The Lone Ranger is no longer with us, but television remains and is now, if anything, more important as a source of information and ideas about American society. The cowboy and the old west lawmen have been replaced by the big city cop and the ingenious private detective as the stock in trade of prime time television. The storybook fantasy of early television drama has given way, at least for the present, to a hardhitting realism that is presented in pseudo-documentary format. Television's realism, however, is only an illusion. Television is a distorted mirror held up to American society. This paper will examine this distortion by focusing on one example of the larger problem, the case of crime time television. First it will examine the nature of the distortion introduced by television. The source of this distortion will then be sought in the institutional structures which govern television programing. Some consequences of this distortion for Americans and American society will be explored. Finally, alternative structures designed to minimize the problems inherent in current institutional arrangements will be suggested. Through the institution of prime time drama, television viewers are exposed to a seemingly endless stream of familiar and predictable crimes and