Gore in Primetime
I continue to be amazed at the level of gore on primetime TV. Years ago, I complained about someone’s arm getting cut off by a helicopter tail rotor on an episode of ER. Tonight, I’m working in a hotel and CSI New York is on the TV.
In the last 10 minutes, I’ve seen:
- A severed head, including a close up of the traumatic cross-section of the neck and a view into the head’s gaping eyes.
- Later, in the forensics lab, a pathologist punctures an eyeball of the head with a needle and withdraws fluid. You see the puncture from the perspective of being inside the eyeball.
- Later still, the detectives find a man nailed to a tree via railroad spikes through his eye sockets. Seriously. You clearly see his impaled head from the front, and from the side with the railroad spikes coming out the back and into the tree. Not done yet, one of the detectives picks up the decedent’s gouged out eyes from the ground, and gives us a good close-up as he handles them.
This is insane. This would be the stuff of underground horror movies 15 years ago. Now it’s on a hit series in primetime.