FX President John Landgraf on Violence in Entertainment and Responsible Programming - Ed Martin Live

In support of John Landgraf's recent comments on gun control and violence, Ed Martin's exclusive commentary for Jack Myers Media Business Report members is being distributed widely to media, advertising, marketing and financial executives.

Pasadena, CA – Violence in entertainment and the responsibilities that come with the scheduling of adult content were very much top of mind yesterday morning during a session with FX Networks President and General Manager John Landgraf at the Winter 2013 Television Critics Association tour. (FX Networks, it should be noted, remains the only basic cable network to present a session with its top executive at every Winter and Summer TCA tour.)

When asked about violence on television and whether or not it is having an impact on society – a hot topic at this tour following the mass murder last month in Newtown, Conn. – Landgraf didn'thold back.

"I'm a really curious person, and I really want to know the truth of everything, so I've been interested to read what studies there have been on correlations between violence in entertainment and violence in actual life," he said. "I think as an industry, if we can find meaningful correlations, we should act upon those correlations.

"For me personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third person entertainment, meaning I'm watching a character that's explicitly not me and I'm ratcheting onto that character and experiencing something through that character's eyes, than what I would call first person entertainment, which is to say a video game in which I am the character," he continued. "I have three sons. They're 15, 12, and 9, and we don't have Xbox or PlayStations, and I don't let them play first person shooter games because I'm not comfortable with that. If you ask my 15 year old, who has played a lot of them at friends' houses, he says, 'Well, it's kind of disturbing because you're not hunting for food. You're in a first person context, and you're killing everything in sight.' So I think we should talk about it. We should research it, and all things should be fair game, whether they're video games or entertainment programming.

"That said, after being so upset and so horrified and sad and angry over what happened at Newtown, I went and looked at statistics on gun violence and specifically gun homicide. One thing that really struck me was … data from Great Britain and data from the United States, constitutional democracies that share an awful lot. They're socially fairly similar. The incidents of gun death in America are 10 per 100,000 per year. And the incidents in England are .25 per 100,000 per year. The incidence of homicide by gun is more than 90 times higher in America, and we consume the same media: Same movies, same television shows, and the same video games. 'Call of Duty' is a very popular game in England. 'The Walking Dead' is the No. 1 cable show in England. 'Sons of Anarchy' is very popular in England. Last time I checked, James Bond kills an awful lot of people with a gun.

"I'm someone who believes very strongly in both the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, so I believe that we have the right to free speech in this country, and I believe that we have the right to have guns for protection. But last time I checked, I think shotguns or handguns that have six round clips are very good weapons, perfectly adequate weapons for self-defense in the home. [The other day] it came out that the crazy man -- even if I knew his name, I wouldn't say it out loud -- who shot up the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, got off either 27 shots in 30 seconds or 30 shots in 27 seconds. We have to look at what is most substantially responsible for this kind of violence, and one way to look at that is by looking at the rate at which it takes place in our country and other countries that don't have access to those kinds of assault weapon guns, which just allow a crazy person to create an untold amount of mayhem."

Can it be, one critic asked, that the elusive young male audience FX is so successful at attracting can only be lured by the expectation of a certain level of violence?

"We actually have a surprising number of abstract theoretical conversations [at the network]," Landgraf replied, adding that one executive recently said, "our greatest fear is death," so if the network wants to rivet people it would make sense to hover around questions of life and death when telling stories. "If you look at the six highest rated dramas [and] miniseries in cable, out of [approximately] 70 drama series, they are, in order, 'The Walking Dead, 'Hatfields & McCoys,' 'True Blood,' 'Sons of Anarchy,' 'American Horror Story' and 'Game of Thrones.' [The non-violent] 'Suits' is No. 7. The top six are all in some way you could say about violence. I would say they're about life-or-death stakes. Let's not kid ourselves. That will always be very compelling for people to watch."

The adult content issue also ties into FX's prime time identity, in that the network doesn't program its original series earlier than 10 p.m. ET. "Ten years ago when we launched 'The Shield' we said we're going to be in the TV-MA business," Landgraf said. "We're going to make shows that are maybe not exactly premium cable but are as close to premium cable in content as possible. We made a pledge that we were going to keep them away from kids and we were going to put them at 10 o'clock. And we've really honored that.

"I pulled the data recently because I was curious about this," he continued. "If you look at the percentage of people under 18 who watch our dramas, it's less than 5 percent. And if you look at the same data for 'Game of Thrones,' 'True Blood' and 'Dexter' it's about 5 percent or 4 percent. I mean, it's literally the exact same ratio for premium as it is for basic, and I think that's because we've been responsible about putting it post-10 o'clock and really labeling it and warning people. I don't want to change that. I think some of our comedies might be appropriate for late-teens, but I don't think our shows are really appropriate for kids.

"Unless we had a significant [amount] of original series that were not TV-MA, I don't think we would put them before 10 p.m. And at this point, I think there's plenty of non TV-MA programming that's good. I think USA makes a lot of it and they make it really well. I don't really think that we could add much to the ecosystem in terms of that kind of programming, so I wouldn't really see us going to 9 o'clock."