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Most prominently, three of the fall's highest-profile new series--CBS's The Agency, ABC's Alias and Fox's 24--are about CIA agents, and they'll be hard pressed to avoid opening wounds while staying plausible. A month ago, the talk about 24 was its gimmick of taking one season to show one day's events. Now it's about a too-close-for-comfort scene in the pilot, in which an assassin (out to kill a presidential candidate) blows up an airplane in flight. The explosion will be cut, but, says co-creator Robert Cochran, the story line will stay the same: "Our obligation is to treat this subject with realism and intelligence and as much insight as we can." Alias creator J.J. Abrams says he's made one change, but The Agency is completely discarding its original pilot, which dealt with terrorism and Middle East intrigue and mentioned Osama bin Laden. "Slowly, we will get back to the reality of CIA life, and that means dealing with terrorism," says an executive producer, Wolfgang Petersen, "but not right now."
Certainly, too, it's hard to look the same way at reality shows' life-and-death metaphors for our everyday worries. Survivor made personal and business relationships into a wilderness struggle. But now that our everyday concerns are life and death, it's the metaphors that look trivial. You don't need Fear Factor to put an edge on your humdrum existence when you've seen 110 stories of steel permanence collapse, twice. Says a network programmer who asked not to be named: "When we look back, we'll be able to say that people [lost] interest in reality shows because [you can] never match the reality of what happened."
As artists and entertainment companies aim to be tasteful, the danger is that relevant work will suffer too. In the 1,213-station Clear Channel Communications radio network, an internal e-mail circulated last week listing more than 150 songs deemed possibly too sensitive to be played during this period, among them Peter, Paul and Mary's Leaving on a Jet Plane. (Clear Channel contends the list was unofficial and did not ban any songs outright.) USA Network canceled an airing of the 1998 movie The Siege, a serious look at anti-Arab bigotry and paranoia after terrorist attacks in New York--arguably precisely the sort of issue the country needs to consider now.
Reshoots, rewrites, omissions and postponements are, relatively speaking, speed bumps. The hard question is whether pop culture has moved permanently to an old-fashioned war footing, eschewing moral ambiguity for earnestness. Have we shifted so suddenly from a Sex and the City culture to a Band of Brothers culture?
It's possible. But it would be a mistake to confuse the reaction of the past weeks, a culture of mourning, with a long-term change. The public's current emotions are many--grief, anger, shame, helplessness--but we may look back on them as the simplest ones we experienced during this chapter of history. And our response has already been more complex than you might think. Some have predicted a return to light escapism. Video-rental stores reported a spike in comedy rentals. MGM expanded the comedy Legally Blonde onto 1,300 screens after movie houses began pleading for feel-good fare. But rentals of action movies were also up, despite Hollywood's breast beating over violence. If there's one thing those bloody blockbusters leave you with, after all, it's a lot of dead bad guys.