When TV’s Best Writers Eschew Morality For Snuff Porn

Robert and Michelle King’s homage to handsome men who kill young women

TV (previously theater) is an important window into a culture’s changing values. It sets the stage for larger social upheavals.

Based on comments so far: This piece is not about censorship. On that subject I highly recommend Simon Dillon’s piece. My issue is with society’s effort to regulate those who abuse their power (which I believe Robert King did).

(I created the following YouTube video using the following script and python programming. I was going to re-format it for Medium but noticed I can’t simply combine lines. I’d have to re-write it. So I left it as-is.)

Today we are going to talk about the pilot episode of “Elsbeth”, a Paramount Global TV show, created by Robert and Michelle King. Robert King and Michelle King created the very popular TV show, “The Good Wife” which ran from 2009 to 2016.

Recently, they have been show-running the supernatural drama, “Evil”. They are also doing a police drama “Elsbeth”.

Robert King is a devout Catholic who attends mass. Robert King and Michelle King have one daughter, Sophia, who is now 24. Keep her in mind.

During an interview, when his daughter was 14, Robert King said he and his wife allow their daughter to take part in their creative process. Before we proceed, keep in mind Robert King is writing a show called “Evil.”

Paramount has no mechanism to handle viewer complaints about subject matter. Nonetheless, I sent a message through their generic contact form. (10 days and counting…no reply)

Robert King describes the villain, Alex Modarian, as “younger Lee Strasberg in an older James Dean jacket, loved by every student, but especially women.”

This was probably written by Robert King because few people under the age of 60 would be familiar with Lee Strasberg, who died in 1982, or James Dean, in 1955. Although Dean died before Robert King was born, he was a cultural icon to men during Robert King’s youth.

The next line makes it even more improbable that Michelle King wrote this script.

“Sometimes he, Modarian, loves them back, which is why he’s about to commit murder.”

King’s description implies that Modarian is a man who girls throw themselves onto. His human weakness is in “loving them back”. It’s why he may have to kill a girl who abuses that weakness.

Would Michelle King, or their daughter Sophia, read this description and not point out that anyone in Sophia’s generation would find it repugnant, to imply that young women ask to be murdered.

This description doesn’t appear in the show. But it is a window into the writer’s point of view.

There are two interesting aspect of the King’s pilot episode for Elsbeth.

The first is that Robert King seems to have filmed a movie in a movie. That movie within the movie is a snuff film. A film where the audience watches the seemingly real and graphic death of a young woman.

He begins Elsbeth by showing an all female cast of Medea at Juilliard, where one woman graphically knifes another to death.

Statistically, 86% of all knife killings are performed by men, usually on women. Is a woman knifing another woman a porn fantasy in Robert King’s head? Why the all-female cast for Medea?

What do you think?

Modarian turns up to the apartment of the young woman he drugged by replacing her pills while she was on stage.

Her fingers are still moving when he gets there.

He unrolls what looks like a toolset for killing. We were shown in an earlier scene that he times the replacing of pills which makes us wonder if this is something he has done in the past. Perhaps many times.

He sets his timer to 4 minutes.

Later. He puts a plastic bag over her head and seals it off with duct tape.

We then watch as a 20-year-old woman suffocates to death.

Robert King and I are approximately the same age. When we were in our 20s, even 30s, these scenes would not be allowed on TV. They wouldn’t even be allowed in a movie you could watch in a theater. It might not even get an X-rating. Scenes like that simply would never be shown — let alone filmed!

In Robert King’s youth anyone creating such films would have been called a depraved pervert. Someone would call the police.

Ask anyone over the age of 60 if you doubt this.

Why is that not true today? How can a Catholic, who goes to mass, create this kind of pornography?

In the interaction between Modarian and the 21 year old student he is about to murder, it is clearly accepted as fact, between them both, that he sleeps with his female students. Modarian never disputes that. Instead, he tries to increase the benefits to Cherry — is that name “Cherry” innocuous?

Old men might find that name funny. Have women — ever?

When Elsbeth interviews another student, Beatrice Bruni, she makes it clear that Modarian gives good parts to the students who sleep with him.

And, this is further proven when they interview Lana Berlin.

It is factually incorrect that Modarian is “loved by every student, but especially women.” Beatrice Bruni says, “Alex has his favorites. The wider you spread your legs, the bigger the part.” Then later, “Alex isn’t a killer. He’s just a scumbag.”

If a student feels a teacher is a scumbag how can she love him too?

Because Beatrice is interviewed on the set of a big broadway play we can assume sex for her was transactional. It helps her get the parts she wanted at Juilliard to increase her chances of getting parts on Broadway.

Why would we assume she isn’t alone in thinking Modarian is a scumbag. Indeed, the girl he killed thought it and more.

So I ask you. Is King’s description of who Modarian is, in his own script, or what Robert King wants him to be in his imagination?

Let’s summarize the facts before us.

Alex Modarian, 50 years old, a Juilliard theater director, gives a leading roll in each semester’s play to the female student who has sex with him. When a student threatens to report him to the dean, to “cancel” him as Modarian says, he drugs her, then puts a plastic bag over her head until she suffocates to death right before us. We are shown this in graphic detail. We later learn of two other women he manipulated into having sex with him. Modarian is a sexual predator and murderer, perhaps a serial murderer.

Knowing all that, why would our hero, Elsbeth, become “feel sad” because, as she says, “I liked him.”

You can quibble with me about everything in this video. Perhaps King was just describing how he wanted the actor to play Modarian in the beginning. I get it.

What I don’t get is why you’d have the hero, Elsbeth, say she still likes him once his true nature is revealed? Likes him!?

What would you call any woman you met who liked a man who killed 20-year-old girls by drugging them and putting a bag over their head until they suffocated to death?

I can’t imagine such a woman. Is this what Michelle King wrote, or would have wrote?

It’s her name on the script too.

Does Michelle King have a fetish for handsome men who murder 20-year-old girls so they don’t get cancelled?

Can we imagine a man becoming aroused over such a scene? Can we imagine this scene in a snuff film?

Was this the kind of stuff they showed their daughter Sophia, when she was involved in the creative process at the age of 14?

What is the writer trying to get across here? Why would we make the killer sympathetic? We could understand if a killer had a tough life, was tricked into it somehow, was harboring a lifelong resentment.

But Modarian is a good looking, 50-year-old, wildly successful man who simply put his career ahead of a child’s life. Olivia Cherry was barely out of childhood.

There are no excuses here. The Good Wife was an intricate, smart, and detailed show. Robert King is a master craftsman. Every word fits. But fits to what?

When Elsebth says “I like him.” what does that fit into?

Is Elsbeth a convenient foil for Robert King. She pretends she doesn’t notice men behaving badly. There seems to be a pattern of Robert King writing independent women, like in the Good Fight, fighting for a variety of feminist issues.

Issues except the one of male writers in Hollywood putting snuff-porn films within the stories.

Why is this ignored?

Over the years, Hollywood has tarred all Christians as anti-right-to-lifers. They’re all people defined only as those who would rather see women die during childbirth than get an abortion. It shunted aside moderates who simply wanted “cleaner” TV.

The Abortion issue works as a shield that protects Hollywood from other any criticism of what’s appropriate on TV.

That’s why there’s no longer any mechanism for anyone to question how Hollywood governs itself in the depiction of violence and character morality on TV. Everyone is in on it.

That’s why a man can put his snuff-porn fantasy into a light-hearted TV show and have the female character, at the end, say she still liked it. Yes, she enjoyed it.

Michelle King has her name on it too, so it must be okay.

Is it okay?. Michelle King? Carrie Preston? Christine Baranski? Or, especially Sophia King?

Why do I, an old white male, see this, but you are silent? Silent while young girls are still more likely to be knifed by a man than another woman?

NOTE: I wrote another story on a similar subject about Comcast and Below Deck here.