The other day, my wife the university professor asked another of her very good questions: “Why do so many critics equate pushing boundaries with excellence?”

Why indeed?  Does more violence, more nudity and sexual content, or the detailing of the depths of human depravity have much at all to do with excellence?  Let’s face it.  Nude human bodies are similar to other nude human bodies, and death and violence have always been with human beings. So have depraved behaviors.  With the advent of HDTV, Blu-Ray, and similar high resolution video media, nudity and violence are now depicted in stunning visual detail right in the home.  As I recall, the science fiction writer Marian Zimmer Bradley (who also wrote pornography under various pseudonyms) once made an observation to the effect that pornographic sex was like writing about plumbing.  And, in a way, excessive sword and slash fantasy is like rather crude dissection.  If adults want to watch detailed plumbing and dissection, so long as it doesn’t involve children or other perversions, that’s largely their right under the first amendment… but let’s not equate it with excellence.

At least in my mind – and historically – excellence is the concept for striving for something higher, not a depiction in greater detail of something sordid, fatal, or demeaning. And while Game of Thrones, for example, certainly has great supporters, and its visuals – at least from the trailers/ads – are stunning, I gave up on the books shortly after the first one, simply because, although Martin writes well, that skill is employed most effectively at portraying a society where there is really no such thing as excellence except in violence and betrayal.

Perhaps I’m dated, or old-fashioned, but to me, the employment of talent to portray the worse in human behavior with no counterpoint of the best in human nature is the equivalent of moral pornography, in addition to the pornography of sex and violence.  And even if it the best is portrayed along with the worst, humans being humans, they concentrate on the worst. In addition, such graphic portrayals also desensitize at least a percentage of younger viewers, a trend that is continuing in pretty much all forms of the arts, so that music must be louder and simpler to retain its appeal, movies – at least the blockbusters – are simpler (and, as an aside, there are so few good songs in movies that the Academy Awards might as well eliminate that category) and ask less and less of the audience in terms of knowledge and understanding, all of which is perfectly understandable from the marketing point of view.

Then again, it could be that pushing boundaries is the only thing some of these movies and mini-series have going for them… and the rest don’t even have that.