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There has been some direct entertainment response to the tragedy. Michael Jackson and producer Nile Rodgers organized separate all-star tribute recordings to benefit the victims. Playwrights and actors in New York plan an evening of short plays written for the occasion to raise money. Comic-book artists, including Will Eisner, collaborated on a volume of stories about the attacks. And Friday night, every broadcast network and numerous cable channels aired the two-hour telethon America: A Tribute to Heroes. Surprisingly restrained, held on spare, candlelit stages, it featured elegiac performances from musicians including Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Sheryl Crow and Alicia Keys and so many star presenters--Tom Hanks, Muhammad Ali, Julia Roberts--that the likes of Jack Nicholson and Meg Ryan were answering phones. But, mainly, pop culture redefined itself in terms of what it now is not.
It is not too flippant. David Letterman held the hand of a weeping Dan Rather on a moving return to the air; The Daily Show's Jon Stewart tearfully invoked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Jay Leno, who almost sheepishly returned from Tonight's weeklong hiatus, told TIME he was "trying to be silly. Not political."
And so it is not political. Nor is it too frothy: the media went through a phase of self-flagellation over their erstwhile focus on the lifestyles of the rich and rehabbing. "A media market that celebrated puerile gossip and forced detachment" now seemed "superfluous, even offensive," wrote media-news website Inside.com--itself no stranger to gossip and snideness.
Above all, it is not too violent. Before Sept. 11, panicked citizens running down a street from a collapsing building was an action-movie cliche. After, the purveyors of cinematic disaster porn began soul-searching, and studios delayed premieres of projects, including Arnold Schwarzenegger's Collateral Damage and Jennifer Lopez's Tick-Tock. "This will forever change the content of certain types of movies," says producer Arnold Kopelson (Outbreak, Se7en), who canceled production of a film about bioterrorism. "It's going to be a very long time" before audiences will watch a building blow up. Disney postponed two comedies, Tim Allen's Big Trouble (involving a bomb on a plane) and Anthony Hopkins' and Chris Rock's Bad Company (with a nuclear-bomb threat). "[To release a terror film] just wasn't being sensitive to where the world is right now," says Disney studio chairman Richard Cook.
The most immediate effects will be in TV, and not just late-night. The Emmy Awards, rescheduled for Oct. 7, currently plan to scrap host Ellen DeGeneres' monologue and a skit about President Bush and Al Gore. Comedies like Friends and Sex and the City will seem surreal, maybe even grotesque, if they return to a happy Manhattan where no one looks up in worry upon hearing a plane. Creator Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing, his fictional White House dramatically outdone by reality, has written a special episode dealing with issues raised by the terror attacks, to air Oct. 3.