, while also delivering the dialogue necessary to move the story forward, whether that be relating a potential motive for their death or identifying a potential suspect.
Despite the emotional context, those scenes never feel too heavy, something Lauricella thinks comes from the fact that “people who watch a lot of crime dramas understand that this is a fundamental aspect of the programming — you need this puzzle piece for the progression of the storyline. So I think savvy viewers understand that that emotional portrayal is also communicating to the audience facts.”
Kort-Butler also identifies another common crime procedural trope that seems designed to put the viewer at ease: the flippant aside from one of our heroes that might come at the beginning of an episode, perhaps most iconically represented by CSI: Miami’s Horatio Caine (David Caruso).
“It’s a tension reliever, right? Because you just saw something horrible, like a body fell out of a dumpster or whatever,” she says. “Cops and nurses and artists have to have that gallows humor to alleviate the tension in their own experiences, and they’re doing that for the viewer in this case, to say, ‘Okay, this terrible thing happened. Now we move on to solving the crime.’”
It’s all storytelling, in the end. As Lauricella says, “Our culture is just in love with stories that are compelling. My studies on education tell me that telling a story is an incredibly effective way of learning things and remembering things. So when a drama takes that established progression, we know that it works with audiences because they remember [what happened] in that scene. That storytelling element is so successful in helping the audience remember relevant details.”
Adds Lauricella, “That fascinates me, that people watch this stuff before bed. I mean, personally I don’t, but I know a lot of people do.”
It’s a choice that does make sense to Kort-Butler, for reasons that go back to our childhoods. “When I think about crime dramas, I also think about things like fairytales,” she says. “They give us comfort in answers in uncertain times. I can turn on [Law & Order’s] Jack McCoy and know what’s going to happen and know that there’s good things out there in the world in the face of bad things. It’s the same sort of thing for fairytales — I can know that there’s a prince or there’s a queen or somebody who’s going to save something, in spite of all the bad things in the world. It’s folk storytelling, just updated for TV or streaming.”
Really, Kort-Butler continues, “It’s a bedtime story, right? If this is your sort of thing, it’s the thing that brings you a sense of closure at the end of the day. Because you know what’s going to happen.”