A new series on USA, Shooter, will premiere a week later than planned. The sniper drama stars Ryan Phillippe as a military veteran attempting to clear his name after being accused of a crime he didn’t commit; it is based on the 2007 film of the same name, which starred Mark Wahlberg. And it reportedly begins, as one might expect a show called Shooter to do, with the sounds of gunfire. Scenes of real incidents of gun violence flash across the screen as the gunshots sound.
Shooter was slated to premiere on July 19, but USA pulled it, citing sensitivity to the attack at a protest in Dallas at which five police officers were killed. The shooting, which shattered a previously peaceful protest, was an act of senseless violence at a rally against acts of senseless violence that had devastated the country just days before. USA released a statement on Monday explaining the scheduling change: “In light of recent tragic events and out of respect for the victims, their families and our viewers, we have decided to postpone the premiere date for the upcoming USA Network series Shooter to July 26.”
USA has been here before, quite recently: Last summer’s breakout thriller, Mr. Robot, was a brilliant, visually stunning drama with its finger on the pulse of all our modern anxieties. Its efforts to feel as real as the real world were so successful that the series accidentally predicted the hack of infidelity website Ashley Madison and included a scene in its finale in which a character shot himself on live television. That latter plot point unintentionally mirrored the horrific on-camera killings of two journalists in Roanoke, Virginia, which occurred the day the episode was slated to air. Citing a “graphic scene similar in nature to today’s tragic events,” USA bumped the finale back a week.
In a nation that saw 372 shootings in 2015 alone, perhaps it is practical, if morbid, to assume that any show about a shooting will inevitably collide with a real-life shooting, and that to create art that attempts to reflect and comment on that reality will, on occasion, veer too close to that reality for viewer comfort. The alternative — writing television shows that are ostensibly about modern American life but neglect to feature, or even mention, gun violence — seems far from desirable and borders on absurd.
Who knows the justification behind the name of the USA show (a desire to build on the brand recognition from the movie, most likely) but in hindsight, it seems extraordinarily shortsighted. It would be completely irrational to name a show “Shooter” and think an episode of that show will never air on the day of a shooting. This is America. Every day is the day of a shooting.
From ‘Buffy’ To ‘Mr. Robot’: When Pop Culture Collides With Real-Life ViolenceIn the aftermath of a shooting in Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday that left journalists Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward…thinkprogress.orgUSA is not the only network shuffling its schedule to accommodate a country that can barely catch its breath amid near-non-stop bloodshed: In June, TNT delayed the third season premiere of The Last Ship because the two-hour episode — which would have aired only days after the mass shooting at Orlando nightclub Pulse left 50 dead — showed a shooting at a Vietnamese nightclub.
The Tony Awards, held the same weekend as what became the deadliest shooting in American history, also adjusted in the wake of the slaughter; the cast of Hamilton performed “History Has Its Eyes on You” and “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)” without prop muskets, instead choosing to pantomime the songs that depict the Revolutionary War’s final battle.
And USA was not alone in having to amend its schedule after the Roanoke shooting: That same week, IFC pulled an episode of Documentary Now, the mockumentary series starring Fred Armisen and Bill Hader, because the installment, “Dronez: The Hunt for El Chingnon,” was a Vice parody in which journalists were killed while searching for a Mexican drug lord. For so many episodes of modern gun violence, an episode of television violence gets back-burnered: An episode of Hannibal was shelved after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, an episode of Haven on Syfy after the 2012 shooting in Newtown, an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after the killings at Columbine in 1999.
As Robert Thompson, founding director of the Bleier Center for Television & Popular Culture at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School, told ThinkProgress last year after the Mr. Robot change was announced, “When you have a big story that is all over the news, and it’s tragic,” 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.”
Tonys Show The Oscars How It’s Done: Actors Of Color Win All 4 Musical Acting AwardsSomething was missing from Hamilton at last night’s Tony Awards, where the show which was nominated for a record…thinkprogress.orgAnd Dave Cullen, author of Columbine and expert on mass shootings and the impact of gun violence on our culture at large, said at the time that while it may seem as if this sort of overlap should happen more often, it’s rather remarkable when fiction and fact align so strongly. “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.”
Cullen also said that the only way to preserve both the integrity of the show and goodwill with the audience is to pull a disconcerting episode from the air, at least temporarily. “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,” he said. “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.”
Update:
On July 18, USA Network announced it would move the premiere of “Shooter” to the fall. Production reportedly will continue without interruption. No premiere date has been publicized. The news comes on the heels of a shooting in Baton Rouge on Sunday morning that left three police officers dead.