/>Queer as Folk, Sex & the City, Desperate Housewives, Grey's Anatomy, Dirt, on and on; what percentage of the population is a housewife of some Wisteria Lane? a medical student humping all the other medical students in broom closets of the hospital? a paparazzi-shot hounding magazine mogul? Not very many. So why are these story lines so attractive in modern media? The easy answer is that they're dreamy shades of everyday reality: that some boring office worker can go home, curl up on the couch after throwing down their half-cooked, just-add-water microwave dinner, & totally lose themselves in a plot they can relate to just enough (the hard day at work, the uphill business struggles), but can't begin to imagine in other ways, to keep it interesting (the paparazzi hanging outside the windows, the murders on the block this week by a new neighbor). The more technical plot twists that serve to "keep it interesting" (sexual promiscuity, unethical work behavior, lying, cheating, stealing) may in fact be more sought-after than any of the more- or less-believable plot vehicles.
In the earlier days of television, the days of Donna Reed, My 3 Sons, and Leave It to Beaver, TV was a media by which to glorify the better parts of life and the human condition. Its sitcoms often portrayed characters worth emulating. Even The Fugitive was really innocent. Slowly, through the fifties and sixties, with vampires like Edward Collins, with comical antagonists like Archie Bunker, TV started to switch over to entertainment that often took the side of the wrong guy. And right up through the years, till we get to NYPD Blue being glorified simply for being groundbreaking by showing nudity on late night TV, the degeneration of TV plots continued.
We arrive at the present-day, where sex, murder, crime, and drug use become the norm of television characters' behavior patterns. They easily move the plot, they each have their own set of consequences to consider for future plot twists, and they are the greedily-devoured traits society seeks.
As social classes quickly sell-out and agree that such behaviors are normal, since Media tells us so, society as a whole begin to crumble more and more as people still struggle to emulate entertainment. Look at celebrities' needing rehab starting at younger ages, look at Craigslist for the adulterous husbands and wives away on business & alone in their hotels, look at the news and listen to all the drug ring busts just today. There is a steady, blanket downward spiral in a society that seems blind to the problem.
With the outlook that any morality in television entertainment is boring, with the rise (due, in part, also to Media) of the consumer approach to life that demands the "I" have better than the next, I see a decline in society that matches Wall Street.