The memory: It’s 2007 in the pool at the Dodge YMCA in Brooklyn with a swim-buddy, who mentions “The Man in High Tower,” a current TV series. Though it’s violence had prevented me from watching much of it, I had been struck me because of it’s basic premise: that the Allies had lost the war and that the East Coast was governed by Germany, the West by Japan. Based on what I had studied and taught about Cultivation Theory, developed by George Gerbner, which posited that heavy consumption of commercial media forms a lens through which we see the world, I turn my body, kicking in the water, toward my companion, and said “Watch, within a year or two, we’ll be talking about Civil War.” And, here we are.

That entertainment media consumption forms our world view and prepares us for the norm-breaking future is the basic assumption of the article “The Four TV Shows That Heralded America’s Fall” by Canadian Stephen Marche, author, most recently, of “The Next Civil War” and the host of the podcast “Gloves Off, ” which explores the relationship between the rise of the anti-hero in “Breaking Bad,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men” (Numbers 1, 2, and 3 in NY Times “Top TV Shows of the 21st Century) and “The Sopranos” and the situation we are in now.

These shows were hardly new in exploring characters displaying hitherto unheard-of, socially unacceptable behavior, but they made those characters human enough, relatable enough, that we end up rooting for them, seeing the world through their eyes. We are human, after all, so this is nuanced, hard to pin down.

So, the questions are: What are we willing to accept as normal, rather than human failing as a cautionary tale? What kind of world am I cooperating in creating by what I watch? As an experiment, I mean to go through my media apps and see how much siloed political material, not to mention violent or fear-inducing product, there is there. What do I support in myself, in our shared culture by which I choose to click?

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