Joanna Weiss thinks that television has heightened it:
[O]ur desire to piece together [the Boston marathon bombers’] narrative, to find the origin story of Tsarnaev’s radicalization, is an irresistible urge, and one that I think has less to do with the boy in those snapshots than with a habit we’ve learned from watching TV. And not just any kind of TV, but the prestige dramas that have made the last decade or so a golden era in the history of the medium.
The character-driven dramas on “quality TV” are, by and large, serialized stories about monsters. This was the innovation of The Sopranos, which reinvented the televised drama by specializing in moral complexity and revolving around a particular type of anti-hero. We’d long had TV villains who we loved to hate, perhaps best exemplified by J.R. Ewing on Dallas—a character who was cheerfully and unequivocally bad, who never asked for, or expected, the viewers’ sympathy. Tony Soprano, by contrast, wrestled with his decisions—if not always his conscience—right before our eyes. He was a bad guy we were invited to understand.
Alyssa argues instead that anti-hero shows “engage with a different set of questions, namely, how people doing extraordinarily deviant things manage to conceal their actions from the other people in their lives, and how people who are friends or family of people who turn out to be terrorists or killers manage to overlook clear warning signs that the people they love have strayed far from the norms of human behavior.”
The Dish 