I have been a great fan of Cops & Robbers shows for as long as there has been television. When I was a young thing back in the 50s, the dawn of the boob tube, our channel broadcast Dame Agatha's “And Then There Were None” on 3 consecutive nights, the way they would do it at a movie theater. It all started there, and then moved right along through Dragnet, Peter Gunn, Perry Mason, Hawaii Five-O, Miami Vice, Columbo, Law & Order and so forth and so on.
They are comfortable shows. With few exceptions there is only one story. There are Malefactors who engage in Villainy and are pursued by Paladins who catch them.
The success of this formula lies in the variety of possibilities within the 3 components. For example the Malefactor might be the butler, the stockbroker, the hood with the scraggly beard, the parson, a street gang, a fraternity, the dimple-cheeked secretary; any person or persons imaginable, especially considering the broad compass of possible felonies to choose from. Murder is the recurring favorite since within its embrace lies such multifarious means and motives, as opposed to, say, bank robbery which involves a bank, a lot of money, and somebody who wants it. There is scant opportunity for interesting embellishment here.
But even confined to that single assault on societal etiquette, there is a wide range of styles in the act and the telling, and like all styles, the current vogue is an evanescent thing and quickly replaced by a new and often more extreme version.
There is almost no aspect of society that has not changed in the 60 years since the first attempts at criminal investigation in 45-minute bites, and the character of these hebdomadal dramas has morphed in parallel. For example, back in the 50s when Mom stayed home and baked tuna casseroles for her husband and well-behaved children, the paladins were brave, honest, clean-shaven, officers with clean fingernails who would never do anything mean except in defense of women and children and the Malefactors were sloppy dressers, lousy shots with a pistol, occupied the 40th percentile in their graduating class, and would stop when Joe Friday shouted “Stop! Police!” The felonies in this distant time were inoffensive felonies like off-screen murder or a genteel jewel theft or somesuch. The only women were Madge, the faithful secretary, or an occasional weepy victim, pathetically grateful for the intervention of The Law.
As time went on, the dress code slipped and our heroes started turning up wearing T-shirts under their sports jackets, there were on-screen fights and we got to see the dead guys. The women were still either secretaries (not yet office managers or administrative assistants) or victims, but tending to favor plunging necklines and D-cups.
Finally the dress code deteriorated to where the Officers of the Law are indistinguishable from the gang members, fights and shootings are commonplace and frequently accompanied by a red mist, and the attack squads have abandoned blue serge for black commando outfits with Kevlar vests. They are armed with any number of automatic firearms and pockets full of grenades, mace, tasers, space age electronic stuff allowing them to track their quarry through concrete walls, and communication systems that make NASA look like they use orange juice tins and fishing line.
Quite apart from the questionable pleasure of following our societal history reflected in amusing stories of violent death and mayhem, there is a considerable entertainment value in picking out the imbecilities that are also a perennial feature of this genre.
Consider, the ace police detective, in pursuit of a known and dangerous felon, enters the dark, empty warehouse and makes his way into a warren of offices, storerooms, and piles of boxes. Nobody else is there, except the felon, of course, who has had the good sense to wear sneakers and is making his stealthy way to the back door. Our detective, meanwhile, having worn his hard-soled office shoes is signaling his passage with the unmistakable scritch scritch scritch of hard shoes on a concrete floor until he finally gets a bead on the felon and takes off running, klop klop klop, up the stairs, across the metal catwalk, past crates and barrels. Meanwhile the felon finally gets to the door and crashes through it into the waiting arms of a small crowd of beat cops on patrol who just happened to be in the neighborhood looking for somebody's lost cat.
A variant on this theme is the lady detective, finally allowed out of the typing pool, but still the plunging neckline, and, more importantly, the 3-inch heels, which she always wears when some young, fit drug dealer needs to be pursued down allies and over fences. Fortunately she has mad martial arts skills and when she finally catches up with him in a dead end full of dumpsters, after an initial shootout she easily flips him over and slaps on the cuffs while her overweight partner comes puffing in late scolding her for not waiting for back-up.
And then there are the flashlights. The paladins kick down the door and irrupt into somebody's house, guns at the ready and flashlights darting about. But not a single one of the dozen infiltrators thinks to switch on the lights.
Or there's a dead guy laid out in the desert at high noon, surrounded by emergency people wearing glacier glasses against the intense light, all except the crime scene people who are probing the area with penlights.
And then there's the inescapable interviews with people who knew the deceased who had died a horrible death involving hatchets and ropes and chainsaws, and the first question out of the mouth of the interrogator is “Can you think of anyone who might want to hurt Maisie?” Hurt? Really?
I still enjoy these crime dramas and am always happy to sit down with a CSI rerun or one of the newly fashionable coroner shows in which people who are supposed to be looking at stiffs and thinking about what might have killed them are out tearing around the countryside in black SUVs annoying suspects and finding clues that the lazy quarter-wits conducting the investigation have missed. However, the source of my pleasure in these silly stories is waiting for the inevitable nonsense and then preening at my great cleverness at discovering it.