Scripts that work in television

What do you like to watch on TV? What about Bones, Criminal Minds, NCIS and Law & Order SVU? You get a lot of blood and bodies on slabs in those shows. I happen to think Bones has the best bodies on slabs and that NCIS' are second-rate.

What I haven't noticed is the absence of gore in such shows as White Collar, Covert Affairs and Burn Notice. It's no coincidence, Jordan Hirsch reports in the Wall Street Journal. All of these shows appear on the USA Network.

USA's shows could easily feature carnality and carnage of one kind or another. But they don't. The president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment, Bonnie Hammer, told me that when NBC purchased USA and assumed command of its programming six years ago, her team developed a "filter" for the station's content that aimed to create "smart, fun escapism." Every USA program emphasizes that essential mission.

And it works: USA's shows secured it a record 15th-straight victory over fellow cable stations in quarterly viewing ratings earlier this year.

It's interesting to me as a writer what this means. Without the gore, the shows' writers have to actually write.

What USA series forgo in cheap thrills, they must compensate for with particularly compelling characters and relationships. "White Collar" Co-Executive Producer Mark Goffman says he finds it "liberating," to avoid seedier elements and instead "focus on elegance and art." The shows pair their visual candy with humor-laden drama and protagonists who, in Ms. Hammer's words, "are flawed, but not in a dark, negative way."

The shows also manage to address weighty moral questions. They feature endearingly imperfect protagonists who "flirt with the moral spectrum" as they encounter tests of trust, loyalty and justice. "They are classic redemption tales," Jeff Wachtel, who is president of original programming for USA, told me.

Most significantly, however, Mr. Wachtel says the shows were consciously designed to strike a chord with the zeitgeist of post-September 11th America. "Following 9-11," he notes, "audiences were worried about the threat of terrorism and war on several fronts." As much as they desire an escape, viewers also seek to identify with a certain type of hero: the kind of people who, despite personal faults, "run toward the burning building while everyone else runs away."

USA's characters innovate and improvise, outlast their enemies and survive adversity—all the while determined to continue enjoying life, even in these darker times.

Ah, they tell stories.