I don’t agree. I suspect that in real life most espionage work is deadly dull as is the work of most scientists. Most people at the CIA or NSA are doing boring stuff like listening in on phone calls or reading people’s emails. Very little espionage work is doing things like the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
Similarly, you’d get the impression from television that most people are lawyers, doctors or police officers. Few are, and the people in those professions have much more boring lives than portrayed on those shows.
That and in general, killing anything other than insects is pretty far removed from most people’s experience.
The idea of people whose vocation or avocation is to deliberately kill other people is so utterly fantastic that many (most?) people are very curious as to what makes them tick.
I like how in the James Bond novels sometimes there’s chapters of Bond being assigned to boring office work. Fleming doesn’t want us to get the wrong idea about spies
I think you’re wrong in saying that hitmen and serial killers are even that common in Hollywood productions. Grab your newspaper movie listings and tell me how many of the movies in current release contain either of these. Or are you referring to TV instead of movies? Go through a list of current TV shows and tell me how many TV shows are about serial killers or hitmen. Are there more hitmen and serial killers in movies and TV than one would expect to find at random in the real world? Yes, but so what? American TV and movies have always been unrealistic. This is only one of the many ways they are unlike real life.
I really don’t get what you mean. You first seem to be saying that the hypothetical aliens would not get the idea that we are violent if they only checked out European cinema. Then you use a “greatest” list of European cinema as proof. But that list obviously has nothing to do with what is popular in Europe. Its like judging what movies are most popular in America by only looking at the Oscar list. That greatest list is not even close to what is most popular. Look at the box office list for that. And that is, by the way, is just something an IMDB user put together. It has no basis in reality. If you look at the US box office, the worldwide box office and the Europe box office it is usually pretty close. A mix of action movies and kids movies at the top.
As for British TV, maybe not as many guns in Morse but you can’t say its not a violent and popular genre. And some of the other shows more than make up for the lack of guns. I watch a lot of British crime drama. If you went by that you would have to assume that the entire British population consists of murderers, future victims and a few embattled cops. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Some very good shows. But it does show a very skewed version of the country. Whether the show is set in London or some sleepy village there are murders everywhere.
Dexter just went off the air. The Following (equal parts FBI/serial killer) got picked up for its second season. Hannibal seems to be coming back sometime. If you expand it to gangsters, Boardwalk Empire is on. That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.
Interesting question. Are gangsters who kill anyone who gets in the way of “business”, serial killers? Killing is not their business or their passion, it’s just a tactic they use when they need it.
It seems like criminals in general make for good stories - most lists of great TV series will include Breaking Bad, The Wire and The Sopranos. My guess is because TV criminals live in a world where individuals can have a huge effect on the world, have few limits on their actions and deal with life-and-death stakes on a regular basis.
It’s only in the past ten or fifteen years that there have been a fair amount of television series about criminals. Even within that period it isn’t as though they’ve been a large percentage of all shows. So why the current boom in these shows? Well, it’s not that crime is suddenly rampant. The crime rate has dropped quite a lot over the past twenty years. I think the only answer to the OP is that sometimes a particular theme will get noticed in one popular series and then everyone else in TV thinks that they can do it to. It will get used until everyone get bored with it and then they will move on to the next fad.