In the aftermath of a shooting in Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday that left journalists Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward, 27, dead, USA announced it would postpone the season finale of Mr. Robot, its most critically-buzzed-about show of the summer.
The previously-filmed episode, a statement from USA said, “contains a graphic scene similar in nature” to the killings. “Out of respect to the victims, their families and colleagues, and our viewers, we are postponing tonight’s episode.” A rerun of the penultimate episode aired in its place, and the finale will now air on September 2. The series has already been renewed for a second season.
An episode of Documentary Now, a mockumentary series on IFC starring Fred Armisen and Bill Hader, will be postponed as well. The episode “Dronez: The Hunt for El Chingon,” is a parody of Vice; while searching for a drug lord in Mexico, the journalists are killed. IFC released a statement saying the episode would be replaced with another (“Kunuk”), although the “Dronez” episode has reportedly been available on Vice for weeks. “Dronez” will air on September 3.
Networks have had to adjust to the collision of reality and too-close-to-reality episodes for years. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, NBC’s Hannibal pulled an episode from the air; after the 2012 shootings in Newtown, Syfy’s Haven did the same. Back in 1999, an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was pulled after the shooting at Columbine; the episode followed a student who planned to bring a gun to school.
Failing to pull a show in this kind of circumstance can result in audience backlash, bringing on the only kind of publicity that really is bad publicity. As Josh Duggar publicly admitted to his history of sex abuse, TLC continued to air a marathon of the show that made his family famous, 19 Kids and Counting. Viewers responded with a #CancelTheDuggars social media campaign, and TLC finally acquiesced, taking the series off the air “indefinitely” and, finally, issuing a formal cancellation in mid-July. Networks responded to similar pressure to pull reruns of The Cosby Show as dozens of women came forward to accuse Bill Cosby of sexual assault.
Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, pointed out that shows have responded to acts of violence with alterations, too, not just postponements: Both the credits of Mad About You and Sex and the City, for instance, were edited to remove the Twin Towers after September 11.
“When you have a big story that is all over the news, and it’s tragic,” he said, these accommodations are “a common courtesy.” And if “people say this is censorship, well, that’s not the case. They’re not making it go away. [They’re just saying]: Now is not the time to show this episode.”
Dave Cullen is the author of Columbine, a book he spent ten years reporting about the killers, the victims, and the survivors. Once a shooting becomes a big news story, he said, he gets “wall-to-wall” phone calls; he has become the go-to voice on these acts of violence and the culture in which they occur.
“I guess my first response was, what an insane coincidence,” Cullen said. Given the astonishing frequency of mass shootings in America, isn’t it almost surprising that this doesn’t happen more often? According to Cullen, no.
“You have to have this window,” he said. “It’s the coincidence that both some writer and some perpetrator, in two distant parts of the country, are having the same idea, somewhat simultaneously… Two people in this similar window having the same thought, one creative and one homicidal, went about and did it in their respective worlds within that same relatively short window.”
After marveling at the timing, Cullen said, “I think my very next thought was, how lucky they were.” They, that is, being the team behind Mr. Robot. “Imagine if that had been scheduled for the previous night. If it had aired 12 hours earlier, just by chance, or any time in the past. There would have been massive questions about cause and effect… I’m sure they would be riddled with doubts and fears of whether this person had copied their idea.”
And no matter how many times to chant to yourself never read the comments, ignore the trolls, never read the comments, ignore the trolls, there would likely still be a lingering sense of doubt and uneasiness, a “going to bed sort of wondering,” said Cullen. “Hopefully you can brush off the morons and the haters, but you have to think, maybe I did” inspire that crime. “So they’re very, very lucky that they’re not put in that position, to wonder about it.”
Though contrary to popular narratives about copycat crimes, “I think these tend not to be too causative.” People, Cullen said, don’t get their ideas “from the fictional pop universe; they’re really getting them from each other,” by watching other mass shootings play out on “24-hour cable news and this infotainment world.”
The Roanoke shooter wrote that he admired the Columbine and Virginia Tech killers, and he decided to buy a gun days after the shooting in Charleston. “He’s clearly drawing ideas from other people, and he’s not the first: It seems like about half of [these shooters], we see them alluding to the others… For the most part, they’re all sort of watching each other.”
Cullen referenced an interview with Mary Ellen O’Toole, a retired senior FBI profiler, that aired on CNN on Wednesday. O’Toole said to expect that, when the police ultimately search the shooter’s home, they will likely find news clippings from other shootings, a browser history that indicates the shooter had been looking into these previous killings.
“We’ll see a clear history of him looking into all these other shootings and getting ideas and inspiration from them,” said Cullen, recalling O’Toole’s report. “So I think it’s coming from reality-based pop culture, where we have this weird fusion that I think is a fairly recent phenomenon.”
This concept — that criminals-in-waiting are learning the ins and outs of massacres by observing other shootings; that they have more intimate access to these acts of violence than ever before, not just because of 24-hour TV news but because of social media, camera phones, and other types of civilian surveillance technology — sounds like a theory out of, well, Mr. Robot.
As for the specific incident in the season finale (no spoilers, other than the obvious: That the episode included a scene so visually and thematically similar to the Roanoke shooting that USA opted not to air it), “I’m kind of shocked that nobody had done that yet” in reality, said Cullen, considering the rapid rise in self-documentation, and the desire to be seen that so many of these perpetrators seem to share. “With any of these things, somebody has finally gone there, and it’s not going to be the last.”
Mr. Robot isn’t delicate with the ugliest elements of modern life; if anything, just the opposite: The show can be brutal about our vulnerability, our dependency on institutions that could crush us at any time, the Frankenstein-way in which technology, created by man, can have far more power than people. So there is the argument to be made that this episode is more important that it was when they originally wrote it — that it is doing exactly what art is supposed to be doing.
“You do want art to be constantly talking about what’s going on in the world,” said Thompson. “That is, in many ways, what storytelling is all about… People should make movies and television shows that talk about that reality in the United States.”
“We don’t want to go back to an era” when the opposite was true, Thompson said, citing the case of Gomer Pile, U.S.M.C., “one of the top-rated shows on the late 1960s, about a guy in the contemporary Marine Corps, and it never mentioned Southeast Asia or the fact that we were in a war.” At the time, “that was par for the course. Entertainment television did not even acknowledge that so many big things were going on. That was, in retrospect, kind of ridiculous.”
But with the Mr. Robot finale, “It’s not depriving us of this episode… It’s just putting it off so it doesn’t play in the middle of all of this.”
“Of course it would be too callous to show it that night, or even this week,” said Cullen. And whatever insights Mr. Robot could be making in the finale would be lost on anyone who watched it Wednesday night. “Nobody is going to learn anything at that moment,” said Cullen. “No one is in a place, when emotions are this raw, to learn anything. That part of our brain is shut down and is not receptive to any lessons.”
So if the goal of a show like Mr. Robot is, in part, to “get something into the culture, make a point, get something into society, you’ve picked a horrible moment if you picked right now,” said Cullen. “The show is only going to be fresh once, to have that one moment to have that impact, and if it does it to that moment when it’s going to be completely obliterated, it has wasted its moment.”
Even on an entertainment level, the episode probably wouldn’t work in light of the day’s events. The murders were committed on live television and the shooter took and shared footage from the attack on his phone; the on-screen slaughter was seen by untold numbers of people, even before Twitter and Facebook hustled to remove the videos from their respective platforms.
“Dramatically, people can’t even experience the show,” said Cullen. “The basic concept of creating anything narrative is to bring people into an imaginary world, into the world of the show. You’re trying to get them to suspend this world they’re living in.” But when the fictional world — even by chance — lands in the Uncanny Valley, when it’s too close to reality for comfort, “you’re out of that world.”
“That’s the whole key point of any kind of drama, is to transport you from your reality into that reality, and I don’t think that can happen with anything that’s too loud, that gets in the way,” said Cullen. “What human being can watch it without their entire mind going to that place of what just happened? Their mind goes straight to Virginia… The gravitational force of the real object is so much more powerful than the one you tried to create.”
No matter how powerful the episode may be, the shooting “is much more emotionally overpowering. It bursts the bubble.”
And maybe this is the kind of scenic language — because of the specific nature of the shooting, because of how many people saw exactly how it occurred — that will belong to Roanoke forever. It could enter that visual vernacular of images that can’t not call an atrocity to mind: Planes hitting towers, toothbrush mustaches. Reference them at your own peril; take the spate of superhero movies that saw their heroes treat New York City like a demolition derby, sequences that, for many viewers, ripped them out of the world of The Avengers and brought them back to 9/11.
When the Mr. Robot finale does air, the pain of Roanoke “is still going to be there,” said Cullen. “And maybe during that part [of the episode], you’ll be thinking about it, and then you’ll sort of let go. Some people will be able to first have the jarring thing and then get past it. Whereas, if it were Wednesday night, 99 percent of the audience, I think, would be incapable of enjoying these entire episode. These things fade; they don’t go away.”