Has death jumped the shark?

Here’s something weird: Today, both the LAT and NYT culture sections feature think-pieces on the new prominence of death as a prime-time television drama plot point. And each piece quotes a different TV drama writer making the not uninteresting point that reality shows, with their metaphoric deaths occurring in each episode (when someone gets fired/voted off the island/kicked out of a hot tub), have shifted audience expectations so as to allow for ‘real’ deaths in scripted shows.

Anyway, the NYT piece is the thinkier of the two, but heck, read both of them:

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