It's time to sound a warning. There is a force of distraction afoot that I fear could incapacitate the nation at a critical juncture in its economic recovery.
I have recently come under the spell of "The Killing", a detective series that apparently began last year and concludes this Sunday. We first encountered it a couple weeks ago via netflix instant access, through which one can watch one 45 minute episode after another, without commercial interruptions.
I hear there are television series that are so good people feel they "have to watch them." In this one, the acting seemed to me so convincing, the characters so intriguingly flawed, the steady thickening and surprising twists of the plot so compelling, that I found myself feeling like the show needed ME to watch IT. I was ready to set aside my work and let the kids fend for themselves--the characters and the unsolved murder needed my full attention.
If this can happen to me, a person nearly impervious to abandoning disbelief, rarely sucked in by a movie, and who has no interest in seeking more violence and problem-filled lives to supplement what already flows nonstop into our ears from news reports, in short if such a program could take control of my psyche and all but command me to watch it, then imagine what could happen to national productivity if the more vulnerable multitudes are exposed.
The troubling implications go well beyond the threat to our work ethic. It was with considerable distress that I found my fate beginning to parallel the fate of the detectives. As the lead detective Sarah Linden became more sleep deprived, forgot to eat, and neglected her son in the obsessive search for the murderer, I too found myself living on leftovers and remaining glued to the screen right through bedtime for the kids and well into the night. As clues led them deeper into Seattle's pockets of political corruption and seedy behavior, and the 13 episodes available through Netflix left us still with the murder far from solved, we found ourselves entering seedier areas of the internet in search of free viewings of the next episodes. Scantily clads beckoned from the fringes of the screen as we clicked on yet another quasi-legal episode in the wee hours of the night.
By the time we caught up with the weekly broadcasts, the series' simple but slightly off-kilter theme music was replaying all day in my mind. There seemed no escape from the program's influence, yet now I see one ray of hope. We watched the actual broadcast of the next-to-last episode this past Sunday, and encountered for the first time the spell-breaking power of advertisements. The online episodes had been 45 minutes long because 15 minutes of advertisements had been excised. Now, if I felt myself getting sucked in, I knew there'd soon be five or six advertisements to pull me out of it.
The ads reminded me there are bigger problems in the world than who killed Rosie, like enhancing my virility through the purchase of a Lincoln Town Car or, failing that, a bottle of Viagra. And though it wasn't entirely clear that justice would be served in the plot, at least I could get a better deal on car insurance.
I'm sure this Sunday's concluding episode will deliver a great ending, but I don't feel compelled to watch it. Maybe I'll wait until it's archived somewhere on the internet. Thanks to advertisements, I have my life back, and the nation's children are more likely to get tucked into bed.
Update, June 25: Though the case is solved, those dissatisfied with the ending suspect that the writers who had gotten the script off to such a fine start may have been killed or kidnapped before they were able to complete the series. Tune in next season as Linden and Holder go backstage in search of the culprit.
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