Today’s TV landscape is also eerily devoid of anything resembling optimism. This is a telling and significant omission, since feel-good programming used to be the medium’s sometimes namby-pamby, sometimes energetic stock in trade. If our reigning doomsday genres qualify as escapist at all, it’s a very peculiar version of escapism—consoling people by creating imaginary worlds so freakish, violent, Machiavellian, and sinister that the real world’s terrors seem tame by comparison. It’s anyone guess whether this stuff is sublimating our fear of apocalypse or pacifying us by demonstrating that even the apocalypse will just be one more clever showbiz career move by Planet Earth—the ultimate superstar.