* Real crime dramas would be overwhelmingly about dirtbags committing lunkhead type crime (beating some guy senseless for looking at them funny, robbing a store in broad daylight with no mask in view of God and surveillance cameras, etc.). And it would be mostly sad and disturbing and not fun to watch.
* I agree that real crime dramas wouldn’t be much fun to watch because most criminals are pathetic in addition to being thoughtlessly cruel and evil. But we mostly watch cop shows as a late evening diversion that we can do together, and the only real pull is the quasi-mystery that the shows present; that, and retribution against the guilty parties (which BTW doesn’t always payoff on the L&O franchises.)
The “warped view of reality” as it pertains to SVU has to do with the constantly repeated refrain that “if a woman says rape then rape” even in cases where there obviously was no rape, as well as the constantly entertained notion that all bad conduct (particularly by women) is due to some sexual assault that happened sometime, somewhere. The other problem is that the show (by its nature) has to involve some kind of grotesque sexual assault every episode (just as Criminal Minds has to have an equally grotesque serial killer every episode) and I can see how binge watching those two shows could really screw up a young person’s mind.
* Law and Order SVU is a spinoff from an individual episode of L&O, which in turn was inspired by the sexually-motivated killing of Jennifer Levin by the Irish-American Robert Chambers in 1986. Even after writing the episode, however, the case continued to haunt [Dick] Wolf, who wanted to go deeper into the psychology of crimes to examine the role of human sexuality. Obviously there was never any intention of giving viewers a series realistically depicting American sex criminals. To this day, Jackie Coakley probably thinks the biggest threat to women like her is from white men.
