The Most Provocative Show on TV?

It's a well-worn axiom that cable is where television goes to be edgy and break the rules. The Walking Dead recently featured a cannibal BBQ-session. A tri-breasted hermaphrodite and a killer clown missing his lower jaw populate American Horror Story's fourth season, Freak Show. And yet the most shocking television moments of the fall have come from a major-network  drama, ABC's How to Get Away With Murder. The series, starring Viola Davis as a law professor whose students may or may not have killed her husband, has become the most provocative show on television (and the highest-rated new series, with an average 11.7 million viewers). Its honest depiction of sexuality and race isn't altogether surprising, though, given that Murder's creator, Pete Nowalk, is a protégé of gasp-master Shonda Rhimes (Scandal).