Staying alive

Happened to see an item about the body count on TV shows. Really. A site called Funeralwise.com published a study of how many corpses litter television. The site is part of the funeral industry, as you may have guessed.

Anyway, the site surveyed a bunch of TV shows to figure out which were the most deadly. The pictured Nikita came in pretty high, with nine corpses per ep. That made it the deadliest show on broadcast TV, in fact. The overall "winner" was Starz' Spartacus, with twenty-five dead bodies per episode. They be killin' 'em right quick over there.

The site wasted no time on game shows. Not too many corpses make it onto Wheel of Fortune. In fact, they're always looking for "animated" contestants.

Which does bring up one halfway serious note on our little genre. Game shows have been dismissed from time out of mind as silly, trivial, boring, unworthy of serious critical attention. But at least they don't kill people. They don't even pretend to kill people. Not even Fear Factor did that.

Which makes the recent heavy breathing (pun intended) over Family Feud's supposed sleaziness seem even sillier. At most on Feud or other game shows we might be discussing a little mildly off-color talk. Nobody needs to worry about bloody violence or steamy sex.