POLICE PROCEDURALS - which are ur faves

books, movies, tv, comics, anything

any nationality

looking specifically for *police* procedurals here, but if a private detective mystery is really good i guess u can post it

Used to love the Ed McBain books when I was a kid, don't know if they're actually any good. Homicide: Life on the Street, the Wire, duh.

does colombo count

Real-life police officers have raised the issue that such dramas fail to focus on the paperwork that many in law enforcement must deal with.[citation needed]

the dramas would definitely be a lot more exciting if they focussed on more paperwork

oh yeah and the book "Homicide" too

colombo is a city in sri lanka so no, it doesnt count

commish for all time

the naked gun

i like murder, she wrote. the song and the tv show.

robocop

the Richard Fleischer/Tony Curtis movie of The Boston Strangler

Fish Police

colombo is a city in sri lanka so no, it doesnt count

― fleetwood (max), Thursday, August 27, 2009 10:12 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hey max i found a cool picture of you

http://www.smartypantsworld.com/images/smarty-pants-new-front-page.jpg

Clockers + Wambaugh + (at least as a teenager) Gregory McDonald's Flynn books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAidnO64NE4

M is my fave police procedural ever but they're all good.

Night and the City, to state the ridiculously obvious.

I like a show called Laws And Orders, you should check it out.

just bought 'homicide' the book after lunch, iirc

Does Cracker count?

just got 'homicide' from the library, iirc

the book is really good.

I finished it a few weeks ago. And yes it is!

just discovered this series, have read two and have two more on deck. moody, atmospheric, compelling. martin is one melancholy cop

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were husband and wife. They were both committed Marxists and, between 1965 and 1975, they collaborated on ten mysteries featuring Martin Beck.

Series
Martin Beck (Per Waloo with Maj Sjöwall)
1. Roseanna (1965)
2. The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966)
3. The Man on the Balcony (1967)
4. The Laughing Policeman (1968)
5. The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969)
6. Murder at the Savoy (1970)
7. The Abominable Man (1971)
8. The Locked Room (1972)
9. Cop Killer (1974)
10. The Terrorists (1975)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_GI8idJ1yqWM/Rhc8aJ9RDiI/AAAAAAAAAsU/bb67qQcdTVY/s320/high-and-low(albany.edu).jpg

(Plus it's based on an Ed McBain book.)

Also, and to my eternal shame, Anne Perry's Victorian police procedurals are pretty fun to read.

really liked the ian rankin rebus books and prime suspect + mcmillan and wife.

those martin beck books are dope

put this on some other thread but: i watched the first two red riding movies. second was better than the first but both are too heavy handed--i think the best police shows/movies/books usually have a pretty good (if gruesome) sense of humor. still, well-acted and really beautifully shot (they remind me a little of the bbc wallander series)

Rewatching Homicide season 1 this weekend. Sooooooooo good, soooooooo bleak. Network television should be ashamed of itself for promoting so much regressive procedural trash that stands up like a limp noodle in comparison to an awesome cop show that aired over 15(!) years ago.

BOYCOTT COP CULTURE!!!

So as I said in the other thread, I am enjoying Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell.

last prime suspect totally destroyed me

Brubaker/Rucka/Lark's Gotham Central comic is A+++.

Jack Reacher novels for the guilty admission.

George Pelecanos "The Night Gardener"

if you liked homicide (the book) or other non-fiction books about crime and police you might like cop in the hood, i dunno

http://www.copinthehood.com/

anyone been watching the new bbc detective show "zen"? i had such high hopes - the books, by michael dibdin, are fantastic, it was being made by the same production company that did such a great job on wallander - but it's awful. unbelievably clunky dialogue (a police chief that says: "I WANT RESULTS!"), plots unaccountably ruined to remove all the elements of mystery, characterisation that consists of people saying, "you've got quite a reputation for integrity, detective" (which gets the character all wrong anyway). couldn't even finish episode 2.

Who writes the books? Not familiar with them.

speaking of bbc policiers i saw one episode of luther and well i liked it well enough i suppose but not enough to watch the second one

rockapads - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dibdin

he died a few years ago, only 60. the zen novels - he wrote a few other things which i haven't read yet - are very stylishly written by the standards of crime fiction, have a really persuasive sense of place and politics and can be very funny, everything that the bbc adaptation isn't.

xpost luther gets better after ep 1, but not that much better.

also for some reason i watched all of the george gentlys, which were kind of silly but martin shaw is so great

thanks, joe

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100225195706AAVtKcA

air force one

The police part comes in with the air battle

I watched the movie on Netflix!

Lots of great Scandinavian PP:

Henning Mankell
Ake Edwardson
Arnaldur Indridason
Karin Fossum

Also love Japanese PP, but maybe not everyone's cup of tea:

Takagi Akimitsu
Matsumoto Seicho

cancelled cop shows that i have watched (at least two of which have zeljko ivanek playing CREEPY MURDERERS or at least suspects):

life
damian price as a cop who was framed for murder and who re-joins his unit after he's freed so he can find the real killers, who framed him, root out corruption, whatever. he picked up self-help zen in prison and now walks around bewildering people with zen tidbits (pretty funny ones, imo). sarah shahi as his partner, adam arkin as his live-in accountant buddy, robin weigert as the captain in the first season and donal logue in the second. a bit thin on re-viewing - too much music and too many 'driving to the next scene' scenes.

the inside
fbi profilers that track serial killers - rachel nichols as a young, possibly unstable / untested profiling savant, peter coyote as a sadistic psychological-expert lead agent, adam baldwin, some other people. tim minear show. actually creepy, and the last episode is disturbing/cartoonish. some good gallows humor. a nice serious amount of PROCEDURE, too.

k-ville
anthony anderson playing it by the seat of his pants in post-katrina new orleans. who doesn't like anthony anderson?

new amsterdam
a dude in 1600s n.y. saves some girl's life and becomes immortal, so he spends 400 years being a detective; mostly present-day with some cuts back while he broods about his past. lots of brooding, lots of moody shots. he has a middle-aged black man who is his son that KNOWS HIS SECRET. he runs into beautiful women who he considers telling his secret to. really kind of a vampire cop show without actual vampires.

touching evil
remake of (boring) u.k. cop show on u.s.a. but actually good for a u.s.a. show - jeffrey donovan is an fbi (or whatever they call it? osi?) serial crimes agent who has just come back on duty after taking a bullet in the head and kind of losing it (he is still pretty off). vera farmiga (!!!!) is his partner, zack grenier is the boss, some other people around, like pruitt taylor vince as an unstable dude that creegan befriends after he's a suspect in an early case (a good role, i think), and a bit of bradley cooper. really moody - a bit of an x-files vibe, especially with all the pacific northwest / no-cal settings and deranged killings. at first i thought it was really engrossing but later the plots did seem a little bit preposterous - basically everyone involved gets SUPER quickly caught up in cases / too close to a victim / too close to a criminal / breaks the rules, in turn, like everyone in the unit starts out messed up by all the shit they see and you don't have time to run through any 'cop life is wearing me down' plots. apart from that preposterousness, though, good writing and acting, nice look.

the unusuals
'quirky' cop show by denis leary or his people or whoever - jeremy renner and amber tamblyn as the leads, adam goldberg and michael from lost (but actually pretty good) as partners, and monique gabriela curnen (!) and some dude as partners, terry kinney as the sergeant, some other good parts. basically, a contemporary homage to goofy-cop-hijinx shows of days of yore, only with a layer of leary-style staring-into-the-abyss-of-public-service despair, except that it's all sentimental. at first the 'quirk' grates and doesn't seem all that funny but it helps them build up some heart and a strong sense of style, which is kind of something to appreciate after watching a csi rerun. lots of cops zingin on cops scenes, well-handled plots but not a lot of PROCEDURE.

boomtown
l.a. setting, 'same crime, different viewpoints' - awfully nbc-looking. really the main thing i ever remember is this dude, and i assume he plays a douche, but that may just be because i saw him playing a douche once and he just looks like he must always get douchey roles.

day break
like groundhog day, except taye diggs is a cop who wakes up every day being framed for a crime that he's trying to solve somehow before they catch him at the end of the day. meta golding, adam baldwin, mitch pileggi. i honestly can't remember anything about it except that it's pretty fast-paced (dude is probably pretty jacked, after all, he keeps waking up and running for his life).

l.a. dragnet
ed o'neill being dragnet dude. very PROCEDURAL, not full of extras like seasonal arcs and goofy concepts. nice and grim if i remember - it's been a while. and voiceover!

cancelled cop show i would like to watch;

robbery homicide division - is it any good?

yes, it is, if you like michael mann

i mean its more or less exactly what youd expect of a michael mann produced cop show, lots of shaky hd video, lots of jaws being set

lots of tom sizemore

I like the John Harvey - Charlie Resnick crime novels.

Set in Nottingham, lots of day to day paper work and office politics + serial killers.

i liked boomtown, but we never got to see (the aborted) series 2 here in the uk. (but your post has made me search amazon for it and dvds exist for series 1, so that's good)

you know what would kill, a prime suspect redux six years into retirement where it's nothing but jane going to AA meetings

i was falling asleep on nyquil at the time, so this may not be real, but i thought i saw an ad for one last night that was titled something like

niwb:od:lks

those arent the right letters, but that was the formatting. was i just high or is that some crazy new show?

Apparently it was this, and apparently I was already halfway out the door to dreamland to not notice that it was a spoof.

http://www.adultswim.com/presents/ntsfsdsuv/index.html

"the fall" on netflix/bbc2 is quite good i thought

starring gillian anderson/barristan selmy/roose bolton

max have you read anything by Joe Gores? He wrote a series of skip tracer/repoman procedurals centered around the Daniel Kearney Associates in Los Angeles. They center around a group of dudes whose main job it is to find people to get money out of them. Obviously there are complicating factors to make the stories more entertaining. A real focus on the drudgery of paperwork, ringing doorbells, and driving around neighborhoods looking for cars that need to be repossessed.

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/dka.html

The BBC show The Cops was great but it seems to have sunk without trace. No DVD box set which is a shame.

thanks for the rec ian

oop i was wrong, they're set in SF not LA. my bad. they're good. i'd lend you "Dead Skip" but I lent it out to someone else and it hasn't been returned. You can really read them in any order cuz they're all self-contained stories and the character development and relationships aren't extreme or particularly complicated.

i'm enjoying the fall but i'm really not looking fwd to the wife finding out :-/

i just started watching The Shield finally, and I'm really digging it

the naked city
once upon a time in anatolia
clockers

the only martin amis novel I've ever read was an attempt at this, can't remember what it was called. It was ok.

clockers is all-time

never seen the movie but the book, man. sometimes I think about poor strike.

crime fiction is a bit fucking grim, I read my 1st ellroy the other day (the big nowhere) because I was too distracted for tolstoy. The book practically read itself, I was impressed, but the fixation on only the meanest elements of humanity... it's wearing. And I'm a tireless gass booster, I dig celine, I <3 dostoevsky but idk, I find the hard genre stuff harder going for some reason

i highly recommend all of Richard Price's novels, even his not-great stuff is better than most

or ahem his POLICE PROCEDURAL

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1825122/

wow i did not know about that!

it was pretty fresh, well-observed, promising.

Barney Miller

retired-Newark-cop father of my friend swears by its veracity

Derek Raymond's "Factory" series abt an unnamed sergeant working in the Department of Unexplained Deaths is really good. There is not a lot of forensic stuff or working with other branches of the department, but they're gritty and wonderful for brushing up on your eighties londoner slang. very dark stuff.

crime fiction is a bit fucking grim, I read my 1st ellroy the other day (the big nowhere) because I was too distracted for tolstoy. The book practically read itself, I was impressed, but the fixation on only the meanest elements of humanity... it's wearing. And I'm a tireless gass booster, I dig celine, I <3 dostoevsky but idk, I find the hard genre stuff harder going for some reason

it's kind of like that taken to the point of a knife in the eye, but you really ought to experience the 'american tabloid' trilogy. there is probably a finnegans wake / beckett comparison around ilx somewhere. the prose is unreal.

i feel like i have watched all the procedurals : /

i need to make a break into the 80s/70s so i can mine them for what they're worth, but every time i try the shows are just so SLOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW

this was a pretty good year for procedurals

well i watched all 20 seasons of l&o from start to finish this year so i need recalibrating

i am finally watching luther. it's pretty good.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/arts/television/times-critics-share-last-chance-tv-picks.html?_r=0

It’s not too late to try the antidote, a French crime series called “Spiral” (“Engrenages” in the original French), which is available on Netflix with subtitles.

This show offers a bracing Continental alternative to all the Scandinavian-ish existential gloom. “Spiral” is dark and brutal but fast paced. It’s a complex but exciting look at detectives chasing child molesters, drug traffickers and terrorists in a Parisian world of corrupt judges, political intrigue and government officials modeled on Dominique Strauss-Kahn. There are four seasons available now, and a fifth in the works, and each season revolves around one major crime that has unexpected ripple effects.

It’s not a show that breaks all traditions. Like so many crime dramas, including “The Killing,” this series is centered on a single, irascible and fiercely dedicated heroine, the homicide detective Laure Berthaud (Caroline Proust). But Laure is not an outcast or a loner. The male detectives who work for her like her and are deeply loyal, and she even wins over the handsome, slightly stuffy investigating magistrate, Pierre Clément (Grégory Fitoussi), who begins the series as a rising star with friends — and tennis partners — in high places. The one person Laure can’t get along with is a defense lawyer, Joséphine Karlsson (Audrey Fleurot), a sexy, covetous climber who is ruthless in the service of her clients and, most important, herself.

“Spiral” is less like “The Killing” than “Law & Order” — filtered with Parisian cynicism and sophistication. It’s one of the best crime dramas around at the moment, and it would be a shame not to give it a try.

Haven't finished series 4 yet but the other ones are very good.

ooooh thanks.

Way up top someone wrote Night and the City. I think they meant the Naked City. Same director but one is police procedural the other anti-hero film noir.

i like spiral a lot

french people tell me the acting in spiral is quite poor. i enjoyed it though. there is one scene per episode that seems designed to shock.

I watched a few eps of Spiral before we got sucked into Top of the Lake; gotta go back to Spiral.

Also started THE FALL the other day and it seems alright but I wish focused more on Scully and less on the killer.

i thought i posted abt it on this thread but this year I really enjoyed the novels of Gene Kerrigan. My favorite was probably "The Midnight Choir" about troubled policeman Harry Synott. All four of Kerrigan's novels give you the POV of both police and criminals, but I found Synott to be the most compelling. He has problems with the corruption he sees in the cops around him but he's also no angel himself. Lots of different plot strands that come together in unexpected and powerful ways. Kerrigan was/is a journalist as well and has written extensively abt crime and corruption in Ireland.

but I wish focused more on Scully and less on the killer.

It strikes a fine balance imo

i only watched 1.5 eps, so i will keep going.

the fall is good, kind of wish there was more ni politics stuff and less life-of-the-killer stuff but in the absence of prime suspect ill take it

Also belongs in the cartoon-movie-poster thread.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c3/Les_Ripoux.jpg

i am fully on board w the Fall now BTW.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2014/01/true_detective_on_hbo_starring_matthew_mcconaughey_and_woody_harrelson_reviewed.html

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/arts/movies/2014/01/140108_MOV_TrueDetective.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg

yesssss

I'm so down for this, it looks really good

I'm thinking about watching Prime Suspect, just 23 years after it came out...is it still considered good? I've caught a bit so far and it just seems so dated (not the styles though they do) but the attitudes...should I stick with it?

Thanks to being out of The Fall and Luther on Netflix

yes, watch it

its most distinctive payoff is in the long-term view of her career, self

yeah the first couple seasons are the best if you view each individually, and are top-notch terrific policiers, but the real thing you watch for is mirren creating and moving through the character

i mean the fall is kind of a straight prime suspect rip with a little bit of silence of the lambs thrown in

otm -- prime suspect is SO worth it.

Alright, thanks for the recs. Watched part 1 last night- it was a little slow, but I think that was just adjusting to the style. Your collective enthusiasm makes me look forward to more.

Just caught up with the first episode in series two of the new-to-BBC police drama Hinterland. It was quite impressive. Definitely heavily influenced by the Scandinavian noir stuff of recent years. Aberystwyth looks really beautiful and it's nice to hear Welsh being spoken extensively in a show being marketed outside of the region.

oooh that sounds interesting

Southland has just started another repeat stupidly late on ch4. not sure if it's procedural enough i've always liked it.

(it's season 4 and i've seen most of it before. still not sure i've seen all of them...)

i like southland a lot too

the wacky twist at the end of the 1st episode of spiral was super stupid. keep going y/n?

channel 792(!) on freeview in the uk is showing the orignal Dragnet. it's 50 or 60 years old and is great. 30 minutes, no flab, and as dark as you like.

Suspects, which is apparently the first British drama Channel 5 has produced in eight years, is better than expected. The plots could do with being stronger but the unscripted improv approach works pretty well.

there are few things better than when a character on a police procedural starts talking about sovereign citizenship

up there with russian mafia

AGREE

Enjoying line of duty, just finished on bbc

It was pretty silly at times but Keeley Hawes was awesome.

everybody's talkin about how good line of duty is, i'm down

yeah I need to check this out

As a procedural goes, the bit in episode 5 where Fleming and Arnott interview Dryden is all-time A+. Hawes was pretty awesome in it, and I usually don't rate her at all.

Highly recommended for fans of the genre:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15IRXKn9LSU

^ ha, yes.

just reading james lee burke right now, it's really really good

my gf is a law and order: SVU addict. help me.

Just watched S2E1 of line of duty - so good

There are at least two genuine HOLY SHIT moments, and already I'm basically trusting no one

line of duty is sick, so down

though at times i find it harder to understand than glaswegian

the police in uk procedurals always seem like such a mess

but their lady cops

http://www.rootfilms.co.uk/uimages/BLOG/VICKY.jpg

and their haircuts…

otm

augh but they RUIN IT in the second series

do they actually say 'answering only yes or no' like that in uk prisons, a quick google makes it look like 'line of duty' is the only place that comes from, but it's so diabolically realistic i could have sworn it was real

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/arts/television/steven-bochco-and-others-on-creating-hill-street-blues.html?hpw&rref=television&_r=0

i would watch the shit out of a cable network that only showed 'racial tensions between homicide investigators and neighborhood residents' episodes of all the police procedurals

https://tv.yahoo.com/blogs/tv-news/-murder-in-the-first--trailer-premiere--silicon-valley-meets-slayings-in-new-steven-bochco-tnt-series-183208663.html

looks very hollywood but maybe that's just trailervision

Happy Valley was really excellent, if a bit hard to watch occasionally.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/arts/television/murder-in-the-first-a-new-drama-on-tnt.html?_r=0

alessandra stanley likes it ok, course every time she winds up to make a judgment i feel a little dumber, so fwiw

anybody seen these latest Wallanders? they're sitting on the DVR but i've had so much other fantastic stuff to watch i haven't gotten around to them yet

ooh there's more wallanders??

new wallanders are... odd. there's a massive elephant in the room and it's hard not to sit there scratching your head over it. like when becky on roseanne was suddenly this whole other person, only worse.

oh, they're just taking over production from the swedish version? that's less… a thing. but i do love cast-switches.

it's series 3 of the swedish tv version with Krister Henriksson in the lead role only (a different) Linda's back having been missing (dead?) for all of series 2.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rwm3r/episodes/player

it's easy enough to enjoy them for what they are (and he is my favourite wallander of the 3) but, y'know, continuity

Definitely The Shield.

The new Wallanders are fine. The least engaging of the series so far but still solid.

New Linda is ok. I know that when Sällström died there was a lot of discussion over whether Linda should be permanently written out of the books, not just the TV series, but it hasn't been managed terribly.

Started watching Whitechapel on a lark -- it's a bit corny but I kinda like it. 3rd season is a bit of a stretch, 2nd season was almost terrible but Peter Serafinowicz! Phil Davis is good, god he's such an odd looking feller - could have sworn he was in Prime Suspect but IMDB tells me no.

Anyway so I'm back on a british crime show tear

Inspector Lewis is streaming, but Inspector Morse is not. Can I/should I watch Lewis without having seen Morse? they also have Endeavor streaming. idk idk

No matter really...eyeing off Foyle's war as my next one anyway.

and yes yess I know The Fall and Spiral are grebt but they're not streaming yet so imma bide my time unless I lose patience and get mr veg to t0rrentz them for me

I adore Lewis and haven't seen much of Morse, so I'm not sure it matters.

Foyle's War is the best.

:D

i liked lewis a lot, and endeavour even more. haven't watched but a couple of morse and it's been years since.

ooh this is good news

i also liked vera. i'm a sucker for the dippy detective shows.

I tried a couple of eps of Lewis, it's good but it didn't really grab me?

Endeavour though -- YES. Have really enjoyed the first couple so far.

i seem to recall it taking a few episodes to get into the characters in lewis.

i've watched a few episodes of foyle's war based on the recommendation above; i like it very much!

i also started The Fall - this one is def my wheelhouse

The Fall is so good - Anderson is great in it.

i love her so much

I like Endeavour a lot even though it can be a bit "it's the 60s DO YOU SEE" at times.

Gave up on The Fall pretty quickly as I couldn't hack yet another TORTURED SEX KILLER mystery

i am sadly/creepily interested in such things, BTK tie-in etc

Murder In The First was kinda good at first, but slowed way down for courtroom scenes lately; think it's almost over? Liked the first three seasons of Justified, haven't seen it since.

they're making american version of broadchurch...

wanna see Top Of The Lake.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/arts/television/murder-in-the-first-a-new-drama-on-tnt.html?_r=0

alessandra stanley likes it ok, course every time she winds up to make a judgment i feel a little dumber, so fwiw

― j., Monday, June 9, 2014 8:34 AM (1 month ago)

this is kind of boring so far (about 4-5 eps in), the dialogue is flat and the characters are stock (STARTUP MESSIAH BURNING MAN OPEN ACCESS TECH BRO). kathleen robertson's shoulders are amazing and she has lots of good tuck-hair-behind-ears moments, taye diggs is kind of muted but potentially maybe interesting with his dead wife thing and kind of a frumpy buttoned-up dad style, but on the whole casting kind of feels too basic-cabley, like too many people who got work because they've been reliable character actors rather than because something about them popped for this project. which makes sense because the characters all kind of feel like they're vague copies of other cop show characters or media-world figures generally rather than having any basis in reality. raphael sbarge's weirdness will probably go unused. they do have out, sexually bantering squadroom dykes though, to make things contemporary and add a note of san francisco realism i guess. richard schiff is ok so far, seems like paycheck work he doesn't really need to dig deep for.

i would pay to read you review things. that was spectacular! (but still not sure to watch the show or no)

too bad you're not sitting on any grant committees that could fund the tv essay i've been writing

from ep 5 and 6 on it gets more interesting, as the trial starts up and it's more along the lines of bochco's old 'murder one'. more twists and knots, consequences play out of having started prosecution so early in the sequence of episodes without a solid case.

there were other actors in that of course but i think daniel benzali (bald lawyer dude, also played sipowicz's defense lawyer nemesis on nypd blue) was kind of enabled to really chew some scenery in it, there's no one in this one with that much of a show-stealing focus. (robert polito is the judge! so probably will be boring.)

paula marshall is in this too, as steven weber (a pilot, o rly)'s wronged wife, kind of a crummy part so far, so i would expect her to get some more play once the investigation lands on her head for a while.

This Saturday at 9pm on Sky 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoYIeOrfDgU

A couple more moments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higSFufaUrA

terrible name.

Chicago PD has just started here. it suffers from all the male leads looking roughly the same so i can't remember who is who. they also did the 'kill the attractive one in the first episode' thing which is becoming a cliche.

er koogs - do u see what they r doing there, with the name?

STOKED for ep 3 btw but WHY DO THEY TAKE SO LONG TO MAKE NEW ONES?? this should be on every week. but possibly tone down the lewdness? i prefer my airplane-style comedies PG, PG-13 at most

new season of the killing on netflix is pretty good

i do. hadn't realised it was a comedy though, which makes more sense. never seen it.

Created by Charlie Brooker

ah... that probably explains the delays also 8)

I hope you didn't watch the videos and then still not realize it was a comedy :)

In terms of turning down the lewdness, this is not your show - they screened it at the BFI last week and it contains some filthy jokes (which I initially started to try to paraphrase but don't want to mess up) and probably the single goriest scene (a procedural autopsy sequence) I have ever seen in my life, counting slasher movies and everything else. But it's brilliant. The funniest of the three of them.

oh, Sky 1, no wonder i hadn't heard of it. space tv...

It's where the good comedy's gone, tbh

Only just watching Wallander.

[SPOILER ALERT]

Really wasn't expecting the (fictional) thing that happened at the end of the second DVD collection.

Mixed in with the (real life) thing that happened after that, it's making the third DVD collection curious watching as neither the fictional thing or the real life thing (and its impact) have been acknowledged so far.

Are "Nordic Noir" series/films The Hunters and Sebastian Bergman any good?

i have not watched those, but i like "Annika Bengtzon: Crime Reporter."

> Mixed in with the (real life) thing that happened after that,

> Sebastian Bergman

weirdly, SB's background story involves the (real life) thing...

these days whenever i want to watch something procedural i end up watching 'foyle's war'

I'm still into Inspector Lewis, he's really grown on me

might have to try 'inspector lewis' out.

foyle's such a chill dude imo. love honeysuckle weeks.

inspector lewis is a bit of a grumblebum at first but I find him v endearing now

vg, glad you came around on inspector lewis. foyle's war is tops.

my mom loves foyle's war so i've never watched it :\

foyle's war sounds generic but benefits from the cast quite a lot. michael kitchen is great in the lead role.

Stockhausen just referenced in an episode of Wallander (Series 3). Highlight of my day.

omar otm

last season is interesting cos it covers a period of the very-near postwar that americans aren't v familiar with

Just one more series of Wallander (Krister Henriksson version) left to watch. Pondering what to watch next.

Two underrateds that got canceled a few years back:
Rufus Sewell in Eleventh Hour
Tim Roth & Co. in Lie to Me, put together by a schoolmate of mine

I accidentally watched Scorpion and NCIS: Los Angeles last night. Hooboy

scorpion is such a hot mess

how was c.c.h. pounder

i watched all of lie to me, repeatedly, they did a slight bit of retooling, more like readjusting here and there, but i think maybe it suffered from being a bullying-human-lie-detector show airing in the era of house. esp in terms of scheduling, promotion, audience attention, etc. - because it was really watchable, snappy banter, good roles, well cast. mekhi phifer maybe not as much, but he was ok too.

i don't remember what accent Roth used or if the show moved at a faster pace than House. the latter was a better-fleshed-out/more interesting character, i suppose, and his supporting cast was certainly less vestigial than Lightman's.

amazon (uk) keeps having deals on ed mcbain ebooks, to the point where i've got 12 lined up to read. all less than a pound. only another 40something to go...

(go to his author page, filter on 'kindle books', sort by 'price low to high', they are at the top. 6 at the moment < £1)

some of the offers do come and go quite quickly though. some hang around, but some are only there for a day or two.

The Fall and Top of the Lake are both finds. Hoping for more episodes? esp The Fall cause it was so brief. leave em wanting more

the evil patriarch on TOL totally looked like Willie Nelson. or to be fair Willie's evil twin

as much as i dig cults and Holly Hunter, the TOL subplot about women living in a ship-container commune got annoying. loved the scene where "Willie" storms the gates of "Paradise" tho :D

In my world that would be considered a spoiler so keep that to yrself

xp the fall has a second season starting soon iirc

hatewatching Grace Point, gotta love a series where every character is unlikeable & annoying except for the guy (detective Carver) who's supposed to be unlikeable. Anna Gun is a good actress, we saw her in off-Bway play Sex W/Strangers earlier this year, but on GP she's like the Worst Cop Ever. Policewoman as PTA mom.

oh yeah dont forgot to vote at everyonesasuspect.com sheesh

the first ep weirded me out too much, the shot for shot recreation stuff was too creepy

i dunno if i will finish it

Episodes of Lewis are like 2 hours long

I'm watching twin peaks atm

Also gonna see James Ellroy "in conversation" at my local cinema in a couple of weeks, might read some of his books in the meantime

one more episode of Lie to Me and then what will i do?

watch elementary

great suggestion, thanks!

there are few things better than when a character on a police procedural starts talking about sovereign citizenship

up there with russian mafia

― j., Monday, March 10, 2014 10:35 PM (8 months ago)

what about JURISDICTIONAL WRANGLING

Russian mafia episodes are always great. Someone in Law and Order SVU described Brighton Beach as "Odessa by the sea" in the episode i watched last week.

Finding it more and more difficult to excuse shows (basically all of them) in which shooting suspects is seen, in effect, as a rite of passage every good police officer goes through at some point, though.

jurisdictional wrangling just doesn't seem as juicy since 9-11, the locals usually just roll over

another thing the terrorists took from us

When someone mentions RICO

i had never heard "queen for a day" til BB

Russian mafia eps always great. All of the heavy handed ethnic stereotyping with none of the colonial guilt

and kh sounds for days

Watched a few Morse episodes and so far, so good. I love how Morse is just essentially a dick to everyone.

You're a good cop Murphy, why can't you just play by the book? I got the Mayor breathing down my neck!!

oh and Life on Mars is probably the best one in ages.

?

wat? It's not exactly an obscure show.

This piece highlights a lot of the issues with Blue Bloods:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/12/blue_bloods_starring_tom_selleck_the_nypd_white_viewers_and_black_new_yorkers.html

It's something I occasionally have on in the background while doing something else but It really is an astonishingly racist show. It's also astonishingly popular and feeds the right-wing fantasy that all police shootings are good shootings and if you don't break the law, you have nothing to worry about. It drums into the rookie characters (and by extension the audience) that it's better to shoot someone unjustly than run the risk of getting shot yourself. As these shows are the only window on policing most people have, they need to take a certain amount of responsibility for the skewed perception of the dangers faced by and from police.

sadly, those points are exactly why it's a success, especially among the demographic it panders to

interestingly i will watch pretty much any police procedural—i even tried to watch the canadian-made, presumably grey's-anatomy-inspired knockoff rookie cop travails and romances show that debuted a few years back, and i will certainly spend time on passable cbs old-people programming—but i have never felt any inclination to even check out blue bloods.

i wonder if that's because the packaging pretty much makes it clear that the implied point of view is FAMILY, and not only can network tv not be trusted to handle that in a real capable way, but it tends to reinforce the worst possibilities of police-themed shows. one of the cornier things about ncis is the gruff-distant-daddy slot they contrive for gibbs/harmon to anchor the interpersonal aspects of the relationships from. when gil grissom dislikes being a boss on csi, that's one of the atypical notes the show manages, for a procedural (and it's why csi new york and presumably csi miami, which i could hardly watch, are more boring - more conventional stoic/swaggering daddy-bosses). inserting a full-blown family segment into a show seems liable to be too much for the format to handle without all kinds of regression.

i had been under the impression that cbs procedurals in particular have been very… careful… about race in the last 10-15 years: multiracial casts, mixture of demographics for suspects and victims, not much in the way of 'race stories', and certainly no unchecked race-themed contempt expressed by the cops in the observance of their duties (more typically replaced by complicated coded class-themed contempt - with the presumption being that dirtbags are dirtbags and always will be). typically, a divided-loyalties story or two about a non-white police officer. or an it-was-a-bad-shoot episode focused on some off-main-cast white cop who forgot what it means to be a cop, was one of the old ones, etc. lots of 'good minorities' whose ethnicity is hardly ever a topic of even casual remarks in the course of an episode (but good for e.g. characterizing awkward white characters' attempts to acknowledge race as well-meaning but not fully sensitive, and still-tolerant minority characters' handling of same as tactful, etc).

for an antidote to that sort of procedural, folks should check out FX's the bridge - sadly canceled this year right as it was becoming borderline great in its 2nd season.

1st season is uneven and occasionally straight-up bad bc it's married to a serial killer plot taken from the scandinavian series it's based upon - body discovered on the U.S.-mexico border (half on each side, literally), leads to some exploration of real sociopolitical issues affecting that region but gets bogged down by the murder mystery plot.

said plot is resolved (stupidly) w/ 2 eps left to go in season 1 - and then it switches gears almost completely for those 2 eps and the whole the 2nd season. becomes an exploration of how law enforcement & the drug trade are m/l symbiotic along with narco trade's connection to multinational business interests, and also addresses the phenomenon of hundreds of unsolved disappearances/murders of women in ciudad juarez. once it sorted out its growing pains the writing became really great, acting is great throughout and the show became almost unapologetically weird in a way crime shows often weren't. the ratings crapped out during s2, which got it cancelled, but its really worth a look for anyone in need of an against the grain crime show.

*often aren't

oh yeah? is it possible to just pick up in the last two eps of s1? ive seen the danish bridge and liked it a lot but dont want to go thru 8 hrs of it again with a new cast

the american the killing got very good in s3, though the ending's botched a little, and still quite good in s4 though the ending is really weird. you can skip the first two seasons if youve seen s1 of the the danish killing

i know u guys aren't using this thread as much to talk about books as to talk about tv shows but i am really like ken bruen's "White Trilogy." even though the US edition has tons of typos and mispunctuations (like missing parentheses or quotation marks, not arguable 'style' stuff imo). while his jack taylor stuff is quick and in a sense easy, the white trilogy seems much denser and more jagged. lots of short fragmentary chapters and scenes. very readable tho.

also we have been enjoying broadchurch and happy valley.

i wish downton abbey was a police procedural.

thanks for the rec

watching the second season of danish bridge now, and enjoying

the jack taylor novels are enjoyable albeit samey, but samey in a way that make me think of them as episodes in an enjoyable tv series that's constantly referring to itself and resetting info and characters for new viewers. i liked the part in the novel 'devil' where jack taylor's bookstore pal recommends him a previous book in the series.

you should read "a white arrest" and its successors. published in one volume in the u.s.

Happy Valley was quite good overall. 3rd & 4th eps were especially compelling.

the mentalist is wrapping up its run. it lost some of its verve as they closed in on the serial killer who was the core narrative's impetus for several years, but since they caught him (with kind of an uncharacteristically unworried endorsement of tit-for-tat vengeance, for network tv) they've actually been trying something interesting with their loss of momentum and presumably cheaper budgets - the last couple seasons are actually trying to manage something like a believable transition to ordinary life and happiness for a main character who spent several years obsessively and pretty self-abnegatingly hunting a monster, in the course of a classically formulaic murder-of-the-week setup. the location changed, the tone changed, there was a slight cast shake-up, and all around things just seem a bit more leisurely, like the police procedural format is not just a fact of nature but starts to loosen up when the lives of the people involved in it are given some play again.

jesus christ second season of Broadchurch was awful, what a waste of 8 hours.

Without giving away spoilers, is the Killing (US) a continuation of the same story (ie. Rosie Larson) for all four seasons?

no

Is there a "best way" of watching The Killing (US version) and Forbrydelsen (Scandinavian version)? I'm guessing the story arc is the same for them both and that the murderer of "Rosie" (and equivalent) is the same in both.

I watched the Danish one first and then picked up the US one in season 3.

i seriously will watch all kinds of police procedural nonsense but i just got bored with the US one after having done the danish one : /

yeah, if youve watched the danish one no need to watch the first two seasons of the american one, its almost exactly the same but more protracted and not as well done.

season 3 of the american killing is quite good though

i finished the fall season 2, *spoilers*:

it sucked! padded, dull, dramatically inert. having spector kidnap someone so the police have to spend the whole season not arresting him was the sort of groansome, lazy, dragging out the storyline writing that all shitty dramatic tv has.

the season felt like such a waste of time, like you could just excise most of it and start with Spector getting arrested in episode 5 and it wouldn't make a difference. the padding felt really obvious, i mean how many scenes of Spector covering up evidence and grooming his babysitter to help him are really needed, especially when you find out that he has a 100% incriminating video on his phone of him with the woman he kidnapped?

plus the whole subplot with the abused wife and asshole thug husband..who cares..especially when all of it just ends up being in service of such a bonehead shitty insultingly implausible deus ex machina final scene that made me want to die of shame for watching the whole thing.

I'd forgotten how ludicrously hilarious Castle can be

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/arts/television/review-mulder-meets-manson-in-nbcs-compelling-aquarius.html

wat

And it keeps getting easier to be graphic about the past. In the first few episodes of “Aquarius,” a 16-year-old girl is coerced into having group sex, a man attempts to sodomize another man at knife point, and a policewoman posing as a free-love hippie chick performs oral sex on one of Mr. Manson’s lieutenants to preserve her cover.

rmde

watched all of the first Line of Duty series in a few days; really liked it. good stuff.

is there a clear first instance of an 'investigator captured / taken hostage / blackmailed etc in order to be forced to investigate a case' plot?

i can recall at least a couple in shows from the past decade, feel like there must be a lot of them whenever a procedural is not literally focused on police.

probably can find it in pulp literature from the 20s already if not earlier?

hmm, come to think of it one of philip kerr's nazi-germany detective books might have that plot, maybe it was a staple of the originals, rich dude's goons conks p.i., drags him to mansion, sez we got a job for you, you're gonna take it, etc.

i think the recent ones i'm thinking of involve a definite selection of civilians for the forced investigations. probably contemporaneous with the uptick in lab-nerd / coroner / medical investigator characters

wow just saw this thread bumped and had no idea max responded to my longass american bridge post ages ago!

max wherever you are I still think you should watch the american version of the bridge, just use wikipedia to fill yourself in on the s1 plot and watch the last two of s1 and all of s2

you've almost convinced me to revisit, i bailed 3/4 the way through s1

xps j. hammett def did stuff like that in some of his stories iirc (not specifically in the novels, which I haven't read in ages anyhow)

veg you definitely should, though your bailing at that point was totally understandable. I don't know what the fuck they thought they were doing and the co-creator of the american version elwood reid said as much in interviews, basically apologized for it, said they weren't interested in those aspects of the story but thought they had to see it through

interesting

tbf I have a taste bias toward stuff focused directly or indirectly on the drug war bc I think it's the most poisonous, tragic thing this country has ever done in many ways, given how egregiously it's gone wrong and how sprawling the consequences have been. so I am def being somewhat biased toward american bridge bc I value the conversations it's attempting to stimulate in its 2nd half. but at it's best it's v reminiscent of the don winslow drug war novels and of roberto bolano's 2666

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/vicap-fbi-database/399986/

important actual facts for police procedural devotees

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/arts/television/in-tnts-public-morals-ed-burns-is-on-the-vice-beat-in-60s-new-york.html?hpw&rref=television&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

ed burns IS

sex cop

ed burns is such a drag...more like ed fizzles

I thought it was the other Ed Burns for a sec and I got excited

I'll probably watch the pilot for shits and giggles but I have pretty low expectations

burned through enough britcop series on netflix that i'm down to watching george gently. it's decidedly not prestige but it's ok

also i noticed recently that netflix doesn't have miami vice anymore :(

What Britcop series do you like? We really liked Happy Valley and Broadchurch and The Fall to a lesser extent. We didn't care too much for Five Days.

i mainlined inspector morse recently: charming, you can see the formula come through pretty quickly, the 'mysteries' are p tenuous and don't really matter, funny to see 80s tom wilkinson and a li'l rachel weisz pop up, the RAVE PANIC episode is ALL TIME and treats the music with some seriousness and respect.

once upon a time netflix was streaming the follow up with lewis and those endeavour prequels but i see those have been yanked too

i couldn't get into the fall, idgaf about serial killers tbh

endeavour was good btw! and i see pbs just re-aired them; idk where you are but maybe they're streaming them directly?

oh and the branagh wallanders, i thought those were all terrific. have not tried the swedes.

@carl_agatha -- give "Line of Duty" a shot. It is on Hulu IIRC. Brit cop series with emphasis on internal affairs investigations. Pretty dense and open ended in places but we really loved it. Very addictive. We are also Happy Valley/Broadchurch/The Fall fans, and in fact I would like more recommendations for things to watch. I would like to watch all of Cracker, also Wire in the Blood and the o.g. Prime Suspect, all of which I've seen a few episodes of here & there.

We/I also enjoy the morse/lewis/gently etc type stuff but they do seem a bit simplistic in comparison to the more recent wave of deep sadness vibes in uk cop tv.

been thinking about digging into some euro stuff but subtitles are often a challenge in this age of "glance at your phone and miss something crucial" multitasking. enjoyed the few eps (really more like tv movies) abt Annika Bengtson that I watched. Also like both the Wallanders but wifey never wants to watch euro wallander. also been wanting to watch Spiral...

my main problem is that on a day like today, which is my day off, I could be watching tons of this stuff, but wathing tv during the day makes me feel weird unless it is raining or i am sick in bed.

We have Hulu! I will check out Line of Duty.

goole, we're in the US. I'm interested in the Swedes but also don't always have the mental capacity to read subtitles at the end of a long day.

top of the list of scandi stuff for me is "The Bridge".

as for british stuff that nobody's mentioned yet (/recently) - "Luther" was good.

i loooooove Endeavour!

i am up to series 3 of Lewis & i find it v relaxing. though 3 to 4 murders per ep is a crazy body count when you think about it.
i just saw the alan davies quiz episode...god that was shite.

ironically i havent seen any Morse. they're not free on Amazon Prime yet, i would like to try them though!

Ooh and if anyone hasnt seen og Prime Suspect, do it. Sooooo good. First 2 series are A+

I'm re-watching Life (mid-2000s US series with Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi; Lewis plays a cop wrongfully convicted of murder who gets released after 12 years in prison and as a part of his massive settlement with the LAPD demands that he be reinstated, as a detective) on Hulu. It staggered to the finish line at the end of Season 2 (Shahi got pregnant and bailed, and they brought in Gabrielle Union as a seat-filler), but man, Season 1 is really sharp, well-written and beautifully filmed.

i thought that was pretty good when it first ran, on watching it a second time, though, i found it a bit jarring how much fast music / car-driving filler there was between the good writing and quirky zen-joke dialogue. so fluffy.

i do like anything where there's a case-building wall with strings connecting the evidence.

Brit-cop aficionados may enjoy Scott and Bailey. Season 3 especially is excellent.

i think we've pondered outloud somewhere before whether "scott and bailey" is a pun on "motte and bailey"

Yeah, I have vague memories of discussing that with someone. I think it may well be, but it's terrible.

(the pun, not the programme. The programme's really good)

Rosemary and Thyme ftw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_%26_Thyme

Ha, I was actually thinking of that when I was wondering if any pun was as bad as Scott and Bailey.

do like anything where there's a case-building wall with strings connecting the evidence.

― j., Wednesday, August 26, 2015 3:09 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^

I liked Scott and Bailey.

I like Endeavour, but it tries a little too hard in the DO YOU SEE?? department when letting us know this is set in the 1960s.

lol it does

but he's v handsome

yeah that show is chock full of beautiful people, baby morse included

it's sort of impossible to believe he grew up to be john thaw, no matter how much alcohol was invovled

no taggart itt :(

not that taggart is "good"

I read Henning Mankell's "Return of the Dancing Master". Takes place in central Sweden, very evocative. Would read more about crime in Sweden. But I liked the geography.

Had a go at watching Witnesses/Les Témoins but it was just so dour and unappealing.

I watched episode 1, the only thing I could think of was that the French still don't know how to make TV and no amount of Mogwai will fix it.

eh Spiral is all-time though

no offence was good

no offence was really good apart from the plot

French colleague tells me Spiral is full of substandard acting which the subtitles somehow smooth over. Which is curious if true. I do wonder whether all these foreign series are just like all those things on the bbc that I don't normally watch and just seem better because they are French / Swedish / Danish / Belgian...

There's always one scene in every episode of Spiral that seems designed to shock, I found.

Spiral has a bunch of flaws but the acting is not one of those imo (and in the o of the French ppl I know).

I do wonder whether all these foreign series are just like all those things on the bbc that I don't normally watch and just seem better because they are French / Swedish / Danish / Belgian...

This was certainly true of Borgen which I approached in the initial afterglow of Forbrydelsen. Seems fantastic initially but then you eventually realize it's literally just a normal show.

agree the exoticism of small differences can make a mediocre show more watchable (hi Cordon!), every country is capable of making bad/overpraised TV

DCIs seem so cosmopolitan

We just started watching Hinterland on Netflix (US). Good so far - very cinematic looking and sounding and my favorite Britcop formula (brooding big city DCI moves to small village hoping for quiet career, finds murder instead).

Yeah it always fascinated me the incomprehensible chain of command and rank insignias in shows like Prime Suspect: DS, DC, DCI. CI. Watching that show as a youth made me consider the administration of British policing as something labyrinthine and overwrought, but with good reason, since officers seemed to be continually on the verge of cracking up or dying of alcoholism, the chain of command needed to be preserved so something could go on even when individuals failed to do so...

Actually that quality is what makes the best police procedurals for me.

Alert: Hinterland involves a case-building wall, although I don't think there are any strings on it yet.

police_siren.gif

we just started watching the bridge (u.s.)
i like it a lot.
i like the idea of hot aspie cop.
also like mr. grizzly McMumblesAlot

Scott and Bailey is my new favorite show. Such good dialogue and none of the unrelenting bleakness of all these other new procedurals

Sally Wainwright who writes Scott and Bailey is also behind Happy Valley if you haven't seen that yet.

why would anyone watch police procedurals for anything other than the bleakness?!??!!

joeks bruv

also PROCEDURE

Suspects, which is apparently the first British drama Channel 5 has produced in eight years, is better than expected. The plots could do with being stronger but the unscripted improv approach works pretty well.

There are four seasons of this now. It is still quite good.

(Without giving too much away) Is there enough difference between the Scandinavian and US versions of The Killing to justify watching both (have just seen the US version)?

Season two and three of the Danish version, yes. Season one, possibly not.

This might be good.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/04/the-bridge-russia-estonia?CMP=twt_gu

Who would have thought Bon Cop, Bad Cop would have such a lasting influence.

Are people still watching Line of Duty? Just caught up to date with it after having checked out the first episode a few days back.

Starts off ok, but not sure about after that. Would have loved the female cop in the 2nd series to be innocent but she does seem to be a bit manipulative. Maybe nobody in the series is that totally sympathetic and maybe it's supposed to show human flaws.
Have found points where I really wasn't feeling very sympathetic to her though.
Also with Jackie the Female AC12 memeber.

There is supposed to be some level of sympathy with even the most evil seeming character or you lose interest with them. & if you do that their part of a story loses weight or so I was told.

Not watched this before a few days ago so hadn't been aware I'd been missing something. Do wonder what else I have been missing.

Haven't seen any of the new Scott and Bailey yet. I thought it went seriously downhill after Sally Wainwright handed it over to somebody else. Stopped watching before the end of that series. So wondering if it might have regained what made it special with somebody else at the reins.

Scott and Bailey has been not great thus far.

I'm still watching Line of Duty, but find myself enjoying this series an awful lot less than the last two. It's missing Gill for a start.

Gill = Scott & Bailey, not LoD, obviously.

The ending of LoD was quite a thing. Bit silly at the end, but the procedural interview stuff that they do so well was really ramped up to the max.

I still like the cast of Scott & Bailey a lot but that latest series was a bit rubbish. I didn't really care about the killings at all and the whole thing seemed quite far-fetched.

I enjoyed Line of Duty a lot more, thought S3 was much better than S2 (I never watched S1)

Both series of Happy Valley were far better than both S&B and LoD.

This series of LoD got better and better as it went on. Ep 5 was all-time, and most of Ep 6 as well

I liked most of it but was going of the jackie character quite a bit, shame cos I like the actress in other things.
I thought bits of the chase scene were a bit corny, like her comments during the showdown under the bridge. & the final shoot out.
Also the caddy never struck me as smart enough to carry off his shenanigans successfully, seemed to be a bit of a gap between the way he was acting and something that intelligent and manipulative. & it just came across to me as this was what was written not something that was inherently convincing. A gap between having to follow a plot and it being portrayed naturally or something. Which is a bit of a letdown in a convincing drama.
I did think at the end of it that I was probably unlikely to watch it again cos it was getting a bit silly. Will see. Shame since there were some very good parts.

Wonder fi Sally WAinwright has anything else coming ot, presumably a new series of Last Tango In Halifax. Would like some more police stuff as good as Happy Valley and the early series of Scott & Bailey.

jesus christ second season of Broadchurch was awful, what a waste of 8 hours.

― akm, Friday, February 27, 2015 6:51 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^^^^^^

I assume series 4 of LoD will have to focus on who was pulling Dot's strings. As long as there's tons of Ted being grumpy and Kate killing it in the interview room, I'm good to go.

end of LoD was super ridiculous, was happy to suppress my incredulity and enjoy the journey up to that point though

xp yeah there was obviously someone up the chain who could arrange it so that eg dot was escorted in by an officer willing to shoot one of his colleagues at the drop of a hat

that device at the end of using text captions like it was freakin documentary

Yes I hate that part.

Was the Caddy a current description as much as a historic one? Somebody constantly at hand with the tools to get the job done? While somebody else directs things, takes the shots?
Though maybe that takes the metaphor too far?

Somehow missed Cottan being called Dot I think. Is that still a cultural signifier?
Not that I'm an Eastenders watcher but thought the character would be long dead. Assuming the name started there and wasn't itself a reference to something earlier.

I assume it's exactly the nickname anyone with that surname would have picked up along the way in his years in the force (Dot's still alive in EastEnders and has been surnamed Branning for ages anyway, but even still would have clearly been an obvious reference for someone to have made in Cottan's early years and for it to have stuck.)

Also, discussing it earlier in the pub, I should have been more annoyed at the time as I have been in hindsight at the general Scooby-ness of Dot's escape route, appearing and disappearing and appearing again out of side roads into Kate's line of fire.

Hands up anyone who is considering the "urgent exit required" text as a strategy at their work?

Also, bah, two procedurals in one year ending with a denouement at a railway bridge. Catherine Cawood >>>>> Kate Fleming at that though.

Dot's foolproof plan to frame Steve was a bit crap, wasn't it? Just "fingers crossed no one'll notice" followed by "shit, run away!"

Enjoyed all the nonsense superhero action stuff at the end. I like that the show isn't above dumb genre pleasures when it could easily just stay gritty and gloomy throughout.

Also lol / jfc

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/line-duty-viewers-tricked-believing-7866676

Mail readers are thick shocker. They used the same device on the 2 preceding series. It can be an effective wrapper up if used right but seemed to be over some very ham acting here.
Not sure where it's first used in drama but do remember Animal House used it back around 35 or whatever years back. & documentaries use it so it is an idea that's around to borrow, innit?

Jackie admitting she wouldn't have minded or whatever she says under the bridge is really questionable isn't it. Would think that even if she was that poor in taste it would be the last thing she'd admit it under the circumstances. Was there any detectable chemistry between the 2?

Her name's Kate, btw.

J

Jackie was the blonde one in Danny's team.

Ok then Kate. Still seemed a bit naff. Unless it was advanced terrorist negotiating skills or something. Thought it would be the last thing she'd want to say.

Did like the actress that played Kate when she was in This is England. Think I felt a lot less sympathy for her in this. But still, that guy seemed a bit of a tosser.

Think it's been said but is it likely that all the Caddy profile would be dictated by Cottan as it was in this? Also the ineptness of his other cover ups. The bounced email for one.
Seemed like some things were overly facile and supposedly covered over by him growling. Which is a bit egomaniacal isn't it?

The profiling "hi dere, I have uncovered a profile which is basically IT'S STEVE ARNOTT" was a dreadful plot device - no evidence as to how that profile had been drawn up. I mean, it's fair enough that as the senior officer he'd get to be in charge of it, but surely he'd have some background rather than a four-bullet-point presentation pointing the finger squarely at Steve?

There was a bit of chemistry between Kate & Dot when she went to his flat, but I'm not sure if that was genuine or whether she was "undercover" then, as she'd gone over Ted's head to authorise some investigation of a fellow AC-12 officer.

I did wonder when she became suspicious of him. I thought the investigation that she had to go elsewhere for the go ahead for might have been Hastings seeming to be subject to Masonic influence.

Watched a couple fo Jack Taylor episodes on Alibi cos it's an Irish Private Eye show filmed here in Galway. It stars that guy who plays the aging swordsman in GoT that follows Daenerys half way across the world only to be turning into stone.

Not sure how old it is cos I saw part of it being filmed on the other side of the park here a few months ago. but could be it's on a 2nd series or something.

Kind of gritty I suppose but it is contained within a semi small town type of city instead of a really 21st century looking one.
Interesting to see locations being used. Also to see how the geographical location has been slightly altered. So a building around the corner from the University is now miles out on a country lane. But I guess you're likely to get that in most things if you know the actual physical locations. Doesn't one of the Dirty Harrys have chases taking part in locations on opposite side of the city that look like they're supposed to be next to each other?

Yeah, the Caddy profile stuff reminded me of Roger Ebert's "idiot plot" concept. ("Any plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots.") Even infallible Ted seemed like a bit of a credulous shmuck at the end.

Who wouldn't love Ted as a boss, though? He cares *so* much.

Aw you guys are just picking holes for the sake of it now. Dot was a hero and yes Ted was blind to the shoddy basis of the profile because of it. We all know office heroes whose work always seems to get waved through regardless of how thin it actually is. And Dot's stitch-up job on Arnott in the first half was just deliciously evil, like the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.

But yeah when the worm finally started turning, I can't remember the last time I yelled at the TV in approbation that much, mainly after something Ted had said.

Steve getting arrested because of a PowerPoint slide was bit ridic. And surely Dot would have been better off just pocketing the envelope and forgetting the frame-up idea?

I mean, these holes are fun to discuss but they didn't affect my enjoyment of the shows.

I was trying to remember and probably should have just gone back and watched teh end of teh last episode fo the first series. But is there not a comment that Dot makes there to somebody other than Tommy about how he got into the police after starting out as a caddy and being mentored by somebody. Thought it was something that had been said more publicly or to one of the other cops which might have been something taht came back to someone.
Or taht it might be something taht was known about or showed up on a CV for him. but didn't turn out that way.

Who wouldn't love Ted as a boss, though? He cares *so* much.

Yeah, totally. Bit unlikely that Steve was reinstated after the evidence he'd crossed the line with Denton though.

JUst wondering if this was done knowing that the first series would be followed by a second that built on it and so on.
Just could swear that Dot told somebody about how he satrted in the police force at the end of that firs season and presumably that was before he went in to see Tommy.
So wondering if the plotting was set up to build on top of things that were established earlier or if somebody just came along and roughly viewed some existing threads and built on them.

Will try and rewatch that episode end.

I just found the place where he does say that he came in through caddying at a golf course. It's to the dark haired higher up in the scene in the car park straight after an injured Steve has had the meeting in the car with the fugitive Gates.
Not sure how bright that guy was or if he remains in the show much longer after that, & it is in passing in a momentary conversation but would have thought the guy if t was anybody else might just have remembered that he'd actually said it.
Unfortunately he's the only person who hears it at the time and he may have never seen it as anything other than anecdotal. Think the guy wasa bit one dimensional from what I can recall of him.

It's in the same conversation where this guy has asked dot if he'd be interested in sitting the Inspector exam. & says taht it isn't pleasant to step into9 a dead man's shoes.
Thought I'd remembered it throughout the next couple of seasons but couldn't remember exactly who it was said to.

jesus christ second season of Broadchurch was awful, what a waste of 8 hours.

― akm, Friday, February 27, 2015 6:51 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Didn't think it was that bad, to be honest.

i've definitely wasted more time on worse.

Does "Trapped" fit this thread's remit?

Midway through, it does seem very good.

Trapped was great! My favourite police this year.

I've got one more episode to go and I'd say it is up there with the Killing and the Bridge. Better than Fortitude.

gah so i'm going to have to steal this clearly

Just watched 5 episodes straight of Trapped, yeah I'm feeling this, despite certain tropes. I also enjoyed that Swedish one I forget the name of which was like a police procedural about kidnapped children but with added FOREST SPIRITS or whatever, with the same conspiracy amongst small town elders covering up something in order to sell out to BIG BUSINESS. I mean, I'm only halfway through Trapped, but c'mon...

Jordskott? Enjoyed it though it was a bit "X-Files" for me.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-recognizer-police-force

bound to be yoinked for a procedural

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/arts/mike-connors-mannix-dies.html?_r=0

In the series, which had its premiere in 1967, Mr. Connors played Joe Mannix, a Korean War veteran of, like Mr. Connors, Armenian descent who sleuthed his way around Los Angeles with flashy cars and a penchant for citing Armenian proverbs.

Unlike many a smooth TV private eye, Mannix took his lumps. The Washington Post, tabulating the wear and tear the character withstood over eight seasons, found that he had endured 17 gunshot wounds and 55 beatings that left him unconscious.

The violence drew criticism in some quarters, but “Mannix” became the most popular crime series on television in an era punctuated by comedies like “All in the Family” and “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.” Mr. Connors became one of the highest-paid television actors of the 1970s, and the role brought him four Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award.

So ... two more episodes until the very end of Broadchurch.

How on earth did we never have a Broadchurch thread? Have I lost all my search skills?

I'M NOT IN THE MOOD FOR YOUR NOISE THIS MORNIN

The Kojack pilot, The Marcus-Nelson Murders--a made-for-TV movie, technically, directed by Joseph Sargent, who did The Taking of Pelham One Two Three a year later--is excellent. Unfortunately, you can't buy it as a standalone.

David tennant looks horrible with facial hair

Good thread, will have to check out some of j's cancelled cop shows (I did see the one about the guy from 1600s NYC, with good but too-brief flashbacks).
A few years ago, my local antenna TV selections incl. very late-night reruns of a couple shows I barely remember from early childhood: Peter Gunn, with a badass instrumental theme song, my first musical experience. Also, going to cigarette commenricals: warm-cool prob hollow-body electric guitar notes, a scale maybe, against Modern Art patterns, with a slicked-haired gumshoe, who looked like an ex-cop, but welcome in the jazz clubs. SCTV's version had him actually up on the bandstand, spying suspects during his sax solos, which was pretty close to Jack Dragnet Webb's movie Pete Wilson's Blues, where he's a bandleader and an informer (LAPDphile Webb was also married to chanteuse Julie London, hubba-hubba).
The other Antenna TV resurrection was Naked City, which started in the late 50s as a relatively tame savvy old-cop. collegiate young cop reduction of the late 40s movie of the same title--which had more spirit and flavor, not noir but kinda Hollywood neo-realist in the funky streets of NYC, which the revamped series updated with some New Frontier exuberance and sensitive liberal melodrama---and as an anthology series, basically, with cops mainly just chasing or coming to the rescue of guest stars, who got most of the action.
Cracker and Prime Suspect are forever, but yall know those. (First series of prequel PS was good except the young Jane is pretty reserved, almost meek, in a way the young *Helen Mirren* never was, like in that movie directed by Michael Powell, her first, I think)

re ageless-detective show, there was just another one of those recently! already canceled i think. i read that the creator swore he wasn't aware of the previous one.

Marcella, series 2, the last 15 minutes, urgh.

I’m probably the only one watching Collateral on NFlix but it’s enjoyable and has my girl Carey in it

kathleen robertson's shoulders are amazing and she has lots of good tuck-hair-behind-ears moments

i totally forgot this show that i watched all of existed until i read this again

the j-lo dirty cop show with ray liotta ('man with large appetites') is decent but i dunno it was getting a bit much as the second season kicked in so i gave up on it for the time being

Collateral was ok, although I have probably muddled it up with the 3000 other things of the same ilk I've watched recently.

(Oh, the pizza guy, the refugees). Carey good, yes.

Yeah it’s purely a time sink. Only watching for Carey

i can't believe they literally had one fbi profiler explain to another on their own same team what exactly rohypnol is and its typical criminal uses in 2005, with zero self-consciousness on the part of the writers

criminal minds has to be the lamest nominally successful police procedural of the past 20 years

Season 2 of broadchurch is weird

Why on earth is danny’s father replicating his son’s killer’s behavior—meeting privately with the young boy?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/rinko-kikuchi-star-michael-mann-hbo-max-series-tokyo-vice-1282655

aaaahhhhh yes please will watch

but wtf is hbo max?

who knows, stealing it anyway

otm

Mare Of EastTown is v good so far

Kate Winslets character reminds me a bit of Happy Valley main character ie beaten down divorced cop grandmother w dead kid

the story is different but has that kind of vibe, bleakness & good writing but more wry humor in this

also guy pearce doing a+ silver fox work as always

literally everyone is suspicious & fairly convincingly so, def scratches a whodunnit itch if you have one

(on hbomoax, 2 eps up so far, weekly)

yeah this is great, except for the montage showing the local kids all being interviewed which was really jarring in tone, like something out of a quirky indie comedy. But I'm in this for the long haul