Violence-dominated genres persist because their production costs run lowest per viewer

Evidence

Program production costs per thousand viewers strongly influences what is televised. Action formats are prevalent because they are relatively cheap to produce. The Western drama required only a few horses, a weathered saloon, a superhero-type lawman, transient evildoers, some dancing girls which the industry refers to as “candy for the eyes,” and the open range with natural lighting. A producer could grind out endless episodes at a price that yielded higher profits than more popular programs that incur higher production costs. Westerns were supplanted by the “space wars” genre, in which a good share of a program is devoted to computer-generated space-ships in lengthy battles with weird-looking enemies from other planets. The crime genre has its share of drawn-out chase scenes and fights by stuntmen and stuntwomen doubling for the actors to reduce production costs. Long-running programs of better quality are typically canceled at the height of their viewership because of the ever-increasing salaries of the stars and annual raises for the writers and production crews. These soaring costs make popular programs less profitable. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 944

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 944