I think that's a good point, and it's been a cause of concern to me for a while.
It's hard for any work of fiction to avoid caricaturing, and perhaps harder in television than for most media. There you have to establish multiple characters, create a scenario, build up an engaging plot and bring the story to a conclusion within 46 minutes. For many TV writers, this means a reliance upon tropes and conventions to fill in some of the details, it means that the characters need to be all surface (deep introspection, while vital, is boring) and it often means that interactions have to be intense and quick, while in real life that's actually very seldom the case. The actors need to be not just pretty or plain but beautiful or grotesque, because a lot of television bypasses the higher orders of the brain and goes for those biologic cues that we look for at an animal level, such as the presence or absence of symmetry or enhanced sexual characteristics, in order to determine the possible health of a mate. (And lets not forget that more eyeballs on a woman's breasts or a man's chest will also mean more eyeballs on the car commercial that follows, with those sleek curves or rugged features molded in steel rather than flesh).
The problem with that is that after a while the viewers of these caricatures cannot distinguish them from his or her own life. We don't measure up, which fuels our desire for the material products which can then be pitched to become more like these caricatures). We emulate the shallowness because people reading in libraries are boring to watch, even if they are writing the next great novel or researching a case (indeed, about the only time I can think of showing a person reading a book is when someone is selling a vacation on a beach). It becomes a feedback loop.
I would argue that I don't think books are AS bad, though they do pick up that bias. The need for caricature is still there, but what appears perfectly normal in a television series can seem extraordinarily shallow and empty in a book. Characters that might seem funny in the canned laugh-track world of TV comedy become pathetic, snarky and mean when the same is translated to a novel. That's one reason why most avid readers tend not to watch that much television. eBooks right now are facing some of that because a lot of writers in that media are coming from their expectations of television, but I think this is a transitional stage.
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