As a kickoff to summer, I decided to finish up The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, HBO’s adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s series of a Botswanan female detective named Precious Ramotswe starring Jill Scott. It’s a totally charming show, and both its tone and content are incredibly different from anything else on television, which makes me particularly sorry that it never got the second season. Precious is neither an anti-hero nor your standard cop with a dark secret—she’s a profoundly nice woman with a streak of steel she acquired during an abusive marriage—and most of the people around her, from her rigid secretary to the hairdresser who refers her clients are also pleasant and kind. The bad people she encounters aren’t great villains. Instead, they’re often petty, weak, or angry, and taking it out on the people around them. And perhaps most importantly, her cases are similarly low-key.

The obsession with murder on American crime shows makes sense for a lot of reasons. Murder and rape, the other pop culture standby, are the crimes we take most seriously: they grab an audience’s attention and lend a sense of urgency to an episode. Murders provide opportunities to whip out the kind of high-tech wizardry that works so well as television transitions, whether it’s a medical examiner explaining something routine to Law & Order detectives, or the geniuses playing with awesome-looking toys on Bones. It also provides an excuse for harsh and theoretically exciting interrogations. And has become almost universally true in both prestige and network drama, there’s a consensus that we reach a truer understanding of humanity by venturing through the darkness rather than by heading towards the light. We’re more interested in divining the motivations of the most depraved people among us than exploring saints or simply good people who maintain from day to day.

This struck me because, despite their wildly differing locales, main characters, and relationships to the American cop show tradition (in one marvelous sequence in Ladies’ Detective Agency, the stylist, who is driving Precious’s secretary Grace, says how pleased he is that they’re bickering because it means they’re living up to trope), the show that most reminds me of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency is The Unusuals. A short-lived ABC cop show with a ludicrously good cast, including Jeremy Renner, Amber Tamblyn, Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau, The Unusuals was distinctive among its network brethren in that that the detectives weren’t always solving murders. Yes, there was an episode where Goldberg and Perrineau’s characters took over an underground murder store as a sting operation and faced a quandary when one of their clients wanted to kill her abusive cop husband. But a lot of the time, the characters were rounding up a one-man band on a nuisance charge, solving a crime spree motivated by the medical bills of an old-school hood, or tracking down a reported zombie that turned out to be a man with Alzheimer’s who had escaped from a nursing home. These were absolutely smaller stories, but they could be beautifully written, revealing of a whole range of life beyond New Yorkers with their heads bashed in or their hearts shot out.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency worked that way by design. As detectives, Precious and Grace were guaranteed to get cases that either didn’t rise to the level of police attention or didn’t concern strict illegality. Watching Precious track down the records that prove a lawyer is committing insurance fraud to help fund an orphanage, or Grace investigate beauty contest candidates for their integrity (an assignment that tests her jealousy and sense of self) is charming and a much more wide-ranging perspective on Botswana than it would be if she was simply another tough cop. I’ve written that we might have an anti-hero glut on television. If we turn away from the old stand-bys, it might be nice to spend time with people who are pleasant rather than saints—and with scenarios that explore our more frequently unleashed petty impulses rather than our mostly-contained dark ones.

At the beginning of Knocked Up, when a group of nerdy Jewish dudes find themselves unexpectedly admitted to a nightclub, schlubby Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) tells his friends that “If any of us get laid tonight it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.” Magic City, Starz’s next attempt to burnish its reputation as a provider of high-quality drama along with its standard doses of reasonably explicit sex and violence, follows the noble and recent pop culture trend of portraying Jews as something other than nebbishes. It stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ike Evans, a recently-remarried widower who built his dream hotel, the Miramar Playa, on Miami Beach, just in time for Castro to take Havana and kick out the casinos, creating a hot new market for a Caribbean vacation spot. It’s the first of the current crop of period shows to put Jewish characters at the center of the frame, and it’s one of the best decisions Mitch Glazer, the show’s creator, made in standing up this gorgeous-looking but uneven drama.

Magic City‘s a personal story for Glazer, who in a conversation with me in January described starting out as an “assistant engineer”—or janitor—a job his father, a lighting engineer who ordered the chandelier for the Eden Roc and put in gambling machine hookups below the floor of the Fountinbleau lobby, got him. Living in the city was also his introduction to both Cuban immigration and the Civil Rights movement. “My parents, I was 7, dragged me to Civil Rights marches in Flagler Street, and we had rotten garbage thrown at us. I remember, because they were very active in what was then a very Southern town,” he told me. “Most of my friends when I was in sixth grade, the first-wave of Cubans, were the white-collar Cubans who came to America, guys who had been lawyers who became short-order cooks. Those were my best friends’ parents. I tried to pass for Cuban for about six months. They just seemed cooler. My high school was 60 percent Jewish, 40 percent Cuban, and Mickey Rourke.”

Magic City is at its best when the show reflects that transition. Ike’s second wife, Vera (Olga Kurylenko) contemplated converting to Judaism on the eve of Ike’s daughters bat mitzvah, and Ike and his father squabble over which of them is the worse Jew. Older Russian emigrees play balalaika on the beach and a louche State Senator from Tallahassee goes on at length about the “Aryan” charms of a potential beauty queen. We’ve had Jews at the margins of Mad Men for years, and with the arrival of Michael Ginsburg in the office, we’ll finally have one at the center of the frame. But I enjoyed how Magic City puts Jews and Jewishness at the forefront of the show, giving a Florida Jewish community far richer than the stereotype of retirees we have today. And Jews aren’t the only community Magic City examines. Work in the Miramar Playa kitchens grinds to a halt as word comes over the radio of Castro and Che’s advance on Havana. And Ike plays off the black residents of Overtown against white picketers who want to unionize the hotel, busting up the picket line by violence. It’s that kind of conflict that shows how perceptive characters are of how the world around them is changing, and how bold they are about taking advantage of shifting power dynamics.

It’s less good when it overreaches in search of drama. Starz’s existing viewers may depend on a heavy dose of nipples and killings, but the gratuitousness of both elements in shows like Magic City or Boss seems more likely than not to turn off the new subscribers Starz would like to woo. There’s a troika of characters in Magic City that should have been recast and rewritten: Steven Strait as Ike’s oldest son Stevie, a sullen seducer whose charms are inexplicable to me but appear to turn every woman around him stupid, Jessica Marais as Lily Diamond, the wife of mobster Benny Diamond (an insanely over-the-top Danny Huston), who begins an impossibly foolish affair with Stevie that serves only to fulfill the sexual quotient, and Huston himself, who lurks around killing dogs and threatening to feed people to sharks. Maybe these things really happened. But I wouldn’t mind if Glazer appeared to trust the power of his memories a bit more.

I spent a lot of my childhood reading the Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library, which is highly recommended for the semi-macabre young person in your life. They’re particularly a good reminder of what our fairy tales really are, and how sanitized Disney in particular and Hollywood in general have made them for mass consumption. But I wonder if we’re at a moment when fairy tales might be having not merely a resurgence, but recovering some of their original, horrific power.

First, there was Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. The movie was a huge disappointment, failing to fulfill its promise to do something novel with the identity of the wolf, and full of cheap-looking foam sets and MTV-styled hair. But it at least had the right impulse: Hardwicke wanted to restore the sense that the night is dark and full of terrors, particularly when you’re surrounded by the big woods. And she was wise to suggest that order can bring fear with it, too, though the message gets watered down a bit when it comes in the form of Gary Oldman in doofy facial hair and wielding the power of a Torture Elephant:

A short film called Red (thanks to io9) does a better job of getting at those ideas. It’s bloody and it’s heartbreaking: if you have to cut your way out of the belly of an animal that’s devoured you and drag the broken body of your grandmother out with you, even if you win, you’re likely to end up fairly traumatized. Becoming a warrior is not always a particularly delightful experience. And having to kill to survive is exhausting:

Snow White and the Huntsman, which arrives in theaters in June, appears to be going the same route, albeit with a bigger special effects budget. The Queen’s evil isn’t implied, she’s not killing her victims with anything as quaint as a poisonous apple. She’s sucking the life force out of them, stabbing them in bed, ravening for their hearts. The forest may be more full of wonders than terrors, but said wonders aren’t of the adorably singing woodland creatures variety. And becoming a hero means going to the front lines in a medieval siege, an enterprise that carries as much risk of grisly death as it does potential for glamour:

By contrast, the dreadful-looking Mirror, Mirror looks like an anachronism precisely because it’s so pristine. These aren’t dark woods so much as they’re a Hollywood set, or an incomplete CGI rendering. It’s hard to be terrified of a world where people’s teeth literally sparkle, and curses turn people into adorable simulacra of puppy dogs. These people are plastic: even if you cut them to the quick, there’d be no blood or guts to spill into that snow.

Once Upon a Time has a bit of that shininess problem, though conceptually, it’s gone darker. There’s a girl who turns into a wolf, and an actual heart in a box that’s been identified as belonging to a character we’ve gotten to know. That’s upsetting, even if we don’t see the organ itself. Grimm, which recently got a second-season pickup, and has improved by focusing on the core relationship between the detective and the werewolf, has been horrific from the beginning: we’ve got stolen organs, fights to the death, and incredibly ugly acts of murder all of them. The premise of the show itself is deeply unnerving—that there’s something else hiding under the skin many of us present to the world.

And Once Upon a Time and Grimm are nodding at a question it’ll be important for fairy tale storytellers to consider if this trend is to continue. In the absence of the dark woods, the arbitrary nature of feudal lords, the horror of high infant mortality rates (at least in the developing world), the wolves that steal the sheep, what are our terrors? And which stories are the best matches for telling them? The persistence of crime dramas would suggest that the big city has replaced the big woods, that serial killers are our ravening beasts. But I’m not sure we have myths to embody the new fears generated by a world that’s much larger than the village, or the disembodied terrors of the digital age.