You never get to read the Kathleen Pike series in “Lucifer.” All you get to know is that it was a high school drama based on the real-life high school that the writer went to. There were teens, who while not engaged in explicit activities, were engaged in swapping boyfriends or girlfriends and petty jealousy. And there were robots, apparently. The last book in the series was finally finished, but the author was dead after completing the last novel with a robot uprising. At least that’s what the manager says, and it took five years to complete.

As the mystery unravels, it comes to light that the last novel in the teen drama sci-fi didn’t include a robot uprising. Instead, the author finished a novel that ended with peace and everyone brought together by the social outcast. The manager was furious, the author was going to kill the series with her ending, but the robot uprising existed, too, written by a fan who had shown it to the author. That was the ending the manager wanted, the one that would sell the most books and keep the franchise viable.

As in real life, violence and dystopia sell. They, along with sex, sell the “Lucifer” show. They sell “Game of Thrones.” They sell every police procedural on television, and almost everything is a police procedural. How many NCIS divisions do we really need? How many good cop, bad cops? How many ways are there to represent people dying? Those are rhetorical questions.

The real answer is that we need to bring balance to our shows. Charlie Brown, “Family Ties,” Mickey Mouse, “I Love Lucy,” “The Facts of Life…” We need more shows that focus on the good in life. Even though “M*A*S*H” was set in the Korean War, it focused on the relationships and the people trying to survive the horrors of war. What entertainment do we have now that’s helping us examine our best ourselves, rather than trying to solve the puzzles of our worst selves with violence and detail or skewering us with sarcasm, satire and rude jokes?