Critic Alan Sepinwall on TV’s problematic love affair with police shows, and how the industry can move forward
) to Detective Vic Mackey , television’s endless flood of cops has accomplished two things. Early on, it presented police officers as infallible heroes who are professionally and temperamentally equipped to handle any delicate situation. Then eventually, it began depicting less admirable cop behavior, but in ways that tended to explain it — and, after a while, to normalize it.
For the most part, cops on TV are depicted as unerring. Some of this is just the nature of the storytelling beast: Each episode is meant to introduce a problem and solve it before the closing credits roll. But the most influential cop show of them all,— featuring Jack Webb as the stentorian, no-nonsense Friday — was essentially made in a creative partnership with the LAPD, and was considered a valuable propaganda tool by officials of that department.
One of the most iconic characters of TV’s black-and-white era was defense attorney Perry Mason, who was forever proving that the LAPD was arresting the wrong people. Mason’s adventures could be seen as a dramatic counterbalance toand company, but that perspective fell out of favor over time.
There’s reference to a woman who calls 911 to exaggerate minor nuisances, which, like everything else about the story, feels terribly relevant to so much of what’s happening today.
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