It is often said that art imitates life. Often, it can shed light on the dark places of our world. Art has always held this responsibility to the people. But with the fairly new concept of mass communication via television, reaching and capturing an audience has become increasingly easy. Spreading a message through a visual medium is simpler than ever.
	Television series allow us to delve into complicated social issues, such as the life and love of a homosexual student, or the psyche of a deranged criminal. With the ideas of such lives available to be pondered on, we are allowed privileged glimpses into the minds of not only the characters, but the creators of the work. We can begin to piece together their thought processes, hopes, fears, dreams, and nightmares. Sometimes, though, these can be a reflection of the audience or of the time. The show “Seinfeld,” is a rather pure example of life in New York in the 90s. It was shaped from the ideals of the era, however, the series would end up helping to shape the era itself due to its massive popularity.
	 More recently, however, would be the show Law & Order: Special Victims unit, the long running spinoff of the cultural touchstone Law & Order. It takes place in New York City as well, and follows a fictionalized version of the NYPD's own SVU. Often, episodes are fictionalized accounts of true abhorrent crimes. They often expose light on sometimes obscure and little known crimes. The series illuminates political issues as well, and how they affect everyday people and civil servants. The show's political ideas are rather thinly veiled, though. Our protagonists portray a wide variety of viewpoints, with this conflict of ideals often being the center conflict of the episode. These conflicts take political viewpoints to logical extremes, resulting in grisly and heinous crimes. The resolution usually involves these viewpoints reconciling in some fashion.
	People often take the opinion of their favorite television program into account when forming their own opinion. Media forms the center of our awareness of popular culture, and television is the crown jewel of it. This is a double edged sword. In addition to bringing us awareness of various things, a flawed idea implanted into the public forum via a television program can leave lasting damage. For instance, due to the proliferation of CSI style crime shows, the public believes things about forensic sciences that aren't necessarily true. The majority public opinion believes that a polygraph, or “lie detector” test is in any way a good indication as to whether a person is lying or not. This is not the case. It is an unreliable test, and as such is not actually admissible in court. The same is true for many forensic practices enacted in crime shows. This doesn't extend merely to forensic science. A wide variety of subjects have been misrepresented in television, notably the subject of computers. The worst offender here would be the military crime drama NCIS. While showing a computer babbling technical nonsense, the tech character commands someone to run a “GUI interface to backtrace the hacker's IP address.” This is garbled technical jargon, and they get away with it because most of the audience doesn't know this. The investigators bring up a low-quality video of a criminal perpetrating the crime, and as they cannot see the details, the video would normally be useless to them. Just when all hope is lost, they perform a non-existent edit to the video, shouting “Enhance!” while they do so. If the video was available at a higher resolution, why wouldn't it already be playing in that resolution? As a result, audiences are demanding evidence that doesn't exist in actual court cases.
	Television will not be going anywhere anytime soon. It's absolutely essential to our concept of communication now. Without televised broadcasts, ideas and opinions on various subjects wouldn't be as widespread as they are now and likely the global dialogue would be hindered. The crime show offers an interesting and entertaining format in which to portray various ideas in action, and has also left a lasting impact on the culture. But sometimes TV gets things wrong, and this is where people need to be careful. Of course, mostly one sees the shows imitating life. But once in awhile, life imitates art.