Female Characters, Made To Suffer for Our 'Art'

"It's certainly dangerous, apparently," executive producer Eric Kripke replied. Then, remembering his prepping from the network before the Q&A session, he did a hasty 180 to get back on-message with "No, not at all, not at all.

"It's -- you know, we're going to be -- you know, every -- we just -- you know, this show to me is, there's kind of this mythic, you know, purity," continued Kripke, who is one of the writers (I know, hard to believe) on this series.

Jeff Davis had much the same reaction during a Q&A session for the show he created for CBS, "Criminal Minds."

(That's the one in which the would-be used-car buyer winds up in a cage with her eyes and mouth duct-taped, awaiting execution.)

Specifically, the question Davis took was: "One of the things we've noticed this season in all the pilots we've seen is the level of violence, particularly against women, has been ratcheted up to some really gruesome levels. You have the woman in the cage before she's raped and murdered. . . . Has that become necessary now, with so many shows on the air, that to become noticed, you've got to think up a crime that's so heinous that it's almost beyond imagination?"

"Actually, I don't think so," Davis responded, bravely ignoring the obvious.

"The most gruesome scene that we see [in the pilot episode] is this woman in the cage getting her fingernails clipped . . . . And when I wrote that scene, everybody told me I was sick. But it's just a woman getting her nails clipped."

Then the rest of the team jumped in and noted that the show's crimes are based on real ones.

Hey, It's Not Us, It's Reality was one of the first lines of defense tossed out by show creators and network suits; critics already had heard it several times before "Criminal Minds" had its news conference.

"That's something we've been hearing," one weary critic responded. "It's just that . . . we've seen about seven of [these types of shows] and to see them all in one season you have to wonder . . . is this what it takes to get noticed?"

"There was actually a mandate from the network saying we want only shows that perpetrate violence against women," executive producer Mark Gordon quipped. "We're just trying to get on the air. We're doing the best we can."

"Well, I don't find it as funny as you do," the critic shot back.