When a friend described the storyline of American Beauty, I knew immediately, that I would never purposely watch that film, ever. It sounded very sick and with heaping amounts of gratuitous violence. For the same reasons, I never watched Dexter. I thought such a TV series would normalize the wrong things in our culture, especially with young people.
American Beauty was stereotype heaped on stereotype of bad conservative, good liberal. But the liberals were truly depraved, which is what made them good, while the conservatives were just everything that liberals fear. And the whole plot was based around a middle aged man (the protagonist if you will) in heat over a high school girl. Sick.