If free-to-air TV still retains value as some kind of cultural indicator, at least for those dinosaurs resisting the move to cable/internet/digital, then a profound cultural shift has taken place. Call me slow, but I have only just noticed it. The underworld has been replaced by the dissection table.

As I write this, Clint Eastwood's apparently less-than-brilliant Hereafter is opening at the cinemas, which may indicate that the afterlife is still of interest to those who go out for their entertainment. But not for Foxtel-resistant Freddy back home on the couch, or those who have not raced out to buy the new digital receivers.

Gone are the shows about mediums helping solve crime in fictional and real worlds; gone are the brothers hunting supernatural beings; gone are the vampires and their slayers; gone are the lovely ladies helping misplaced souls cross over to where they ought to be. It still seems like yesterday that the underworld was all over the small screen. When we turned on the box we could regularly quote the famous line from that Bruce Willis film The Sixth Sense: “I see dead people”. From the couch the view was clear: ghosts and beings from the underworld were everywhere.

But for today's viewing pleasure we have a different scenario. Strangely, “I see dead people” still remains true. But they are no longer from the other side: they are spread out on the dissecting table in a hospital or morgue with all their bloody parts akimbo.

During a random sample week (14-20 February 2011) on Sydney free-to-air analog TV, we could watch bodies in various stages of dissection on Sunday (Bones, CSI: Miami—two hours of it—and NCIS: Los Angeles), Monday (NCIS) and Tuesday (NCIS). Although Wednesday gives dissection in the context of crime a break, the hankering after cut bodies is not far away in the Wednesday night medical viewing that also takes us into operating theatres, be it fiction with House, or the real world with RPA and the eminently yukky Embarassing Bodies. This then spills us over to Grey's Anatomy on Thursday. Once we are on Thursday, it's back to the crime context, with cadavers being carved regularly in CSI, CSI: New York, Cold Case, and Law & Order. To finish the week before the Saturday night reprieve, we have on Friday just one offering with an occasional forensic feast: Law & Order.

For a different kind of dissection, if we throw in our fascination for serial killers we can add Serial Killers to Sunday's list, and to Wednesday's Criminal Minds. For those hooked by this initial free-to-air foray, there is many a late night couch being warmed up by those who hope that season five of Dexter, “America's favourite serial killer”, might be delivered free-to-air in Australia sometime before Season 6 is released in the US in September 2011.

What is this slice-of-life (sorry, bad pun) through our culture telling us? Have we explored the afterlife, missed the key to it, and now turned to the grim reality that our fate lies there on the silver table, carved up just like a chunk of meat?

If so, where is that strong Christian voice proclaiming that this is still the world in which a man has risen from the dead?

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