in every cop show ever

"Just happened to be walking through the neigborhood, Captain."

Corollary to #6 is detective is not speaking with adult daughter who has moved in with hippy boyfriend. Detective investigates teenage-runaway-prostitute murder case; it was her pimp. Detective kills pimp and is moved to the realization that nothing is more important than family. Calls daughter, reconciles.

continues investigation outside jurisdiction despite suspension

or charmingly incomprehensible russian/arabic/urdu

29. swigs cwoffee - "hey lady! quit busting my chops!"

Detectives' wives must always plan their annual socials to coincide with the discovery of another body.

Detective dramas must regularly feature cases where someone appears to have died, yet will be mysteriously seen alive by one of the protagonists...

Young copper, handing over coffee in polystyrene cup: "Whassamatter sarge, you look as if you've seen a ghost."
Old copper: "I think I just have..."

Courtesy of TV.Cream.org

And never wearing gloves to handle potential evidence, despite just about everyone knowing about fingerprints!

37. Cops eating burger/pizza/doughnuts, radio goes off, it's a 4-16. They rush to car stuffing burger/pizza/doughnuts into mouth.

Or they throw it in a bin, especially if it's a polystyrene cup of coffee - what a waste!

41. Increasing use of dramatic irony - the audience knows who the killer is and oh noes the cop/detective is about to step into a trap that will involve a hostage situation.

42. There HAS to be a love interest on the force, resulting in tense scenes that might cause a bungled sting or distract the cop from important clues that could solve the crime.

love these threads

south american reprobate: 'go ahead, call the embassy. i have deeplomatic eemunity.' *smug grin*

Periodically this phrase will just pop into my head out of nowhere.

22. Chase scenes require bongos, and if a cop looks up the staircase of a building and sees the door to the roof swinging, the bongos will do a trill.

― A-ron Hubbard (Hurting), Thursday, October 5, 2006 3:14 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post

just reread entire thread and this made me lol irl again

143. DA or Police Chief removes (but does not set down) glasses while making a serious point.

144. around the halfway point of the show, the hero chases a minor supporting bad guy to a rooftop and corners him, but the dude is such a psycho that instead of giving himself up he throws himself off the roof. Hero: "noooo", runs to railing, looks down, sees bad guy lying on ground with a tiny trickle of blood coming from beneath his head.

xxpost: Oh my god, please tell me that's ever happened!

145. Detectives sighing at one another's idiocy despite being long inured to said idiocy.

146. Cops go to see witness. He doesn't have anything useful to tell them. Just as they're leaving he says 'Its really funny you asking me about that. There was another guy asking me about it 2 days ago".

147. Female cop incredibly good at playing pool.

what no crimer?

https://twitter.com/CrimerShow

148. (during a rare insight into troubled past) "they don't teach you that at the academy."

149. painkiller problem, i can handle it

150. "I'll start another pot of coffee... we got a looooong night ahead of us."

i hate this thread

'she's not my mistress, she's my daughter'

152. "He knows what he's talking about. He caught <insert colorful criminal nickname>!"

I'M GETTING TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT

Detective who had/has a drinking problem

And his wife that just can't bring herself to throw his ass out.

'put some clothes on, toots'

sleazy management: 'it's perfectly legal'

Has anyone ever looked into why there are so many cop shows on TV? And in movies? And it's not exactly a recent thing, I think ever since the 70's cops-related entertainment seems to have dominated America.

I was in college in 2006, taking Communications 101, a required course that pretty much everyone who went had to take. The professor did a survey about what kind of careers people wanted to go into, and overwhelmingly it was CSI-style stuff, or DA work, or forensics, etc.

It really made me sad, because here were all these smart and enterprising people, who probably want to do that kind of work because it looks interesting, and it looks like there are puzzles to work out and you use your brain a lot and you probably pick up all these skills that you wouldn't learn in the service industry. And yet it's being funneled to the State, rather than health or technology or environmental science or anything that would help people.

Not that the police don't help people, but usually they show up AFTER a crime has been committed.

I blame all the cops shows and movies. It glorifies the police, it does a good bit to make it seem like State power is super sophisticated and something to be in awe of.

Has anyone ever looked into why there are so many cop shows on TV?

Good post and I agree with your take, pretty much - as to "why," I could only guess but I'm sort of inclined to explain it in kind of boring mechanical terms: cop shows are relatively cheap to make, as they're short on effects or elaborate sets, but they still promise drama, action, violence and a moral universe that's as tidy and predictable or as "we probe shades of gray" as you need it to be. Basically they replace cowboy shows, which did the same things up until people stopped caring about cowboys. If I'm correct in my timeline, the shift from cowboys to cops would more or less coincide with the years of America's significant urban crises, "decay," "crime waves" etc., making cop shows particularly timely and exciting for a long period there.

Crime is way down now, but we may be stuck with it as a narrative, in fiction as in the nightly news (where obviously it also does lots of work to reinforce reactionary attitudes and the expansion of state power). There's also some chicken-and-egg stuff with the audience's expectations and assumptions; generally people think of the cops as heroic, and of course the abundance of cop shops (generally) reinforces that, making the next cop show that much more acceptable.

Cop shows also rely on a kind of trick where the audience, who are overwhelmingly non-cops, are brought in to identify with the cops both as (a) regular people and (b) larger-than-life people, "heroes," people who put their lives on the line for society, etc. etc. This is an appealing fantasy though the political implications again may be problematic. But it could be argued that this strokes some of the same appeals as, say, superhero fiction, but with less suspension of disbelief and associated silliness. Of course, this varies with the extent to which the fictional cop is seen as wrestling with problems most people will never face, but to the extent that they are Regular Folks with slobby apartments and difficult relationships, it's perhaps exciting to see them rising above all that "in the line of duty" and making big, weighty choices about life and death and justice and morality that the viewers are powerless to make.

there are a lot of people who want to go into health, technology, and environmental science too.

tv favors a small regular central ensemble cast which encounters a regular, inexhaustible, un-prefigured supply of new figures (less experienced or cheaper or simply less identifiable as actors) from week to week, and for whatever reasons has been drawn to programming in which the central ensemble is shown (a) at work, and (b) helping people, and so public or 'state' (usually, on the level of a locality, even below the level of a whole city, like a district or a neighborhood, since the action will be anchored in a physical place of work) employment at that task is a staple, since officially a lot of the work of these state actors is meant to help people, help society. programs with state actors in that position are more realistic; an alternative model with a band of helpers or a lone hero is also used a lot, but it tends toward the implausible or fantastical (quantum leap, angel, highway to heaven), maybe because it's harder to make believable that people would devote their lives to helping the helpless. and in the alternative model, the people helped are more often helpless; in the law enforcement model, the 'help' is really more for the state of society but is occasioned by someone who is technically helpless, since dead (so often they appear in the characters' rhetoric about speaking for the voiceless etc.).

medical shows and law shows work in similar territory, with variations for the kinds of relationships the principals regularly have with the transient characters/actors, and the kinds of positions those characters are often in: e.g. the dying and the indigent vs. the paying client and the innocent.

there is a dramatic reason for all this far in the background, too, which is that for whatever reason dramatic works that want to at least sometimes partake of tragedy (these shows do sometimes, but not necessarily every episode, and not necessarily that intensely) do it with a death, or at least the prospect of one. cop shows, especially murder-detection ones, come with a guaranteed death, a pretty much guaranteed figurative death (the murderer's, potentially, once caught and sentenced to life in prison), and a regular flirtation with death (of the cops doing their risky jobs).

but the competition between networks probably made the models more pronounced. if one network has a success with a program, another will probably try to get a similar one to succeed. and the intensification of the spinoff gambit in the 90s (it existed before but it didn't used to be that bad, did it?) and 00s, with networks taking up multiple slots for laws and orders and csis, probably didn't help any.

pfft 'trick' 'the audience, who are non-kings, are led to identify with king lear as larger than life but somehow also as a human being' it's called art, it's this thing

Didn't mean "trick" in the sense of tricking anybody but in the sense of a flourish, a device, a technique. None of us lives in Shakespearean times so convincing me that I relate to King Lear's tragic faults has a different political valence than convincing me that an officer of the law is "just like me."

but otherwise I agree with your long post, think it gibes pretty well with what I was trying to get at in my first paragraph above.

yes, we were typing at the same time

but i don't really believe that what the techniques encourage is thinking that law enforcement are 'just like me'.

Has anyone ever looked into why there are so many cop shows on TV? And in movies? And it's not exactly a recent thing, I think ever since the 70's cops-related entertainment seems to have dominated America.

By "70s" you mean, like, 30s, right?

The procedural became more prominent after World War II, [...] a large part of the impetus for the post-war development of the procedural as a distinct sub-genre of the mystery was due, not to prose fiction, but to the popularity of a number of American films which dramatized and fictionalized actual crimes. Dubbed "semidocumentary films" by movie critics, these motion pictures, often filmed on location, with the cooperation of the law enforcement agencies involved in the actual case, made a point of authentically depicting police work. Examples include The Naked City (1948), The Street with No Name (1948), T-Men (1947), and Border Incident (1949).

(just elaborating on phil's point)

One semidocumentary, He Walked By Night (1948), released by Eagle-Lion Films, featured a young radio actor named Jack Webb in a supporting role. The success of the film, along with a suggestion from LAPD Detective Sergeant Marty Wynn, the film's technical advisor, gave Webb an idea for a radio drama that depicted police work in a similarly semidocumentary manner.

but i don't really believe that what the techniques encourage is thinking that law enforcement are 'just like me'.

Well there are common factors you can put into any media to pander towards the everyman, the most effective being personal flaws. At heart most people think themselves flawed, and seeing a character flaw triggers sympathy. So the character has a drinking problem, or is going through a divorce, or has lost their partner, etc.

I think most of the techniques encourage the idea that if you do the slightest thing illegal, the state has an unrealistically advanced forensic science department and will devote 100% of the work force to track you down. Big Brother Fan Fiction.

a snuff film. is it real?! they're never real. but…?!

'am i in some kind of trouble here?'

in a garage, a suspect at work (usually a parolee) is approached by the police

they announce themselves

<suspect bolts>

Poloroids of shifty looking people's faces pinned to cork board, linked by bits of coloured string.

thoughtful examination of the death of the american working class

163. after a case which ended messily detective macannister visits his father, who was also a detective but has been retired for 20ish years or so since his wife carol passed. macannister, sr. recounts a story about a similar case he investigated once and macannister, jr. gains some perspective and clarity about his role in ameliorating the hurt this world doles out, regardless of how it all shakes out in the end. macannister, sr. is sitting in his favorite chair the whole conversation. it's his favorite chair.

'this is startin to sound an awful lot like an interrogation'

Drug dealer or criminal holding info is let off the hook, i.e. not jailed or charged for carry illicit items in exchange for coughing up some tidbit or three of use to constabulary

― Raymond Cummings (Raymond Cummings), Thursday, October 5, 2006 10:56 AM (9 years ago)

aka 'don't worry, we're not narcs'

164. Suspect sarcastically recites his own Miranda rights, "No, don't tell me. I have the right to remain silent. I have the right to an attorney..."

165. Cop guiding suspect into police car, intentionally whumping suspect's head on roof. "Whoopsie-daisy!"

165 (b). Suspect's innocence has been proven or has been arrested for an "honorable" crime. Cop graciously goes out of way to keep suspect's head from whumping the roof again.

school official who didn't think it was relevant

detective prays with a suspect

detective prays with a suspect who is a priest

there is a baby!

the public servant wants, unexpectedly, to take care of it

but they have to send it to family services!

22. Chase scenes require bongos, and if a cop looks up the staircase of a building and sees the door to the roof swinging, the bongos will do a trill.

I still think about this maybe once or twice a year and it never gets old.

Cocky Detective: "We'll see what the lab has to say about that!"

The Lab: "It's inconclusive!"

but first the lab person has to be silly and obfuscatory before the cop goes “get to the point” or “in English, please”

From the "separate the art from the artist" thread:

how many cop shows just have the ubiquitous drag queen sitting in a chair twiddling their thumbs waiting to be put in jail? even now. its like having a coffee machine in the scene.

― scott seward, Friday, May 10, 2024