The soap opera.
That's basically what Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Mad Men, even Dowton Abbey, and the one we most regrettably watched, The Blacklist, all are: soap operas, with large casts of extreme characters to which seemingly random but extreme things are done in the course of many episodes. With no reason other than to shock, and create new storylines.
Mad Men and Dowton Abbey most obviously fall into the category, since their sturm und drang is basically domestic and workplace related, like the daytime soaps. The others however (and all their close relatives) may be less obvious, because they center on specific worlds, like Washington politics or police, FBI, CIA etc. And they are incredibly violent.
They may have elements of thrillers, and resemble latter day Grand Guignol but like soap operas they emphasize sensationalistic grabbers to keep you watching for the next episode, dangling questions and subjecting characters to the most extreme fates, repeatedly. (This sounds like melodrama, but technically melodrama pits good against evil. These shows don't. Everybody is more or less evil.)
Almost by definition, soap operas have no actual center or spine or reason for being, no actual story to tell. They exist to keep on going, keep people watching and talking, whatever it takes. Plausibility, let alone integrity, just don't figure in.
After seeing the pilot and first four episodes and vowing never to see another, I nevertheless read the plot descriptions on Wikipedia of every episode so far (two years worth; it's been renewed for a third season.) It all becomes quite clear. Spader's character murders somebody in just about every episode. The female lead (an FBI agent; there's also a badass female CIA agent) is tortured, and tortures people, including her husband, though they later get back together. (?--but why bother...) One of the key characters is diagnosed with a terminal illness, and then he isn't. A new villain is introduced for each story, each more inventively and horrifically evil than the last. No one is who they say they are, everyone betrays everyone, there is no moral center to any of it.
I'm aware that my response may to some degree be related to age as well as taste. I also resent all the articles offered on the Internet that are headlined "Shows We Love" or "why we like" etc.--assuming a hive mind "we" on almost any subject. That the kind of action that appears on these shows every week just doesn't happen in the real world (the multiple times that heavily armed men waylay FBI convoys, kill lots of people and make off with somebody in custody--how many times has that happened in America? How about never? Is never good for you?) --this is part of the postmodern pleasure for some I suppose. It just pisses me off.
But I do think it is worse than that. Though it may express a pervasive anxiety in viewers, it also creates that anxiety big time, which bleeds into anxiety about the real world. Everyone on the street becomes a potential psycho-killer terrorist or sadistic, super-intelligent serial killer. All done with the purpose of manipulating viewers, which is apparently what passes for innocence in Hollywood.
Though the intention may be just ordinary cynical manipulation for ratings, the worldview that gets expressed is fascistic. Various excesses by "law enforcement" on various levels is a staple of every such show, to varying degrees, which makes real world police excesses less of a mystery.
But shows like The Blacklist (the name itself defiles the name of an historically significant and actually fascistic phenomenon and time in America) promote torture, first by showing it as a regular investigative tool, and by suggesting that it works in extracting good information, which of course is its justification. That's not debated, it's part of these shows. (That this show is a child of 24 is obvious even if you don't know that the producers' first choice for the lead was Keifer Sutherland.)
This portrait of torture is wrong factually, not to mention morally. How many times did it work in the war on terror? Check the studies and it's never. Is never good for you? It seems the Bush administration really isn't over. It's alive and well in the Golden Age of Television.
That honorific was previously given to TV's earliest days--the Golden Age was live TV in New York, dramas by real dramatists, comedy by geniuses like Sid Caesar, Ernie Kovacs, Jackie Gleason, Steve Allen.
Though I fondly recall the latter part of that period from my childhood, and know how formative some of the 1950s shows were for me, it's not the period of my viewing I'd call the Golden Age. That would be the late 80s, early 1990s, with Northern Exposure, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Twin Peaks, Moonlighting, Thirtysomething, even Miami Vice.
While some of the more recent, much praised shows that I nevertheless choose not to watch may be very good in some respects, I also suspect that there is a vicious cycle now involving social media, the media that now reports on social media as a main focus, and the shows themselves. The ability to instantly text your did you see that? and the amped-up social pressure to watch the shows so you've got something to say on Facebook as well as at work the next day, give these shows maybe more buoyancy than they might otherwise have.
All that self-involvement may be creating a bubble, that will eventually burst. As a form, ultraviolent soap operas don't interest me. They are a huge waste of time and emotion. And some are worse than that.
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