In oral cultures,''story'' might connote the village historian or tribal sage,the person responsible for interpreting the outside world to kindred with lesser vision,the personal repository of a culture's myth and William Link, creators of the police drama Columbo,gave the title '' The Storyteller'' to their introspective drama about the crisis of conscience faced by a television scriptwriter whose work,aired one evening on network television,portrayed several acts of arson. In the story, the show is seen by a youth who immediately after viewing leaves his home to try to burn down his school.The youth dies of smoke inhalation in the fire.
Levinson and link broke info television writing just as the industry came face to face with questions of the infuence of televised violance on the real world.The many studies,essays,and investigations following the Kennedy assassinations,however inconclusive,at least established the intuition that television can be a factor in why real people do some things and do not do other things.