Should we rethink cop shows?
June 6, 2020 7:43 AM Subscribe

Cop shows are undergoing a reckoning as the nation confronts policing in the streets. On TV, cops are always the main characters.

How 70 years of cop shows taught us to valorize the police. Critics discuss if TV is afraid to tackle police brutality or unable to do it well. Is Brooklyn 99 copaganda? The complications of liking Brooklyn 99 as a black man. It's not just an American issue, as Jamie Chu makes observations on watching Hong Kong cop movies after 10 months of tear gas.

posted by toastyk (136 comments total) 37 users marked this as a favorite

I think cop shows are like war movies, they all glorify the police. Given who our police actually are, that's super-problematic. I'd love to watch B99, but cannot because of that.
posted by maxwelton at 7:53 AM on June 6, 2020 [17 favorites]

I heartily support the calls on twitter to suddenly turn Brooklyn 99 into a show about a post office, without apology or explanation.
posted by zamboni at 8:04 AM on June 6, 2020 [161 favorites]

For a more even-handed depiction of the wide world of policing in all its arguable glory and horror, just watch The Wire. Even in season one there is a scene of a bunch of cops beating and kicking a guy (including Kima, a female cop of color, who is also a lesbian, to boot), if that's how you prefer your cop entertainment.

edit.. ah, good, one of these links talk exactly about that 💁🏻‍♂️
posted by Chickenring at 8:05 AM on June 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

Regular reminder that Scalia cited the cop show "24" in his defense of torture.

Beyond the persistent representation of a cop as the main character, another way shows/movies/books seriously distort the public's thinking on this topic is to treat crime and violence as an individual, acute act by an antagonist. In this way, downstream problems will always require downstream solutions. The worse the singular crime, the harder the singular cop (or cops) has to be.

In reality, crime and violence are the products of massive systems of oppression and deprivation across generations. The issue is that those stories aren't as easily told or enjoyed, especially by a society fed a far more simplistic narrative of why crimes happen.

Furthermore, if violence is the mainstream currency of narrative action and the police have a monopoly on violence, it is difficult for a society to imagine a different kind of entertainment, let alone a different kind of world.
posted by Ouverture at 8:10 AM on June 6, 2020 [44 favorites]

I don’t watch TV, at all really, but I purposefully don’t watch TV shows about cops; or lawyers. The general reaction to that is nonplussed at best. What else is there? That’s kind of the point. I also don’t watch shows about doctors. The main reason is that these are such worn out tropes. Surely there are more stories and better narrative devices. Really though, why celebrate institutionalization? Why normalize state violence and intrusion on human bodies. I’m not fluent or current enough on Foucault and power to go into depth, but these kinds of programs are like a panopticon in action. COPS the show was (is?) the worst offender to me, I’m sure there are worse ones by this point.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 8:11 AM on June 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

I think this is what made the Wire such a great show, because it put the "cops" and "criminals" on an equal moral footing, along with other structural elements (city government, lawyers, business leaders, etc.). What made one a sympathetic character was not which side they were on, but whether they even had a moral code in the first place.

Episode 3 of season 1 -- the riot at the housing project -- was the first moment when I realized it wasn't going to be a standard cop show.
posted by panama joe at 8:19 AM on June 6, 2020 [32 favorites]

It's still jarring to me to see Tom Selleck as the protagonist of a show about a heroic Chicago cop family, when even a relatively uninformed person like me has heard horrific things about Chicago cops. You can't take that show as anything BUT copaganda.

I'd be happy for all the cop shows to go dark.
posted by emjaybee at 8:20 AM on June 6, 2020 [28 favorites]

I actually made this post as someone who loves watching at least the HK cop shows/movies, and also a huge number of American cop/investigative shows (until fairly recently - still watching Brooklyn 99). (I mean, if you love action movies, the heroes are all cops in various forms.) As much as any of us are dunking on Brooklyn 99 or Law & Order right now, it's hard to deny that we basically grew up with them, and they are an inextricable part of our pop culture at the moment. So I think it's not about whether we, as individuals, do or don't stop watching them, but it should be about actually reckoning with what we have bought into, willingly or not, and whether we (as a society) can reimagine what and who the heroes are.

*(I have never watched the Wire, dunno if any of that applies.)
posted by toastyk at 8:20 AM on June 6, 2020 [12 favorites]

I heartily support the calls on twitter to suddenly turn Brooklyn 99 into a show about a post office, without apology or explanation.

That's absur… oh my god it's perfect.
posted by atrazine at 8:22 AM on June 6, 2020 [51 favorites]

Realizing how much of our entertainment (I include true crime) is basically cop shows is horrifying in the same way that discovering just how much money police departments soak up from their cities is horrifying.
posted by emjaybee at 8:24 AM on June 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

Cop shows are undergoing a reckoning as the nation confronts policing in the streets. On TV, cops are always the main characters.

Meanwhile, in 1994 ...

BOYCOTT COP CULTURE

Thus the Cop Show has only three characters—victim, criminal and policeperson—but the first two fail to be fully human—only the pig is real.

FULL TEXT*: Resolution for the 90's: Boycott Cop Culture

* words originally published in 1985.
posted by philip-random at 8:25 AM on June 6, 2020 [14 favorites]

Yeah, so one of my comfort shows is Due South. I'm not sure if I could watch it anymore, even though it is so completely removed from reality anyway. I don't know if I could even stomach british detective shows at this point. I was enjoying Babylon Berlin, but a lot of the last season's storylines felt way too close to home.

Also, I keep on thinking about how the TV version of Snowpiercer just debuted and they made the decision to somehow turn it into a cop show? That has to be one of the worst decisions to make about entertainment in quite a while.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:26 AM on June 6, 2020 [17 favorites]

Mrs. Fizz and I were just having this conversation, how it feels like 90% of network television is devoted to cop dramas about truth and justice and blah blah blah. Stories that make people feel comfortable and safe. It's kind of gross when you consider what the actual justice system is like, especially for POC, black people, queer people, minorities, (anyone who is not white).

It's super easy to watch shows like CSI, L&O, Criminal Minds. You can turn off your brain and watch the "bad guys" get punished. But if you turn on your brain and think about what you're watching and how these stories are being told and who gets to dole out the justice and decide what is right and wrong, you see through the cracks and the shows become pure propaganda.

The Wire is amazing and it still holds up. I urge anyone and everyone who has not taken the time to watch that show, do so. Also, give it at least 3 episodes to sink in. It takes time for the first time viewer to learn the shows language and how it wants to tell you it's story. It's very different from all of the other police procedurals and criminal justice shows that we've consumed.

Still making my way through all these links. Thanks for sharing and posting.
posted by Fizz at 8:29 AM on June 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

It's one of those things, I really like the 'buddy cop' dynamic, because it's one of the few times where friendship, chosen family, and getting along with someone you're not necessarily romantically interested in supercedes sexytimes and FAMILY in American entertainment, but I really hate the cop aspect to it. I just want the buddy.
posted by dinty_moore at 8:29 AM on June 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

has Quentin Tarantino ever written a cop character that was properly heroic? I can't immediately think of any.
posted by philip-random at 8:30 AM on June 6, 2020

I think of Brooklyn 99 as part of the same metaphysical universe as Life of Mars, in a scenario spun off from Homicide: Life of the Streets. Frank Pembleton has died and is now in a sort of community policing purgatory, where he can reject his Jesuit indoctrination and come to terms his homosexuality. In between these incarnations, he has inevitably passed through the universe of the Wire, where he was Good Police, and therefore needs exculpation before he can get into The Good Place. I'm not sure if this makes Jake Michael or Eleanor, but the fact that he is married to Shawn should be a giveaway.
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 8:36 AM on June 6, 2020 [21 favorites]

It's not just fictional TV. Cops has been on the air for 20+ years, and Live PD for 4 (though both have paused showing episodes at the moment.) And both have higher ratings than B99.

Fictional cops shows have nothing on these two when it comes to valor-izing police. They are all about showing cops as infallible heroes who get the bad folks. The podcast Headlong: Running from Cops really dug into just how fake and misleading these two really are.
posted by Frayed Knot at 8:38 AM on June 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

One of the clearest memories I have of any of the "Career Days" at my junior high (in a little podunky town) was when someone from our local police department was there, and told us that "people always assume that my job is like on Hill Street Blues, but honestly it's a lot more like Barney Miller." So it seems like we need to bring back the Barney-Miller kind of cop show.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:43 AM on June 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

For a more even-handed depiction of the wide world of policing in all its arguable glory and horror, just watch The Wire. Even in season one there is a scene of a bunch of cops beating and kicking a guy (including Kima, a female cop of color, who is also a lesbian, to boot), if that's how you prefer your cop entertainment.

I tried and couldn't get past the first season of The Wire. I just don't like police shows and I know it was trying to be more realistic but it still felt like it came down too much on the side of the police.
posted by octothorpe at 8:53 AM on June 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

In our house we always refer to any forensics shows as 'Murder Entertainment' and any Law and Order (or variant of) as Sex Crimes Entertainment.

We normally only watch those shows if we are idly flicking channels and happen to see a Guest star or a choppy piece of music&editing, but calling them what they are makes it very hard to actively watch them once you've passively fallen into watching them.

Me: What's on TV?

Boyf: Sex Crimes as Entertainment.

Me: Oh. let's change channel then.
posted by Faintdreams at 8:55 AM on June 6, 2020 [23 favorites]

First of all, I think that everything needs to be run through the Sarkeesian rule:

It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.

The piece about B99 is great. One of the fears I do have about B99 is that it can be a propagandaish in terms of whitewashing the current NYPD and making white people feel better about cops. Nobody in the NYPD acts like they do on B99. B99 is aspirational. It's how we WANT the NYPD to be set up and how we want all other people who work in the machine to act. It's really hard to make sure that aspiration doesn't bleed into propaganda.

The start of season 5 where the jailers were just outright fucking corrupt is a great little "open your eyes" moment because that's not even half as bad as things are in real life and we know it. If Jake acted like he did in prison even in PC he'd be dead first day.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:03 AM on June 6, 2020 [14 favorites]

and any Law and Order (or variant of) as

the thing I always liked about the original Law + Order (not the variants) is how explicitly procedural it was -- how little it bothered to dig into the personal lives of the various cops and lawyer types, but rather kept its focus on the crime at hand, the specifics of investigating it and then working it through the legal process. Yes, there were moments where the cops and lawyers would hang out and get personal, but not many and never for very long. Whereas the criminals (and their victims) were generally the characters who ended up having actual dimension.
posted by philip-random at 9:03 AM on June 6, 2020 [12 favorites]

In our house we always refer to any forensics shows as 'Murder Entertainment' and any Law and Order (or variant of) as Sex Crimes Entertainment.

On South Park they just outright call it "murder porn" which is far more apt.

Contrapoints has a video on violence and how people need permission to enjoy violence because of society morally and socially allowing it. The obvious example being cop shows.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 9:08 AM on June 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm mostly here to remind everyone that Charlie Brookers A Touch of Cloth exists.

Possibly the best send-up of police procedurals I've seen.

---

But yes, cop television is horrible and I literally advise anyone who watches it to stop. Even considering it's possible to enjoy something while also understanding the need for critique and welcoming those critiques.

It's too much. I put cop television up there with all the hackneyed "racists" on television which absolve real racists from their racism by allowing them to say "Well, I'm not like THAT guy who is super obviously a racist, and I'm not." Because the racists on television/in movies are mostly hack one dimensional characters whose entire existence is predicated on them being a "racist." (See: Any new Wolfenstein game)

It's cool that we understand the critiques these shows need, but if 99% of the people watching DON'T and all they take away is that cops are heroes or they're not actually a racist because they're not as bad as the guy in the movie they watched, then honestly it doesn't fucking matter if WE see the valid critique, because we're going to get overrun by the idiots who don't. If people are wondering why cops are responding to calls of police brutality with more police brutality, then you've missed the point: they think they're the heroes because of these shows. They've successfully dehumanized protestors into just another "criminal." How these fucks interpret this shit matters way the fuck more than how we interpret it. We didn't buy the ~~propaganda~~ copaganda, but the people with the power and weapons DID.
posted by deadaluspark at 9:14 AM on June 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

How would The Shield stand up in today's world?

Vic and the strike team are undeniably corrupt and brutal, fighting crime and committing crime in equal measure. Members of the team are racist through and through without apology. There are good cops in the precinct who want to fight back, but they are largely marginalized both as individuals in the precinct and institutionally in their efforts to root out the corruption. And the captain overseeing it all has political aspirations that preclude him from cracking down.
posted by Fukiyama at 9:29 AM on June 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

has Quentin Tarantino ever written a cop character that was properly heroic?

Not written, per se, but Ray Nicolette in Jackie Brown is a hero, in the sense that he doesn't embezzle money and ends up saving the main character's life.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:40 AM on June 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

Would this include shows like, say, Twin Peaks or The X Files, for not making Dale Cooper or Dana Scully into realistic borderline-KKK psychopaths?
posted by acb at 9:43 AM on June 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Dick Wolf loves to do ripped from the headlines stuff, they should do one where Richard Belzer (Belzer still on? It's been that long since I watched a L&O) has to put on his old uniform and beat the shit out of some peaceful demonstrators, or torture someone to death in a cell. Have an episode where the exasperated DA tells the cops to just plant a gun on some black teen so they can get a conviction.
posted by rodlymight at 9:46 AM on June 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

I'm mostly here to remind everyone that Charlie Brookers A Touch of Cloth exists.

Possibly the best send-up of police procedurals I've seen.

I had an idea for a TV show that was essentially a slight refresh of Perry Mason-by-way-of-Ace Attorney; some absurdly lopsided victims' rights law has passed and now, among other things, our heroes have only about the length of an episode of television to convince a jury of suckers that their client is innocent, usually by radically recontextualising the prosecution's argument, demolishing key witnesses and revealing the true murderer.

One of the key ideas was that a lot of the expert witnesses would be thinly-veiled versions of stock detectives and police procedural characters, and naturally the holes in their testimony would be critiques of their particular shows. So you'd have a fussy, high-functioning sociopath who'd jump to absurd conclusions based on details like scratches on your phone case; a Las Vegas-based forensics lab that would muscle in on a case, do their own evidence gathering, and use forensic techniques that aren't reliable enough to use in court; or a 'quirky' private detective who's contaminated the crime scene and charmed the police into letting him essentially run the investigation despite openly admitting he's a con artist. Kind of lightly satirical, at least until people realise that the premise of the show is that the American justice system is fundamentally broken and the people who broke it have names.
posted by Merus at 9:50 AM on June 6, 2020 [17 favorites]

I heartily support the calls on twitter to suddenly turn Brooklyn 99 into a show about a post office, without apology or explanation.

That's absur… oh my god it's perfect.

You'd literally just need to do a cold open where Hitchcock wakes up from a nap on his desk at the post office & announces that he dreamed they were all cops, then the rest of the gang explains all the ways real cops differ from idealized TV cops, & Hitchcock gets on board & agrees it's very good they all work at the post office instead.

(Although having had a desk job with the Census Bureau in 2000 I think I'd like to see that as a sitcom office? Census people are gloriously weird, I suspect they joined up after seeing the scene from Silence of the Lambs where Anthony Hopkins announces that a census-taker once tried to test him therefore he, Anthony Hopkins, ate his, the census-taker's liver, at which point they, the real-life future census employee, thought "Yeah shit I wanna test Anthony Hopkins & get my liver eaten by him, this is my new life's dream. ")
posted by taquito sunrise at 9:53 AM on June 6, 2020 [37 favorites]

Have an episode where the exasperated DA tells the cops to just plant a gun on some black teen so they can get a conviction.

It's been a while, but wasn't there a detail of Sam Waterston's L&O DA character along the lines of having been an idealistic activist lawyer in his younger years, leading him to be conflicted about the right-wing militia that was attempting, as a defence, the same jury nullification he once advocated in defence of left-wing activists? But then, IIRC, the upshot was that he'd abandoned his principles because Criminals Are Bad And His Ideals Were Delusional? I haven't seen that episode since the 90s, but for some reason it's rattling around in the old brain pan.

Fictional cops shows have nothing on these two when it comes to valor-izing police. They are all about showing cops as infallible heroes who get the bad folks. The podcast Headlong: Running from Cops really dug into just how fake and misleading these two really are.

Another recommendation here for Running From COPS -- it is really worth a listen if you're a podcast person (or even if you're not but are interested in how this shit gets made and the impact it has).

These discussions always cast my mind back to Debra Seagal's 1993 essay "Tales From the Cutting Room Floor." She worked in the editing room for "American Detective," one of the byproducts of the initial success of "COPS," and wrote about what gets left out because police departments that participate contractually obligate the show to be pro-police propaganda.

Harper's paywalled link here, and a open-access pdf copy is here (it's a scan of the article, so it's inaccessible for screen readers, but it was the only non-paywalled copy I could dig up):

By the time our 9 million viewers flip on their tubes, we've reduced fifty or sixty hours of mundane and compromising video into short, action-packed segments of tantalizing, crack-filled, dope-dealing, junkie-busting cop culture. How easily we downplay the pathos of the suspect; how cleverly we breeze past the complexities that cast doubt on the very system that has produced the criminal activity in the first place. How effortlessly we smooth out the indiscretions of the lumpen detectives and casually make them appear as pistol-flailing heroes rushing across the screen.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:55 AM on June 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

>Would this include shows like, say, Twin Peaks or The X Files, for not making Dale Cooper or Dana Scully into realistic borderline-KKK psychopaths?

Both of those shows feature by the book FBI agents, (and supernatural themes,) not the sort of distorted police glorifying we are discussing here.

But for the sake of the garbage fire that policing has become in 2020, yes, sure. Let's put those on the list. Also, let's be sure to ban George Herriman's comic strip Krazy Kat for featuring a Officer Pup and his inappropriate affection for a cat and his oppression of the real hero of the story, Ignatz Mouse and his brick.

That's sarcasm, btw. Because if you don't understand the point of these articles or just how insidiously prevalent these hero cop shows are, you can name show after show and play devil's advocate all you like and just not seem to get the point. The point is, these shows are fiction, but people have come to view them as fact. And people are being brutalized and dying because of it.
posted by Catblack at 10:01 AM on June 6, 2020 [9 favorites]

Anecdotal: a colleague and political ally of mine led the fight to get Salinas CA to ban Cops from filming here. They didn't want to film in Carmel or Monterey, no sir. Only in dominantly latino Salinas.
From what I hear, at least in California, there's no a movement to get municipalities to deny filming to cops. Modesto, Manteca. Good, it's a racist show, and the 2006 film C.S.A. nailed the parody perfectly.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 10:17 AM on June 6, 2020 [9 favorites]

Oh I just remembered, James Cameron made the Terminator a cop for a reason: “Cops think of all noncops as less than they are: stupid, weak, and evil”.
posted by toastyk at 10:25 AM on June 6, 2020 [13 favorites]

Similar reckoning going on with crime fiction. I actually think that piece kind of understates the extent to which the PI genre has a surviving and flourishing critique of the justice system and the ways in which marginalized people often can't find justice through the police and the courts. He alludes to it by quoting S.A. Cosby as saying 'while white writers have “dominated crime fiction for a long time, today more writers of color, of L.G.T.B.Q. orientation, and who present as female are tackling the sacred cows of law and order with the passion and intensity of those who have been silenced finally finding their voice.'" (I'm not sure how new that really is: Sara Paretsky has been at it for almost 40 years.) But yeah, there is a lot of crime fiction that totally perpetuates heroic cop narratives. And as some people have been pointing out on Twitter, true crime has some of the same issues.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:30 AM on June 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

I’m not sure that Quentin Tarantino has ever written a properly heroic character, which is why the idea of him anywhere near a Star Trek movie horrifies the living shit out of me.

The closest to a not-especially-fucked up cop was probably Tim Roth’s character in Reservoir Dogs.
posted by drivingmenuts at 10:36 AM on June 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

which is why the idea of him anywhere near a Star Trek movie horrifies the living shit out of me.

Star Trek ideals didn't prevent the world we exist in now, maybe they need some valid critique. (I am in no way saying that Tarantino is capable of "valid critique.")
posted by deadaluspark at 10:41 AM on June 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Twin Peaks and The X-Files weren’t police procedurals as the genre is normally understood. The protagonists were FBI agents so there would be a reason for them to look into all the weird stuff the writers wanted to show the audience through their eyes.

A couple of years ago I tried to watch some old Dragnet episodes. They spent so much time banging on about how allegations of brutality and racism against the LAPD were false, that they might as well have been wearing T-shirts reading “I Do Protest Too Much” in giant neon letters. No wonder real cops liked Jack Webb so much.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:49 AM on June 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

Twin Peaks and The X-Files weren’t police procedurals as the genre is normally understood. The protagonists were FBI agents so there would be a reason for them to look into all the weird stuff the writers wanted to show the audience through their eyes.

The problem is that they both present FBI agents as though they're really interested in pursuing truth and justice. Fox Mulder wants everyone in America to know about the abuse and hidden crimes of the American government.

Meanwhile the real life FBI is infiltrating and shutting down Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter while also putting weapons/bombs in the hands of mentally unstable people so they can swoop in at the last minute and declare they "stopped a terrorist attack" in an attempt to secure more funding.

Yeah, they may not be police procedurals, but they can be tossed in the trash with everything else. There are no Fox Mulders or Dale Coopers in the real life FBI. There are plenty of Dana Scullys (at the beginning of her career anyway), constantly questioning anyone who questions the "official" line. If people forget, that's literally why she was assigned to Mulder, to provide someone to question his methods, research, and conclusions. Essentially, to discredit him. Yep, plenty of Dana Scullys.

The FBI told MLK to kill himself. They need to stop getting a pass. Period.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:52 AM on June 6, 2020 [20 favorites]

Any work of literature is open to audience interpretation, of course, but in my opinion The X-Files went out of its way to establish that Fox Mulder was an extremely unusual agent, his very presence barely tolerated by all but a small handful of his colleagues.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:56 AM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Right, and the fact that Mulder still held his job through many seasons was literally why I knew it was "fiction."

As if they wouldn't use a fine toothed comb to find a reason to get rid of an agent they don't like.
posted by deadaluspark at 10:57 AM on June 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

I heartily support the calls on twitter to suddenly turn Brooklyn 99 into a show about a post office

Rename it Going Postal
posted by sammyo at 11:04 AM on June 6, 2020 [17 favorites]

My suggestion was to turn B99 into a show about an animal shelter, because what's better than Andre Braugher with puppies?

But I would certainly accept a post office.

Also, the USPS needs our love right now.
posted by suelac at 11:10 AM on June 6, 2020 [21 favorites]

It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.

Thanks for this post toastyk.As someone who both watches B99 but also finds it wincy (I also get horrified by the gender politics but this isn't that thread), it was interesting to read the article about how maybe the best B99 episode about Terry getting harassed by white cops was something they 'wanted to do' but didn't actually move on it until they had a Black writer who pushed them into doing it. Even that Slate article, the tv cops who are more visible in #justiceforGeorge are Stephanie Beatriz (woman of color) and LL CoolJ (Black man) and it should be everyone.

Which pushes a drum I like to bang on which is diversifying writer's rooms so that you don't get so much of what people are talking about upthread: cop shows basically being used to defensively respond to public opinion about cops being, on balance, shitty at serving their ENTIRE communities and downright dangerous people to have in many communities.

What always draws me back is I like puzzle-solving mysteries and more often nowadays those shows are cop shows which... bleh. Like I watched Scott and Bailey (hey it's a cop show but all the cops are WOMEN, and many of the cops are deeply flawed) but it was ultimately all about surveillance culture solving a LOT of crimes and I wasn't here for that either.

Cop shows (and courtroom dramas) tend to promote a just-world victim blaming perspective on the criminal justice system and it's a problem. I am firmly on TeamPostOffice.
posted by jessamyn at 11:13 AM on June 6, 2020 [10 favorites]

Rename it Going Postal

Also, the USPS needs our love right now.

So, in the spirit of the USPS needs us right now, let's not make allusions to the continued and ongoing postal-related murders. Because the jobs they created to fight the uptick in workplace violence in the 80's and 90's were disbanded completely in 2009 due to budget cuts, and I'm sure that has something to do with the issue being ongoing.

Also, let's not forget that maybe the Post Office was unfairly attached to a lot of these murders just because they were postal workers, and many of the violent crimes did not involve the Post Office or other postal workers in any way.

In many ways, postal shootings were just evidence of what was to come for the whole nation, and it got unfairly placed on the back of the postal service, and not the way our society is structured. Because surprise, surprise, mass shootings are fucking EVERYWHERE these days, and it's not just postal workers.

Just... yeah. Let's skip anything "Going Postal" related, thanks.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:16 AM on June 6, 2020 [29 favorites]

Rename it Going Postal

Which brings me to what I was just rethinking, which was how much I like the Watch series of Discworld books. I'm not a procedural fan, though I do read mysteries and watch the occasional show.

The mysteries I like almost always have historical settings and authors that have no reason to pretend that the crime-solving apparatus in that setting was run by perfect people, or even decent ones. Otherwise, they're fantasy mysteries. In the Discworld books, Sam Vimes is supposed to be grim and gritty, but he's basically a parfit gentil knight compared to an actual cop. He deals with racial difficulties, but there's no problem he can't solve by firing his bad apples, shouting at the rest of them, and acts of derring-do. I feel increasingly distant from something I grew up enjoying, which, I guess, is part of being alive and thinking.

(And on preview, yes, that joke was worn out in the '90s.)
posted by Countess Elena at 11:18 AM on June 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

As if they wouldn't use a fine toothed comb to find a reason to get rid of an agent they don't like

Yeah, they were actually shown to be doing this on several occasions. The only reason he was kept on was because some of the powerful shadowy figures pulling the strings behind the scenes wanted him there for their own dark purposes. And he only stayed there because he wanted/needed their resources for his personal research into the paranormal and extraterrestrial.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:20 AM on June 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

Shut down all police movies and TV shows - Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post

Bingeing on Cop Propaganda - Nick Martin, The New Republic

I like procedurals because I find the predictability soothing, but I always struggle with how they're basically all fascistic wet dreams. I had the free month of CBS All Access to watch the Star Trek shows, and took a look at some of the other stuff on the service, and holy moly, it's the all authoritarian, all the time channel. And you will see police and military murder so many people without blinking an eye or suffering consequences if you watch these shows. Just dropping people everywhere, with big overpowered guns.

And I think I always spend way more time feeling bad for the two or three mistaken initial suspects who get hauled in, slapped around, have their lives ruined, and then get released because they didn't do it, than the writers of these shows every have. So much unexplored, unchallenged misery and destruction perpetrated by law enforcement on these shows.

I keep trying to find nice chillax shows to replace all the law enforcement ones in my rotation, but TV in the 2000s is just grim and violent, it's a challenge.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 11:21 AM on June 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

I just gotta say that I thought reference to "Dick Wolf" was some kind of inane reference to a really horrible old Penny Arcade comic and I'm only just now realizing that this is a guys REAL NAME.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:26 AM on June 6, 2020 [22 favorites]

I... would not be surprised if - and I say this after hours and hours of avid cop show viewing as a black person - cop shows did actually raise the public tolerance for abuses of power by presenting hypothetical situations to excuse it and engender sympathy. That "24" scenario they kept talking about during the Iraq torture discussions happens on police procedurals too on a smaller scale, and it - engaging in vigilante justice, taking an accomplice hesitant to talk "for a walk" - is often presented as a good policeman's temporary descent into necessary evil. Sometimes there are consequences - a DA yelling at a policeman about how to put this now battered person on the stand to testify while avoiding questions about how he got that way - but the narrative is usually on the side of the officer.
posted by Selena777 at 11:27 AM on June 6, 2020 [23 favorites]

cop shows did actually raise the public tolerance for abuses of power by presenting hypothetical situations to excuse it and engender sympathy.

110% this is literally why these shows exist. Copaganda.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:28 AM on June 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

Brooklyn Nine-Nine : policing :: West Wing : politics. I love both but am fully conscious they are escapist fantasy versions of the real thing.

And my inner 13yo must stand up against Perry Mason being lumped in with copaganda. He's a defense lawyer! The whole premise is that he and his crack assistants show up every week and demonstrate how poorly investigated and baseless the DA's case is! As long as every other show/movie is a reboot these days, I nominate Perry Mason.
posted by Flannery Culp at 11:44 AM on June 6, 2020 [26 favorites]

I almost hate to say this, Flannery Culp, but it's already been done (as I'm skeptical of the outcome): Perry Mason reboot.
posted by sardonyx at 11:54 AM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

There was a revealing moment in an official Brooklyn 99 podcast where the show runners basically said they picked a cop show after doing Parks and Recreation because cop shows are easier on some level. Like, in Parks and Rec, if they wanted to build an episode around an environmental impact study, they had to do a lot of explaining. But an unsolved murder? You're good to go. There's a set formula that the audience is expected to know.

It's revealing, in a lot of ways.
posted by damayanti at 11:54 AM on June 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

The thing about cop shows is that they are about good guys and bad guys. If the cops aren't the good guys they have to be the bad guys. Which makes the criminals the good guys. These types of shows exist but they're usually much more nuanced and tend to be prestige TV (e.g., Power, or The Sopranos).

I don't think you can really make a mainstream cop show that isn't copaganda because it's pablum and nobody wants to think too much about it, so casting the cops as the bad guys is a non-starter. You can make the cops unsympathetic (Andy Sipowicz, as already pointed out) but you can't make the criminals the good guys, because viewer expectation is that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and if the criminals win then the case of the week doesn't get solved. It's just too much to shoehorn into the format. B99 has about one episode per season where Doug Judy shows up, but if every show was like that AND Jake, Holt, and Amy were all terrible people it would be incredibly tiresome.
posted by axiom at 12:15 PM on June 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

My suggestion was to turn B99 into a show about an animal shelter, because what's better than Andre Braugher with puppies?

YOU TOOK... THE WRONG FLUFFY BOY!
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:32 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

I had to throw 21 Bridges away precisely because, for a movie about dirty cops, it spends a lot of time praising cops. I noticed that the film had Chinese backers; authoritarians propping each other is something to take notice of.
posted by SPrintF at 12:40 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Oh I just remembered, James Cameron made the Terminator a cop for a reason: “Cops think of all noncops as less than they are: stupid, weak, and evil”.

Well, of course he would say that as a commie liberal from the left coast. Wait, no, Cameron is a former truck driver born and raised in Kapuskasing ON (pop. 8,292). It’s the Canadian equivalent of being from Columbia, Missouri.

But w/r/t Cameron’s point: I have mentioned before on the blue that my circle of friends in a previous city included an RCMP officer and a CBSA (Canadian Border Services Agency) employee, and their favourite topic of conversation was How Stupid Criminals Are, Part LXXVII. I occasionally wanted to interject, “Well, the ones you guys catch are.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 12:54 PM on June 6, 2020 [6 favorites]

because cop shows are easier on some level

Some writer - probably Stephen King in Danse Macabre, but I could be wrong there - has made the point that if you're doing serial fiction with a recurring cast of main characters, you want a reason why your characters are mucking about in other people's lives novel after novel or episode after episode after episode. And cops, lawyers, doctors, private detectives, they've got that built right into the premise.

So, yeah, cop shows are "easy mode" on that level.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:06 PM on June 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

Seems like the same is true of veterinarians, social workers, and journalists, though.
posted by suelac at 1:09 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Seems like the same is true of veterinarians

James Herriot's series of novels that began with All Creatures Great And Small was adapted into a truly great television series that also featured a future Doctor Who. It's rural veterinarian work, though. A lot of arms going deep into cows for various reasons.
posted by hippybear at 1:14 PM on June 6, 2020 [18 favorites]

Seems like the same is true of veterinarians, social workers, and journalists, though.

Yeah, which is the point - you could build shows around all kinds of things (any other Gen-Xers childhood fans of "Emergency!"?) but to do so you'd not be able to rely so much on the simple "good vs. evil" framing.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:19 PM on June 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

Suelac, I feel like your point is less a disagreement than you might think it is, based on the way it is presented? The "though" at the end seems to insinuate that there isn't a market for these shows?

To be fair yeah, I don't see many about social workers, but veterinary medicine shows are definitely a popular subset of medical shows.

And really? I feel like shows about journalists/TV writers are SUPER common. (I mean, write what you know, right?) Didn't we just live through the comeback of Murphy Brown? The history of people in TV writing about being in TV goes all the way back to Dick van Dyke and even more recent forays like Sports Night, which is even more narrow in that it's about sports journalism specifically.
posted by deadaluspark at 1:20 PM on June 6, 2020

My point is that it's not that hard to make a show with interesting problems and lots of new characters cycling in and out; but it's easiest, as noted above, to make shows with simplistic good/evil dichotomies.

Stories are so important, and they shape so much of how we see the world, and yet our storytellers so often fall back on these false simplicities.
posted by suelac at 1:22 PM on June 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

If you like formulaic procedurals with ensemble casts with less cops, I'll put in a plug for firefighter shows. Dick Wolf has a garbage one, but Station 19 (the Grey's Anatomy spin-off) is excellent. The two 911 shows, 911 set in LA with Nathan Krause and Angela Bassett and 911 Lonestar with Rob Lowe and Liv Tyler, are also good shows that center on firefighters--they do occasionally feature police (Angela Bassett is a cop), but both shows have included bad police plot lines.
posted by hydropsyche at 1:33 PM on June 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Cop shows also have the built-in milieu for action: car chases, shoot outs, hostage situations, etc.--something that your average accountant or insurance agent or social work shows don't have. Yes, its easy mode, but there's a reason why they work. I mean if people wanted to watch characters talking about their feelings and interfering other people's lives, then there would be more soap operas still in existence. That's not to say I'm excusing cop shows. I'm not. I'm just saying there are a number of reasons they are a go-to genre.

Yeah, which is the point - you could build shows around all kinds of things (any other Gen-Xers childhood fans of "Emergency!"?) but to do so you'd not be able to rely so much on the simple "good vs. evil" framing.
posted by soundguy99 at 1:19 PM on June 6

For that particular group of people, this is a must-watch video, (even if Roy was your guy and not Johnny). There is an interesting discussion about the realism of the show and the impact the show had on the real department.
posted by sardonyx at 1:37 PM on June 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

How would The Shield stand up in today's world?

Team Vic Mackie straight up murder one of their team members in the first episode because he got added specifically to root out their corruption. They are introduced as pieces of shit, and if you remember how Vic ended up, it's real clear the show itself never meant them to be anything beyond "pieces of shit".
posted by sideshow at 1:44 PM on June 6, 2020 [4 favorites]

I tried and couldn't get past the first season of The Wire. I just don't like police shows and I know it was trying to be more realistic but it still felt like it came down too much on the side of the police.

The Wire is much better than most but it is still often something of a "cop's eye view" - I assume because in David Simon's career as a crime reporter those were the people he worked most closely with. There is a point in the show though (season 4) at which the police subplots fade into the background for a while.
posted by atoxyl at 1:56 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Emergency! is the most realistic of fire shows/movies. Everyone’s always cleaning, or in the kitchen or at the hospital drinking coffee, lunch/dinner are the most important topics of conversation, someone is always making a terrible decision and the rest of the firehouse is giving them shit about it when they find out, and not every person or every building survives.

LACoFD Capt (Ret) Mike Stoker (Fireman Stoker on ENG51 on the show) happened to have his SAG card and was trusted to drive the rigs. The scripts were also reviewed by active chiefs of the dept.

That being said, except for a few days in your career - if that - are you going to run a cardiac arrest, a downed plane, a high angle rescue operation, a commercial structure fire, then oh yeah then you’ve been banged out mutual aid for a massive wildland fire in one shift. The rest of the show is absolutely true to firehouse life.

:::has a framed autographed picture of Johnny and Roy in front of SQD51 that she received as a gift hanging in her bedroom:::

KMG365
posted by sara is disenchanted at 2:19 PM on June 6, 2020 [17 favorites]

I don't remember much about Emergency! other than the alarm noise and a life-long desire to have a car with that yellow-green paint job. Oh, and some episode where a kid ate too much bread dough and it was rising in his stomach.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine could be about a post office or a school and I'd watch it again. As it is, it's an amazing cast that I wish were doing literally anything else.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 2:22 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

I have a longstanding fondness for the consulting-detective genre. Not just Sherlock and Elementary, but Psych and The Mentorist and Lucifer and Monk and Bones and Numbers and iZombie and The Blacklist... you know, the ones where a brilliant but quirky character needs to help out a police department with their expertise.

Except most of what they do is help police get around the law. Almost every episode they're breaking into places without warrants, tampering with evidence, interfering with witnesses, and doing whatever they can to make the cops' jobs easier, whether it's illegal or not.

The message isn't subtle; the cops are too bound by the law, and you, yes you you brilliant citizen, could make everything run so much smoother if you were a cop and there weren't all these pesky laws around limiting what cops could do.

I've stopped watching cop shows lately.
posted by MrVisible at 2:38 PM on June 6, 2020 [25 favorites]

I enjoyed Sledge Hammer for its parody of the whole Dirty Harry vigilante-style cop genre. The thing is, you only have to exaggerate a very little bit to show how ridiculous it is.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 2:47 PM on June 6, 2020 [11 favorites]

The problem with antiheroic pieces of shit as protagonists is that, for a lot of viewers, their stories remain aspirational. Never kid yourself that people watched The Shield and didn't think Vic Mackie was a role model. See also half of all Martin Scorsese movies. It doesn't mean these shows and movies aren't great, but it does mean that viewers may not engage with them in the way one might hope.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:49 PM on June 6, 2020 [9 favorites]

What's interesting about Brooklyn 99 for me as a part of this genre is that it's only sort of a cop show -- it treats the world of police as the setting for an office comedy. So the points upthread about the writers wanting a setting that's easy mode for writing make sense to me (even if what that says about our culture is unflattering in the extreme). I don't know if this is common in other cop shows! I only noticed it because Mr. eirias asked me about some of the cases and what they were like and I had to admit I really had no idea after watching like two and a half seasons. I care zero about the crimes or their resolution, I just want to watch quirky people bounce off each other and love each other a little bit for twenty minutes.

Sure feel pretty awkward/guilty watching it this week, though.
posted by eirias at 2:55 PM on June 6, 2020

it's real clear the show itself never meant them to be anything beyond "pieces of shit"

That show is a partial indictment of the viewer, in hindsight, getting visceral pleasure from Vic and his crew escaping consequences one more time, and one more time again, season after season. The end is a bit of a tease, even: Vic is free, maybe a little more constrained than before, but still hungry for action and ready to work the streets for it.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:32 PM on June 6, 2020

It doesn't mean these shows and movies aren't great, but it does mean that viewers may not engage with them in the way one might hope.

Indeed. At the core of most cop shows, I can't even begin to pretend I've seen anything close to the majority of such an unending genre, is the idea that the urban environment itself is a threat. In some shows it may be that the cops act as an alleged balance upholding the status quo through their individual acts of valor and exceptional moral discernment, but in other shows, the ones often praised for being more "gritty" and "real", the city is shown as a blighted urban virtual hellscape of amorality, when contrasted to the existence of assumed viewership of suburban whites to whom the shows are mostly pitched at in hopes of maximizing revenue.

A telling sign is often how the shows handle class and money. "Gritty" shows are those that have the cops more frequently deal with the underclass and marginal members of society and the drama within the shows comes as much from how "life on the streets" is inherently dangerous and fraught with amorality and that is echoed in the police department itself, making heroic behavior either near doomed from the start or selling the cops as truly exceptional moral figures who have to regularly deal with scum and somehow manage to stay mostly unsullied themselves. While the shows like Law and Order tend to show the cops standing up to the wealthy and protecting the vulnerable against class privilege, which affirms the middle class values of anti-intellectualism and distrust of elites, while feeling good about how the poor and minorities are treated.

Along with this comes the narrative need/strategy of subversion of expectations, used so consistently in the same ways that it itself becomes a constant. The need to suggest "this guy" is obviously guilty, only to have further investigation by our good officers find someone else is actually behind the crime, leads to certain regularly reoccuring tropes that reassert the values of the status quo. Back in the nineties, for example, the first few seasons of Law and Order used to run as marathons overnight and I tracked the way the show handled its depictions of guilt. The sheer number of episodes where some white guy was seemingly the guilty party only to have to revealed that it was actually a woman who either committed the murder or was morally responsible for it, as in a son committing a crime because of the influence of a bad mother, was way out of proportion to anything like actual crime statistics or reason. Add to that the regular feature of the DA's, played by white guys, having to correct their "bleeding heart" assistants, played by young women, the status quo was rarely threatened.

Along with that comes the way black characters are used in the shows, often having positions of authority among the cops, as a way to upend any claims of racism as their characters direct or sign off on the actions the cops undertake. They usually aren't the main character, they just support that character's action in ways that act as a buffer to complaint. Even when they might be listed as co-stars within the credits, they are often the characters who are either more removed from the main action or more in the dark about the "real" reasons for events and have to be corrected by the white star the show uses as its primary source of identification for the audience.

Within the cop show genre, there are a lot of variations of course. Some shows, like CSI (Las Vegas) or Bones are more or less science fiction. Where the hook of the show is that science, as shown practiced in their "futuristic-now" settings, is the ultimate determinant in truth that the cops unyieldingly adhere to. The moral conflicts of those shows are often about attachment to the victims, too much or too little, and how that can potentially skew results if the cops don't maintain their moral compass. Something like Law and Order: Criminal Intent does something vaguely similar, but instead of a science fiction-like take, it relies on the ability of Goren's uncanny ability to unearth the underlying psychological cause for the perpetrators actions, as if he was an Ernest Jones's Hamlet turned detective deconstructing character's tragic flaws. With all the shows the who-dun-it aspect is just the hook relied on for the characters and through them the audience to act as moral arbiters of events, and through that the expectation is that white audiences won't be discomforted. (Law and Order: SVU is somewhat different than most, but that's a whole separate thing.)

Interestingly perhaps, one of the things that tends to distinguish supernatural shows from the normal cop dramas is in how often the supernatural show are set in places outside the big city urban environments or in out of the way areas within city boundaries perhaps. The problems those shows deal with are, oddly enough, not crime per se, but demons, monsters, and aliens, things that don't implicate the suburban or rural characters in purposeful commissions of crime, but as unexplained events that strike the characters from evil outside forces.

That the main characters in such shows are often not cops is fitting given these events are outside the jurisdiction of such law and order types. As with cop shows there is a pronounced tendency to celebrate certain values of the status quo, even when they "invert" some common tropes, like the early seasons of X-Files, where Mulder gets the more traditionally "feminine" trait of intuitive understanding and Scully gets the more "masculine" skepticism, but as the show is about the supernatural it just means the man is still correcting the woman. The show Supernatural is based around a good old boy, Dean, and his college educated brother, Sam as they investigate and dispatch demons and the like, with Dean's old school know how being the driving force and the attitude which Sam's more "liberal" attitude and that of the other characters are set off against. Like so many of these shows and even some of the more grounded cop dramas, the shows frequently go so far as to use that ideal to school black people and other minorities on morality, including racism, through a thinly veiled symbolic likeness. (See also Star Trek and any number of other shows outside the law and order genre.)

At the heart of so many cop shows and other near associated genres lies the central ideal of dynamic individualism. The cops, paranormal investigators, super heroes, or whatever, aren't just fighting crime, but are also fighting the system, a government or other systemic figures in doling out justice. The system is stacked against them and it is only through their exceptional abilities and discernment of events that they are able to succeed. Cop shows and the like might celebrate a "family" of moral authorities and sometimes the rules or laws on which they draw their claims of righteousness, but they do not tend to celebrate the system as a whole, as they are beset by forces seeking to undermine their, and our, true values, values that continually reassert the right life is one that the white middle class likes to believe it holds. There is rarely any meaningful challenge to that perspective.
posted by gusottertrout at 4:22 PM on June 6, 2020 [29 favorites]

I think it's hard to discuss cop shows on television and not mention NYPD Blue. The entire arc of the lengthy series was Andy Sipowicz being a racist, brutal bastard and being called out on it constantly by co-workers and loved ones until he finally learns how to be a real person instead of an asshole.

I really disagree. One of the things that show goes way out of its way to avoid doing is to suggest that Sipowicz's police work was ever compromised by his every-fucking-ism there is. By his drinking, yes; but we are shown over and over again that Sipowicz is a damn near inerrant cop when sober, with astoundingly accurate instincts. This notion of the savvy cop who can always spot the lie or the inconsistency in the end, and whose policing just isn't impacted by his various bigotries, is a profoundly damaging one holding up a lot of bullshit support of the cops.

Further, Sipowicz is, in the end, a sympathetic figure, an everyman, almost Christ-like in certain sequences. Infinitely forgiveable, infinitely worthy of being forgiven. Even if years after meeting the gay character he's reluctant to let the guy babysit his toddler son because...well...YOU KNOW. Gay John doesn't mind, isn't offended that because he's gay he's likely to be a rapist and a pedophile! He understands Sipowicz's struggle!

And most of the time, no, he is not "called out on it." His Black commanding officer knows Sipowicz is a racist piece of crap but he goes out of his way to salvage his career, MULTIPLE times. He starts off making an obscene gesture to a lady DA and he ends up getting to marry her!

NYPD Blue has held up better than most shows of its era, considered artistically. But there's still a lot of pernicious nonsense embedded in there.
posted by praemunire at 4:46 PM on June 6, 2020 [14 favorites]

I tire of the gun being used as the easiest prop ever. Used to be the cigarette. Now; just have any random character for no reason; running around with a gun; as if it was all but a cheeseburger from a fast food joint. Cheap, easy, lazy tv at its finest.

Sorry to break the thread pattern. Unable to watch cop shows save for The Wire; which as above a few times; was hardly a standard 'cop show'.
posted by Afghan Stan at 5:02 PM on June 6, 2020 [3 favorites]

And yet there's moments like at the end of one episode where Andy hangs up the phone after talking to one of his colleagues about a case in the evening, and his pregnant wife says to him "If you ever talk like that around our child we are through" or words to that effect.

The assumption is that a man who uses a gesture to substitute for the n-word (as he explicitly tells her in that scene he is doing) when talking about people who he effectively has power of life or death over, even while their taxes pay his salary, deserves to stay married to any halfway decent woman. The man, who loses a LOT over the course of the show, never loses a single thing because of his -isms, except his feelings are hurt that the little daughter of the murdered Black activist he referred to with the n-word might think less of him because her mom is trying to "teach her to hate him." His drinking is punishable in the moral universe of the show; his many and varied bigotries are not, and it's kept that way by pretending they're personal failings rather than a contribution to a huge systemic problem.

There's nothing complicated about whether a man with known views like Sipowicz's should have been armed and given the authority to kill people by the state. Really nothing.
posted by praemunire at 5:05 PM on June 6, 2020 [12 favorites]

I've been working through the 1001 Movies to Watch Before You Die and watched Dirty Harry a few weeks ago for the first time and boy is that some scary fascist propaganda.
posted by octothorpe at 5:35 PM on June 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

Re COPS : if you haven't yet seen TROOPS, do yourself a favor and watch it. Truly captures the essence of what it's parodying.
posted by splitpeasoup at 6:21 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Original SNL riffed on this 40+ years ago. "Another drug-related death!"
posted by zaixfeep at 7:02 PM on June 6, 2020

I’m not usually a big fan of police procedurals, but I did enjoy The Closer while it was on. I don’t think I remember it well enough to consider how much it glorifies cops (certainly to some extent) but I’d be interested in other folks’ take.
posted by nickmark at 7:19 PM on June 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

I found the central premise of The Closer to be deeply problematic, at least in the few early episodes I watched, as the main character's big skill is essentially in getting suspects to confess to crimes or implicate themselves through rhetorical pressure to get around their right to remain silent and have an attorney speak for them. It's a common enough trick in the police show arsenal, helps prove the cops are right, but with The Closer it was really amplified beyond my tolerance.

Just watched the short film posted to the front page, Binge Watching, and it helped clarify one of the most important things about cop shows, which is for most white audience members the shows are essentially fantasies or cautionary fables about strange and dangerous lands, like NYC or London as in the short, as most white people don't really have much experience with cops outside maybe a traffic stop, much less racism, so the shows only tangentially reflect lived reality to many whites, which in part is why so many of the shows feature serial killers, criminal masterminds and vast conspiracies as those are more threatening to the viewers than racist cops would be as those racist cops are in fact protecting white isolationism.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:48 PM on June 6, 2020 [9 favorites]

Okay, I've been thinking about it, and I've got a pilot I want to pitch. Hear me out, here.

We start with a wide shot of a police precinct, as a suspect is being booked. Except it's the standard cop show ending scene. The suspect is hauled off, there's a bit of banter, and then someone yells cut.

The actors playing the cops drop out of character, and we're introduced to the rest of the cast; the crew of a cop show. A bunch of talented people who work together every week to make a quality show that deals with 'the issues'. And in the next half hour or so we're introduced to their lives, their work habits, their relationships. Every week they figure out how to take a script and make it happen, solve all the problems of stunts and car chases and action scenes; there's pressure from the network, tight budgets, danger, romance, good-looking people in a non-traditional but still very structured workplace drama.

And then at the end of the pilot, news of the police riots of 2020 begins to break.

I want to see a show that's about a cop show dealing with this new public understanding of the nature of our police. I want to see how the cast and crew, how the director and the writing staff react to the sudden change in the nature of their jobs.

The television industry is going to have to look at this one way or another. They're going to have to examine their role in what society has become, and the more transparently they do it they better off they'll be. They may as well make a series out of it.
posted by MrVisible at 7:57 PM on June 6, 2020 [15 favorites]

There's your B99 pivot. Season 8, episode 1: cold open, cut! and transition to Samberg, Beatriz, Dan Goor, etc as themselves figuring out what to do with a goofy workplace comedy cop show in the current climate.
posted by Flannery Culp at 8:09 PM on June 6, 2020 [8 favorites]

'Between The Lines' (1992-1994) was kinda like a cop show, but the protagonists were internal affairs investigators, and the actual cops were threatening to kill them in almost every episode..
posted by ovvl at 9:17 PM on June 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

telling Americans they can't talk about cop shows is like telling the English they can't discuss Shakespeare. It's cultural currency. There's buy-in from many angles, agreed upon value. At least, there was ...
posted by philip-random at 11:29 PM on June 6, 2020 [5 favorites]

I watched "The Wire", for the first time, under Covid lockdown. The show unrolls against a canvas of a Baltimore that changed during the course of the show (payphones gave way to burner phones) and that the writers seemed keen to keen to emphasise was continuing the change: we see the declining stage of a local newspaper for example. The show's conclusion was that "everything continues": take out a drug gang, corrupt politician, hard working teacher or alcoholic police officer - and new figures will emerge to take their place. The city is much bigger than its inhabitants: even (and perhaps especially) the heroes and villains - of whom the show dispatched so many with little regard to its fanbase.

I believe that David Simon offered to consider making a 6th season for the show just as soon as anything really changed with drugs in Baltimore or in the United States. The show might have done so well as to attract presidential interest - but the message was still of a meat grinder. The wide and unrelenting nature of police operations might serve as positive encouragement for the backers of dozens of "CSI-like" low-end dramas - but they look grim to whoever tries to depict things as they really are.

I watched the final episodes as the reaction to George Floyd's murder played out. 2020 has been a year of discontinuous experiences: a plethora of events that we have not seen before. It is a reminder that the way that we see the police: the way that we fund, control and dramatize them - are not necessarily set in stone. Big changes can sometimes come quite rapidly in a way that eclipses the scope of any precinct .
posted by rongorongo at 12:48 AM on June 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

What are you people waiting for.

Metafilter: A lot of arms going deep into cows for various reasons.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:18 AM on June 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

Cops has always been a nauseating concept to me, filming police arresting poor/minority people as entertainment/propaganda. Of course anything that makes the cops look bad never makes it to the broadcast, as well. It kind of fit with the god awful copaganda "World's Most Dangerous Police Chases" type shows where the narrator was always, always super into telling the viewer just how crazy it is to run from cops, and how cops are always not only the good guys, but always, always right.

Years back, there were a series of articles on how the CSI shows actually made court cases more difficult since the shows made it look like it was always easy to get a DNA match, or do science magic to find out who did it. Rather than maybe do something about how fictional representations of police work affected the populations understanding of how things work, it seems more like shows now are using that as a guideline: tell everyone the cops are always good, and they'll have a hard time believing real cops could possibly do anything bad.

I've largely stopped watching cop shows, but the few that make it over here on Japanese cable are pretty stunningly blatant. I saw about half an episode of Chicago PD and it just seemed like the guy who was portrayed as the hero of the show was aggressively and violently violating as many rights as possible. It was very clearly filmed in a way that told the viewer "this conduct is perfectly fine" and was utterly revolting to me. Pretty much all of the First Responder Porn out there is in line with this, the cops (fire fighters, whatever) are all good people doing the best they can, and are incapable of being in the wrong.

To juxtapose that with nuanced shows like the Shield or the Wire, it's an argument that America in 2020 is entirely a different nation than it was in the early 2000s. The Shield was based on the very real Rampart scandal, yet, like every anti-hero so far, you have people who just utterly missed the point or needed a focal character to cheer for, which gives us people who think Mackie was the hero and his actions were okay "because they got the job done," which no part of the show or anyone involved in making it would agree with. Honestly, the Shield is maybe the closest an American cop show has come to having All Cops Are Bastards as its premise.

As far as the Wire and people who were turned off by the first season (which is, even with all the pretty astounding stuff going on, very much a cops vs drug dealers season), it might be worth watching the 4th season, where the main point of view characters are junior high school kids, and the cops are ineffectual at best, or otherwise outright antagonists. I've always agreed with the idea that the main character of the series is Baltimore itself, and the show uses the city and the characters as a way to address the decline of the nation. If you haven't seen at least the 4th season, it's worth a go.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:37 AM on June 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

rongorongo beat me to it, damn. As far as a sixth season, I remember reading an interview with Simon saying that he and Burns didn't really have it in them. Burns was the main resource for the police and education storylines, having been a detective and then a teacher, and Simon used his understanding of the city through years of reporting on it to tell the stories through 5 seasons. For a possible 6th season, Simon said the only possible storyline (at the time) would have been to explore immigration and the changing demographic of the city, especially with regards to the growing Latinx population, but that neither he nor Burns were in any way knowledgeable enough to write anything that could do a sixth season justice, even if they were able to convince HBO to do it.

Bonus points, I guess, for the guy realizing the limits of his expertise, but maybe minus points for not being willing to pass the mic over to people who had said expertise, even if it's highly unlikely HBO would have gone for a season not overseen by Simon.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:44 AM on June 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

I don't think you can really make a mainstream cop show that isn't copaganda because it's pablum and nobody wants to think too much about it, so casting the cops as the bad guys is a non-starter. You can make the cops unsympathetic (Andy Sipowicz, as already pointed out) but you can't make the criminals the good guys, because viewer expectation is that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and if the criminals win then the case of the week doesn't get solved.

One of the reasons why Perry Mason and Ace Attorney work is that they're usually defending the innocent, and part of the format is working out who is actually the culprit. This lets you cast cops and the System as the bad guys without having to make criminals the good guys, so long as you accept the slight untruth that it's reasonable for defence attorneys to go so far as to lay out an alternative explanation that not only exonerates their client but allows the police to arrest someone else. (Ace Attorney manages to push this a little further than Perry Mason by having its cases structured so that, instead of throwing out an accusation directly to a witness and requiring them to break down and confess, the protagonists lay out a plausible alternative explanation that can only be true if a specific piece of evidence exists in a specific place that no-one thought to check.)
posted by Merus at 2:01 AM on June 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I don't think you can really make a mainstream cop show that isn't copaganda because it's pablum and nobody wants to think too much about it, so casting the cops as the bad guys is a non-starter.

The BBC's Line of Duty deals explicitly with police corruption, and goes the whole nine yards on quis custodiet ipsos custodes?* It's by no means perfect, and I can think of all kinds of criticisms, but if you want a mainstream cop show where all cops are bastards, or at the very least borderline criminal, this is probably as close as you can get.

For what it's worth, I don't much care for the genre for obvious reasons. I won't leap to its defence for having enjoyed the less offensive ones. I think at its best it can confront notions of justice, right and wrong, unreliable memory etc, but yes, always too much copaganda. I would argue that The Wire avoided this by being more than just a cop show, and that B99 is not a cop show at all, or even a spoof cop show, but eh... what I said upthread.

* (yes i had to google that i'm not frank pembleton)
posted by Elizabeth the Thirteenth at 2:53 AM on June 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

telling Americans they can't talk about cop shows is like telling the English they can't discuss Shakespeare.

further to this ...

sometime in the hopefully not too distant future, a history will be told that purports to make sense of America, its rise, fall etc. I can't help but feel that a deep study of the THE COP SHOW will end up being part of making sense of it all -- toward understanding why this supposedly FREE (TM) nation was so hung up on police and policing. All I can say is, you had to be there, particularly the latter part of the 20th Century, the days of ubiquitous broadcast TV, the three big networks -- three hundred million people essentially dependent on three basic filters (all offering not particularly different versions of the same thing) for not just their news, but also their fun and games ... and all of it intensely profit driven, which meant if you wanted to do something good, something literary even, with depth of character and complexity of situation, you bloody well bet you had to shoehorn it into something that so-called average Joes (and Janes) would feel compelled to watch, and yeah, cop shows just seemed the obvious choice much of the time because ... well, good guys and bad guys, stories that by their very nature (crime committed, crime investigated, crime solved) aligned with the limitations of the TV hour (usually more like 44 minutes after all the commercial interruptions and whatnot).

So if you're an ambitious creative type who wants to work an arc of a character "... being a racist, brutal bastard and being called out on it constantly by co-workers and loved ones until he finally learns how to be a real person instead of an asshole" -- well, make him a cop. It's a no-brainer. At least, it was. Just like, I suppose, in Shakespeare's time, if you had similar ambitions for your dramas, you'd be an idiot not to make your leads kings and queens, princesses and princes.

You gotta give the people what they want.
posted by philip-random at 8:14 AM on June 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

In the vein if alternative settings for cop shows, I feel like if you wanted to make a gritty / quirky serial drama that touches lots of people's lives you could do worse than setting it in library. Our friend worked in our library in our urban neighborhood in a Pittsburgh but and she ended up just buying her own Narcan because she was administrating a couple of times a week. It serves in a fairly economically and racially diverse set of neighboods, not especially "urban" as it's usually used. Librarians make good "good guys".
posted by DarthDuckie at 8:55 AM on June 7, 2020 [25 favorites]

^^^ I support this idea ^^^
posted by jessamyn at 10:21 AM on June 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

if you wanted to do something good, something literary even, with depth of character and complexity of situation [...] cop shows just seemed the obvious choice much of the time

There are some commercial attractions to this choice too; if I were a nervous investor looking for a show to back - then I could see the strong appeal. Sure, the market is crazily crowded with other material - but the format has a 70 year track record in pulling in viewers and advertisers successfully (and internationally). The writers aren't going to run out of ideas because there are so many usable tropes (and real life criminals inspiring the same occasional novelties). There is a world of people in the business who know how to write, cast and shoot such material. We can get cheap acting talent and keep them on if they are good; dispatch them quickly and messily if they aren't. There is no expectation of an end to the story - so no tricky long story arcs or "end of show" moments. Cop shows are truly the pizza parlour of TV show genres.
posted by rongorongo at 10:34 AM on June 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

"This is the library. I'm Jessamyn. I carry a card."
posted by Flannery Culp at 10:35 AM on June 7, 2020 [13 favorites]

OK, now someone needs to do Columbo. I haven't seen enough episodes to claim expertise, but it seems to have a few notable aspects in its favor (similar to Barney Miller): the criminals were usually wealthy elites, Columbo himself is working class, and I don't recall him ever using guns (or any form of violence) or violating rights, although he does often trick the criminal into confessing. And he's probably one of the least threatening TV cops ever, right up there with Abe Vigoda's Fish & Joe Lo Truglio's Charles Boyle.
posted by Saxon Kane at 12:43 PM on June 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

Columbo exists in an alternative universe where blacks essentially don't exist. It's a favorite place for Hollywood to set shows and movies as it allows for pure escapism where the white audience doesn't have to think about pesky things like representation onscreen or the world outside. Columbo's big thing is in tripping up those elite types by their arrogance matched against his more humble gifts. It's a working class fantasy, closer to Murder She Wrote than Kojak, where the middle brow values triumph over fancy elitists for being snobs. Of the many crimes of the wealthy, them murdering each other really doesn't rate very high on real world concerns, so there is little connection between the real world and the show even on that account.

Fun fact, the second episode of Columbo, the one Spielberg directed, aired on September 15th 1971, two days after the New York State Police stormed Attica and killed 25 inmates and nine hostages. The Attica prison riot was largely motivated by the racism and abuse prisoners were experiencing, which didn't end with the police retaking the prison as one of the main spokesmen for the prisoners, Elliot Barkley, was said to have been hunted down and killed after the prisoners surrendered purely as retaliation for speaking out. The world of Columbo exists in order for Attica to be ignored and the police to be seen as coming from someplace closer to Mayberry than the real world.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:36 PM on June 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

Lookit this, Metafilter sounding like a punk show, haha, Yes!

Who's Gonna Witness for the Good Cop?
Who's Gonna Witness for the Bad Cop?
Who's Gonna Make A Million Dollar Motion Picture?
Who's Gonna Pay a Million Dollars just to see it?
Who? You!!!
posted by eustatic at 2:48 PM on June 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

t's not just fictional TV. Cops has been on the air for 20+ years, and Live PD for 4 (though both have paused showing episodes at the moment.) And both have higher ratings than B99.

Fictional cops shows have nothing on these two when it comes to valor-izing police. They are all about showing cops as infallible heroes who get the bad folks. The podcast Headlong: Running from Cops really dug into just how fake and misleading these two really are.

For me it really came into focus on an episode of Live PD in which an officer started firing out of his window during a chase. It cut back to the hosts, one of which pointed out that you are taught never to do that unless there is an imminent danger to the public. But then he quickly justified it with, "So he must have seen something that led him to believe that there was." I understand that they rely on the cooperation of the individual municipalities to provide them with their content, but there have been a lot of situations on that show that need calling out.

I was speaking with a police Sargent in our town once who said that he walked in and was dismayed to find a rookie officer watching Cops while waiting for his shift to begin. He sat down with the officer and used it as a teaching opportunity that concluded with, "And stop watching that show before you get any bad ideas."
posted by dances with hamsters at 3:21 PM on June 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

Columbo exists in an alternative universe where blacks essentially don't exist.

so what if there was a Columbo remake where he was black? Everything else would stay pretty much the same, except it would be a black man "... tripping up those elite types by their arrogance matched against his more humble gifts." You could probably just work from the same old scripts.

Though personally, I'd be way more interested in seeing Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins' stories given a solid adaptation.
posted by philip-random at 3:56 PM on June 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Columbo exists in an alternative universe where blacks essentially don't exist.

Interesting. As I've said, I've only seen a handful of episodes, but I don't recall many (or any?) black characters, except maybe in the background or having inconsequential line here or there.

I'd also be interested to hear what people say about Luther, which of course stars Idris Elba. I tried watching it once, but there were so many cheesy cliches in the first episode that I don't think I even got through more than 20 min.
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:02 PM on June 7, 2020

Columbo exists in an alternative universe where blacks essentially don't exist.

I noticed the same thing about Twin Peaks.
posted by acb at 4:09 PM on June 7, 2020

acb:

I'm a big Lynch fan, but there are few black people in any of his films. In Twin Peaks there's a black female doctor in the pilot, maybe a couple of other black characters here and there, but that's it. Same with pretty much all of his work. I think part of it is that his aesthetic is often about finding the unsettling and disturbing underneath the patina of 1950s White Americana, but it is still very problematic, and I wish he would be more inclusive in his casting (and, probably, behind the camera too).

Now remembering: In Wild at Heart, there are 2 black minor characters, both criminals. Terry Crews (?!) of all people has a small part in Inland Empire, but no other black characters I can think of until the very end, when there's a dance sequence featuring black women performing to, I think, a Nina Simone song? And in the Showtime Twin Peaks series, there is a black sex-worker character named Jade who is topless in her first appearance, which isn't exactly the most, um, progressive way to introduce a black character.
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:25 PM on June 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I also just remembered that Clarence Williams III plays an FBI Agent sent to investigate Cooper during season 2.
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:34 PM on June 7, 2020

Thanks for posting this. Like rongorongo, I have been watching The Wire for the first time while sheltering in place. I don't usually watch TV, much less cop shows, and I appreciate the show's nuance and how it shows the (sometimes devastating) consequences when cops act or fail to act. I do find it uncomfortably glorifying of the police, though, and I sometimes resent how it plays on my feelings, getting me to feel bad for a cop who's killed someone, or assaulted suspects. I read a critique about how the show treats black women as at best one-dimensional and at worst villains, and I can certainly see that, too, and it is horrifying.
posted by ferret branca at 4:36 PM on June 7, 2020

I'd also be interested to hear what people say about Luther, which of course stars Idris Elba.

Luther is a fascistic wet dream about society requiring a bigger, badder sociopathic predator to catch the lawbreaking sociopathic predators.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 4:45 PM on June 7, 2020 [7 favorites]

I don't think The Wire is uniformly terrible in its representation of black women, but... yeah, it is a very male-centric story, and there are only a few women, mostly white, who get any sort of real character development. A lot of the tertiary female characters seemed to have potential for more nuance (Marla Daniels; Kima Griggs' partner; D'angelo Barksdale's mother) but the writers did little with them.

Luther is a fascistic wet dream about society requiring a bigger, badder sociopathic predator to catch the lawbreaking sociopathic predators.

OK, so that's what it seemed from the 15 min I watched -- glad I didn't bother to continue!
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:50 PM on June 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

On the subject of The Wire, Wendell Pierce has added his thoughts to the conversation on Twitter... though notably he is currently in yet another law enforcement-related show, Jack Ryan.
posted by urbanlenny at 4:51 PM on June 7, 2020

Idris Elba is very good in Luther (and so is Ruth Wilson, and a couple other folks), but Luther is really operating in that "a good bad cop, and his young good good cop who needs to learn to be a little bad to be good, vs. sufficiently bad guys including that one bad bad cop, such that doing bad things is good" morally pretzled police fantasy that, yeah, sucks.

It speaks to how good he was in it that it stands out in my mind as being so watchable. Speaks to how problematic putting a charismatic and sympathetic face in front of justifications of police violence is.
posted by cortex at 5:00 PM on June 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Meanwhile, what do we do with a series like Prime Suspect? It's sort of the antithesis of what everyone is hating on here. It shows the cops as corrupt, misogynist assholes who aren't interested in justice but just in the easy fix, and it has a main character who is working actively against the system in which she is employed and also working to provide actual justice for the problematic cases she has been tasked with solving.
posted by hippybear at 5:01 PM on June 7, 2020

that series should develop a plotline where the police are defunded.
posted by eustatic at 5:43 PM on June 7, 2020

What a great and timely post. One thing not mentioned is the so-called reality cop genre. My brother loves watching them, and his views on race have clearly been influenced by them. I was surprised though to hear him say the other day that he's taken a break from them in light of George Floyd's murder. He was self aware enough that they were merely entertainment, not reflective of what is actually going on - something I've been trying to tell him.
posted by blue shadows at 5:52 PM on June 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

One thing not mentioned is the so-called reality cop genre.

The reality show Cops and its ilk get mentioned a number of times in the comments here and in some of the articles, but it is confusing because it's just called Cops which doesn't stand out as a title if not given emphasis.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 6:09 PM on June 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

That trope where the city's population vote to get get rid of the entire police force and replace them with something that actually keeps them safe? - not one I'd seen before today.
posted by rongorongo at 1:34 AM on June 8, 2020 [4 favorites]

it has a main character who is working actively against the system in which she is employed and also working to provide actual justice for the problematic cases she has been tasked with solving.

I haven't seen Prime Suspect so I could be way off base, but this sounds like copaganda anyway, because it essentially posits that even if a bunch of (most?) cops are assholes and the system is broken, there are nevertheless good people working for justice, which while certainly closer to the real world than most shows, is still uncomfortably into apples territory.

To restate my earlier point another way, any cop show where the protagonist(s) is a cop and the case tends to get solved is propaganda, because we don't remember all the details of how so much as a broad reinforcement of the idea that crime is a problem and cops are the ones who solve it. I'd even go so far as to argue that this helped us get where we are vis a vis police being increasingly used on problems outside their (historical) remit like homelessness, mental health, and drug use. Once you criminalize something everyone knows it's for the cops to handle. It's not all television's fault by any means, but browse social media for 10 seconds and you'll find someone reacting to the idea of defunding police with a knee-jerk reaction that suggests the idea of anyone else addressing any of these problems is totally unthinkable to them.
posted by axiom at 8:49 AM on June 8, 2020

I used to be a heavy watcher of crime procedurals. Shows where the cops were undoubtedly the good ones. The ones were the system was broken- the system being the legal system that gave criminals too many rights, so of course the cops had to sometimes be a bit flexible with the rules. If our heroes sometimes got violent, well that was because they were passionate about justice, right? Not to mention that Internal Affairs and criminal defense attorneys are always the bad guys.

I used to laugh at all the scientific and technological inaccuracies, but never stopped to question the basic principles of policing being a force for good.

I tried watching Brooklyn 99 recently, and hated it. I probably would have loved it a few months ago. I'm aware that's my white privilege talking, being able to stick my head in the sand for far too long.
posted by daybeforetheday at 2:13 PM on June 8, 2020

browse social media for 10 seconds and you'll find someone reacting to the idea of defunding police with a knee-jerk reaction that suggests the idea of anyone else addressing any of these problems is totally unthinkable to them.

Someone pointed out that we have been defunding education for years. I think this is obvious in some comments sections.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:44 PM on June 8, 2020 [2 favorites]

Star Trek ideals didn't prevent the world we exist in now, maybe they need some valid critique.

One of the things I liked best about the first season of Picard (even more than Discovery, which tends stray into trite grimdark at times) is that I realized while watching that it’s the first time we’ve gotten a view of the Star Trek universe from outside of the rigid, conformist institutions of Starfleet and the Federation, and it isn’t the paradise that’s been preached at us for over fifty years. In a way it’s retconning almost every other Trek series (parts of DS9 would like a word) into in-universe propaganda of itself. I wonder if old Picard would still quote Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is a man” with conviction instead of irony.

On the broader thread topic, although it’s harder now, I’ve always enjoyed watching cop procedurals ironically. If you don’t get it, I suggest going back to old-school Dragnet. The naive sanctimony, the shallow villains, it’s all so transparently manipulative and hilariously misguided in its moralizing, whether it’s mobs of squeaky-clean white teens rioting in a movie theater because they took a marijuana or Friday and Gannon ranting to one another in ‘67 about how this crazy “Miranda” bullshit is just tying their hands and letting criminals go free. What you realize watching corny copaganda decades old is that modern procedurals are exactly as preachy, manipulative and conformist as Dragnet. They’re just written in a way that has verisimilitude for contemporary audiences. CSI was always at its laughable worst when they tried to base scripts on third-hand takes of social phenomena the writers clearly only knew of from Time articles written to scare old people, but the theme of the show was always, if you aren’t a plain yogurt in human skin, then you’re guaranteed to be either a murderer or a victim, so keep your head down and don’t under any circumstances be anything the prevailing mainstream would consider weird.
posted by gelfin at 3:48 PM on June 8, 2020 [7 favorites]

Luther is a fascistic wet dream about society requiring a bigger, badder sociopathic predator to catch the lawbreaking sociopathic predators.

I always think "Luthier" - a show about a dude who would leave no ass un-kicked in a bid to rid the city of inferior tremolo arms, poorly seasoned spruce and ouds with misaligned fretboards - would have been much better entertainment. Like this guy, in fact.
posted by rongorongo at 5:04 AM on June 9, 2020 [7 favorites]

Ctrl + f Andy Griffith

Nada.

I admit that it's a fringe example of what we're discussing here and, admittedly, holds up well in some ways (far better than many other shows to say the least, Andy was a helluva pacifist and would be a really foreign concept to modern cop show protagonists) and not so well in others (whitewashing and lack of POC altogether for the most part which, ya'know, product of it's time and all that so what do you expect, ditto the obliviousness to the events surrounding it's initial runs). But, damn if I wouldn't take the Neutral Good of Andy over the Lawful Evil all too present in modern police interactions.

Plus the 'gun as a masculine low hanging fruit prop' trope only really applies to Barney and his one bullet which is the source of impotent mockery for the vast majority of episodes. That's something.
posted by RolandOfEld at 10:34 AM on June 9, 2020 [2 favorites]

I met a guy long ago, an artist type who spoke with a pronounced southern twang. At some point, I asked him where he was from and he said Mayberry with a laugh. In other words, small town somewhere in the the southern states. His dad was even cop. And his life was basically as depicted in the show. He was Opie ... until he hit about age thirteen and realized he was gay. Things changed after that.
posted by philip-random at 10:53 AM on June 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Terry Crews on the Future of Brooklyn Nine-Nine
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:00 PM on June 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

Underground Railroad on the top of Seth's book pile while Terry Crews was talking.
posted by jessamyn at 2:36 PM on June 9, 2020

The show "Cops" has now been canceled at Paramount.
posted by toastyk at 3:44 PM on June 9, 2020 [11 favorites]

Holy shit, I never thought I'd see the day. I mean, I know FOX dropped it years ago and it's been scraping by on cable since then, but still. I literally can't remember a time when it hasn't been on TV in some form.
posted by tobascodagama at 3:56 PM on June 9, 2020 [1 favorite]

meanwhile, cast members of Cop Watch(?) LARP for real.

So, you know, audition for the new genre
posted by eustatic at 6:58 PM on June 9, 2020

How Brooklyn Nine-Nine Is Changing Things Up For Season 8
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:03 PM on June 9, 2020

Cop shows also have the built-in milieu for action: car chases, shoot outs, hostage situations, etc.--something that your average accountant or insurance agent or social work shows don't have.

Maybe we need a Johnny Dollar reboot. It's police-adjacent, certainly, but the insurance angle could easily involve white collar crime each week.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 6:43 AM on June 10, 2020

I might show up for a Banacek reboot.

Also, 21 TV Procedurals That Aren't About Cops (Vulture)
posted by box at 12:03 PM on June 10, 2020

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