In a spoiler-filled essay, Paula Marantz Cohen contemplates why recent TV series seem increasingly  inclined to kill off key characters without warning. She writes that “some reflection suggests that this may be what that audience subliminally wants. The shows are feeding our masochistic desire for a certain kind of intense realism”:

What I’m describing can be traced back to Alfred Hitchcock’s groundbreaking 1960 film, Psycho, in which the death of the marquee star, Janet Leigh, in the role of the protagonist, Marion Crane, occurred less than mid-way through the film. Hitchcock’s marketers made a point of asking audiences to keep this dramatic event a secret so that future viewers could experience the jolt of surprise when, relatively early in the action, a compelling character played by a famous and beautiful actress is stabbed to death in the shower. But even today, when people know the plot of Psycho, the death of Marion Crane still manages to arouse a powerful double response. “It just doesn’t seem right,” to quote someone I know who watched the film recently, “but it’s brilliant.” There, in a nutshell, lies the value of this maneuver. Wrong but brilliant — unfair but real.

For in fact, that’s what life is like. People we love deeply can drop dead when we least expect it, and a void can suddenly open that was once filled by a vibrant presence. In a television series, where the characters have been expertly developed so that we have invested in them over time — in some cases, a year or more — the effect is even more like life than in a movie.