It must be difficult to be a mainstream journalist. The world is so full of mysteries. Why do crime rates go down when more people own guns? Why do HIV-infection rates go up when you distribute free condoms? Why does tax revenue decrease when you raise tax rates? And hey, why do people keep saying there’s a liberal bias in the news? To the mainstream media, it’s all just one big riddle.

And as it is on the front page, so it is in the arts section. Take this example ^[1] from last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Cultural journalist Greg Braxton was stroking his chin over the success of the CBS TV crime series The Mentalist starring Simon Baker. “An aggressively unhip show with no built-in ‘water cooler’ factor, The Mentalist might try the patience of the most seasoned psychic as to why it has triumphed over more edgy, star-driven fare,” he writes. Braxton considers a number of theories: maybe the show is so old it’s new, maybe Baker’s good looks draw the ladies, maybe it’s the flashes of wit and so on.

But almost unnoticed toward the very end of the article, the show’s creator, Bruno Heller, delivers the obvious answer. Heller co-created the HBO series Rome, which had a shaky first season as it tried too wearyingly hard to shock and tittilate, and then a brilliant second season as it allowed the story of the fall of the Republic to find its natural way.

“After going through that incredibly intense experience, I wanted to do something that was positive, that had joy in it and would make people happy and reassure them that redemption is possible,” Bruno said.

Now, believe me, I’m not one of those conservatives who feel that sex, violence, nihilism and darkness have no place in our entertainments. I want the arts to encompass the whole range of life—plus I like a good nude scene as much as the next guy. But what our cultural critics so often fail to understand is that there is nothing inherently more profound, more worthy or more entertaining in stories of despair and decadence than in stories of faith and decency. What makes The Mentalist so much fun to watch is precisely its sweetness, even innocence. The shy, old-fashioned burgeoning of young love between two of the co-stars, for instance, may not be realistic in its sexlessness, but it’s a warm pleasure to watch, gives you a good feeling and maybe even reminds you of something important in the interplay of men and women—something lost in the graphic sex scenes that win so much critical praise.

And there’s something else. Bruno goes on to say of his work on the show, “I needed to challenge myself—it’s easier to do something that is edgier and complex.”

That’s exactly right and it goes against everything our cultural critics believe. Their highest words of praise are adjectives like “shocking,” “disturbing,” “searing,” and “radical.” They swoon over films like Towelhead, The Woodsman and The Reader that seek to wrong foot our moral senses by presenting us with sympathetic child molesters and Nazis.

But the truth is, any fool can pull off crap like that. It’s easy.

The single hardest thing to do in the arts is not to shock or disturb or sear or radicalize—but to delight. And as the test of time is the test of ultimate value in the arts, I’m willing to bet that reruns of The Mentalist will still be drawing an audience long after the moral idiocy of The Reader is deservedly forgotten.