There is a kind of empathy that television gives away cheaply and a kind it almost never offers at all. The first goes to the victim, and it should: we are wired to grieve with the wronged, to want the broken thing mended and the guilty punished. The second is harder to even name. It is the empathy owed to the people standing closest to the person who did the terrible thing, the mother who raised him, the sister who shares his surname, the wife who has to decide every morning whether to keep it. These people did nothing, and yet they wake up inside the wreckage of someone else's act, expected to apologize for a choice they did not make and could not have stopped. The dramas brave enough to look at them are doing something genuinely countercultural. They are asking us to understand without excusing, which is the most demanding moral move a story can make.
The Secondary Victims Nobody Is Allowed to Pity
Taiwan's The World Between Us, which arrived in 2019 and has only grown in stature since, is the cleanest example I know of a show built entirely around this discomfort. It opens in the aftermath of a public mass killing and then refuses to stay where we expect it to. It follows the mother of a young victim, yes, but it follows just as closely the family of the man who pulled the trigger, the parents who shut their shop and went into hiding, the sister who changes her name and lives in a kind of internal exile. It gives equal weight to the legal-aid lawyer who agrees to defend the killer and is hated for it, and to the newsroom that turns the whole catastrophe into ratings. The series never once suggests the crime was anything other than monstrous. What it suggests is that monstrousness has a wide blast radius, and that some of the people inside it are themselves casualties.
Calling them secondary victims feels almost transgressive, because our instinct is that the family must have known, must be complicit, must at minimum owe the world a permanent posture of shame. The show patiently dismantles that instinct. It shows the perpetrator's relatives losing their livelihood, their anonymity, their right to grieve their own son, who is, however indefensibly, still their son. It understands that society needs someone within reach to punish, and that when the actual offender is locked away or already dead, the family becomes the nearest available surface for the public's rage. That is not justice. It is the appearance of justice, aimed at the wrong people because they are the only ones still standing in the open.
The Camera, the Comment Section, and the Mob
What makes The World Between Us more than a sensitive character study is that it indicts the very machinery that produces our cheap empathy and our cheap rage. The newsroom thread is the show's sharpest blade. We watch editors decide that nuance is bad for numbers, that a grieving mother is content, that the rush to be first matters more than the duty to be accurate or humane. The show is not subtle about the cost of this, but it does not need to be, because we recognize it. We have all watched a real tragedy get flattened into a hashtag within hours, the demand for blame outpacing the arrival of facts. Television, in dramatizing that flattening, is quietly confessing its own sins.
Understanding why someone broke is not the same as forgiving the break. The dramas that matter refuse to let us pretend it is.
The British series Broadchurch understood a smaller, quieter version of this years earlier, when it spent a whole season watching a single seaside town turn suspicion into a weapon and aim it at neighbors, friends, and finally families. Grief curdles into accusation; the need to assign fault outruns the evidence. But where Broadchurch keeps the perpetrator's interior life largely offscreen until late, The World Between Us insists on it from the start, and insists too on the perpetrator's mental state, on the possibility that what looks like pure evil may be entangled with untreated illness. That insistence is where the show takes its biggest risk, because the audience does not want the killer to be unwell. We want him to be simply, cleanly bad, so that our condemnation can be total and untroubled.
Can Understanding Survive in the Same Room as Accountability
This is the question the genre lives or dies on, and the worst versions get it wrong in both directions. Some lean so hard into the perpetrator's wounds that the victim disappears and the crime starts to feel like a misfortune that befell the criminal, which is obscene. Others raise the question of understanding only to slam the door, using the family's suffering as a brief detour before the satisfying return to punishment. The honest dramas hold both at once and let the tension stay uncomfortable. They let a defense lawyer be both right that everyone deserves representation and naive about what that costs the people around him. They let a victim's mother be both deserving of all our sympathy and capable of cruelty toward people who share only a name with the man who hurt her.
The reason this matters beyond the screen is that the stigma the genre dramatizes is real, and it kills people slowly. Families of offenders carry a guilt that is not theirs, and a society fluent only in condemnation gives them nowhere to put it. Treated without sensitivity, these stories become misery tourism; treated with it, in the sober and non-graphic register that The World Between Us mostly sustains, they become something closer to moral training. They teach the muscle we are worst at using, the one that lets us say two true things in the same breath: this person did something unforgivable, and the people he left behind are not him. That is the hardest empathy, and it is precisely the kind a culture addicted to instant blame most needs to practice.