It goes without saying one should not believe everything on television, but the medium can be seen as a place where trends start (or are magnified).

The way people watch soap operas, in part, to obtain decorating ideas or suggestions on what to name the baby, it is easy to watch television and observe where society is going. (And I’ll try not to use the term “dumbing down.” Even a high-end intellectual challenge like “Jeopardy!” rarely asks for knowledge about, for example, classical music. That’s a category that, a few generations ago, was a staple on radio quiz shows, and you were expected to know who composed what. And yes, there were quiz shows back then, not game shows).

Consider the role of The Boss on television, and in reality. Whoever supervises the workplace can be seen as the mentor, the adviser, the man or woman in charge, the one who takes the credit or takes the fall. The television emphasis, lately, has a new definition, the boss as Judge, and if a generation grows up assuming that the way to supervise is as draconian as television depicts it, I expect to see a few bumps in future labor relations.

It can be seen in the many manifestations of “The Apprentice,” wherein contestants place a higher priority on avoiding the wrath of Trump than they do the implementation of their good ideas. In a drama like “Lost” or a so-called reality series such as “Survivor,” we can observe the “Lord of the Flies”-style ascent to power through threats and tyranny. Chef Gordon Ramsey, music critic Simon Cowell — authority figures purporting to be teachers or advisors, for whom nothing, nothing is ever good enough. I wouldn’t last a day with either of these guys as my boss.

Everyone with a job has a boss, and those of us who think we’re in business for ourselves have more bosses than anyone. The next wave of management will be one instructed, through television, to be authority figures first. Wisdom comes further down the list; the satisfaction in television bossdom seems to be in the abuse of people desperate, in the current climate, for a job, any job. This does not augur well.

Television once featured the good-natured but clueless supervisor as a stock character; recall “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or “Spin City.” Even the PBS epic “Upstairs Downstairs” was part of a theatrical tradition going back to ancient Greece, in which the worker bees were smarter, more resourceful and more resilient than their supposed betters. That’s been upended.

An ethos of behavior can be seen in television’s pseudo-courtroom procedural programs — Judge Mathis, Judge Pirro and the rest — who use an archaic model straight out of Victorian novels. Civilization is a smoothly running machine as we have devised it, and when an irregularity or dispute takes place, a superior intelligence (like Sherlock Holmes or Judge Judy) takes command and kicks society back into place. Problem solved, except that it comes with plenty of boisterous and insolent behavior on the part of the renderer of justice.

This attitude has been passed to news readers who don’t object to berating guests of varying governmental power, and to television news departments who do not report the day’s events as much as they “ask the tough questions.” Note the confrontational tone taken in many heavy-rotation commercials, particularly lawyers and car dealers whose first goal is to demonstrate who’s in charge of the client relationship.

Power does not necessarily corrupt, but for a society in which style seems to count for a lot, television is offering malice as power these days, a template for how those in charge are expected to behave. Of course, it often undoes itself. Have you ever observed a platoon of reporters chasing a congressman down a hall, yelling questions and pleading for answers? In a closer-to-perfect system, it would be the elected officials begging the news media for a chance to explain themselves.

For many people, dealing with authority is tough enough. Things tend to operate best when missions are clear, responsibility and accountability are shared, rewards are considered commensurate with the expended work and the labor-management equation is something other than open warfare. Every generation alive in America is, or has been, a television generation, and we’re presently in a wave of programming that depicts leadership as something to be resented. If the Boss is a jerk, he or she should be able to demonstrate it without the role models television currently offers.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears weekly in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.