Toward an Evolutionary History of TV Cops

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[Jeff]

Excellent thread, Jack and all.

Let me tell you about Craig Bromell.

Ten years ago he was the president of the Toronto Police Association. Guilty of beatings - at least one which hospitalized a homeless man - general thuggery and political intimidation. He launched a fundraising effort, "Operation True Blue," to support gathering "data" on progressive city councilors seen to be at odds with the cops. Donate, and you received a decal for your car, which was widely viewed as giving you special favours on city streets. And so on.

Anyway, he stepped down in 2003, and stepped into local conservative media as an on air "personality." A couple of years ago he graduated to television, becoming executive producer of "The Bridge," a cop drama based upon the career of - Craig Bromell.

Craig Bromell always wore with honour his “made up” image of being a union thug with a badge.

However, a decade after “scaring” the hell out of some “targeted” Toronto politicians, the former Toronto Police Association boss-turned TV producer now says they were not being bugged back in the Year 2000 as many of them feared. It was, he said, nothing but theatrics.

“I was urged at the time to reveal we actually didn’t do that but we were having too much fun watching them jump around,” Bromell said Wednesday. “We were conning the cons.”

However he doesn’t deny having the “1-800 snitch line” for people to offer dirt on politicians. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff we had but we didn’t use it because it was all a bluff as part of our negotiations.”

http://thebridgetv.com/2010/03/03/from- ... -producer/

Fantasy:


Reality:


Just ten years ago, this was an unambiguous Bad Cop to much of the city, even to members of the Police Commission. He had some powerful allies aid his rehabilitation, and I don't believe it was for his own benefit alone.

[DoYouEverWonder]

Too bad we can't go back to the days of Toody and Muldoon.

[semper occultus]

This is an interesting area ; played around with in the Life on Mars BBC series

I’m finding it very difficult not to deviate off-road into the cinematic arena but there is a close cross-fertilisation ( contamination ? ) from cinema to small-screen which I think does render it a crucial part of explaining the evolution under examination :

alongside the heroic lone cop cliché is the buddy-buddy partner scenario , 2 notable examples in the early 70’s being Busting ( Elliot Gould & Robert Blake ) & Freebie & the Bean ( Alan Arkin & James Caan ).

I presume these led to Starsky & Hutch as the small-screen equivalent & in this regard I would note Antonio Fargas in the cast of Busting – Huggy Bear of course in S&H.


In Dirty Harry the partner is a new boy & as a character & protaganist effectively reduced to a cipher to allow Eastwood to more clearly portray the lone hero.

The fascistic overtones of the above were addressed in Magnum Force where an overtly fascist death-squad operating within the police is used as counter-point to emphasise Eastwood as the acceptable face of police violence. There is also the use of subtle hints at a gay subtext to the 3 motor-cycle cops as if to try to delineate & identify Eastwood with an acceptable & “normal” hetero-style machismo.
From memory I can’t even remember if Eastwood has a partner in Magnum Force ?

One of the killers was portrayed by David Soul who ofcourse then went into S&H

In The Enforcer ofcourse Eastwood is saved again from having his alpha-male style cramped by being partnered with a feminist female - Tyne Daly - who was then cast in Cagney & Lacey !

The greatest police thriller of the 70’s I would reckon was probably the French Connection & I would suggest tv networks would have been too conservative at that time to countenance building a show around Popeye Doyle’s casual small-time roughing-up informants etc

[JackRiddler]

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Yes, French Connection! Greatest car chase ever (No. 2 is in The Terminator). Was also interesting for covering up the, um, French Connection.

I feel an urge to do a Typology of TV Cop Wounds, but I'll resist overdoing the frivolous, and point out the existence of the hugely entertaining TV Tropes wiki (more entertaining than TV, once you've watched enough TV in your life).

Intro pages:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... ToTVTropes
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... rsalTropes

I enjoy "The Big Bad" in its many incarnations.

Brief wound typology for heroes:
- Bullet graze to the face or arm: Grrr! That gets me even angrier!
- Through the fat of the arm: Some clutching, fight continues. No bone, no biggie.
- Shoulder: Falls, clutches, must first resort to retreat or use of new weapons. Can continue fighting one-armed.
- Leg: Damn, that hurts. Sidekick or girlfriend will save the day.
- Chest: Hospitalization may be required, full recovery after commercial.
- Head: During recovery, a full episode of flashbacks and scenes of concern among the supporting characters.

Villains, we've all learned that you should shoot right away and deliver the valedictory speech over the good guy's corpse. Otherwise you will be shot in the back. This will always and only happen as you pull the trigger. Also, don't ever bother grabbing a hostage and pointing a gun at their head. It bores us.

As for those who have introduced movies, of course they're essential. I think the most obvious change there has been in the enormous explosion of the body count starting in the 1970s and 1980s. Was watching North by Northwest the other week. (Yes, not cops but spies, but same thing applies. It's damn funny with gaping plot holes every five minutes, and in reality a comedy about Cary Grant and his doomed love for his indestructible suit.) Anyway, the Mt. Rushmore tourist cafeteria shooting, the Chicago train station "red cap" chase, and to a lesser extent the art auction all struck me as scenes that if made today (starring George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and maybe Snape Guy as the George Mason) would never get by without many dead mooks and innocent bystanders (all bodies die instantly, fall out of screen, and turn invisible two shots later). Which would also mean a lot more mooks under George Mason's command. (Mook is TV-Trope terminology for disposable henchpersons.)

I think it took until the late 1990s before the TV body counts started competing.

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[sunny]

Personally, I love it when the bad guy sprays copious gunfire in every direction without hitting a soul. The goodness of the good guys acts as an invisible shield I guess.

[Joe Hillshoist]

This is an interesting area ; played around with in the Life on Mars BBC series

The BBC version of that series was fantastic. The Gene Genie is a great tv cop. (A real bastard, which is something most cop shows ignore.)

Also the way the Bill changed over the years. Burnside was a real cop. (Ie a bastard.) And on the plus side they are repeating the Professionals on late nite telly here. (Yes I know they are fascist pricks, but the dialogue is great. How many cop shows have the lead characters hanging such shit on each so naturally.)

[nathan28]

And the way suspects behave in interviews as a form of mind control/programming.

There's an episode from the first season or second season of Homicide where the Frank Pembleton character, who is responsible for the type of chewed scenery bill you'd expect from a puppy mill, says something like "he's not the guy" to his supervisor, who clearly disapproves, and then Pembleton says something like "I'll get the confession", then goes back into the room and through intimidation, browbeating, moralizing and psychodramatic suggestions torments the suspect until he breaks down crying and gives a false confession. Of course, the cop leaves the interrogation room with a frown on his face and it's rectified in the next forty minutes or whatever when the real killer does something stupid like leaves shell casings at another murder or gets busted on a traffic ticket with the gun or whatever, but still, for almost half an hour a network TV cop drama let us in on a dirty secret about law enforcement. IIRC w/in a few years there was a high-profile case in Long Island where a false confession leading to conviction was successfully challenged.


On the other side of the coin, I'd like to note that cop reality TV has gotten really freaking stupid, as opposed to being just racist. There's now a show like "COPS: College Beat" or something like that, consisting almost entirely of cops issuing noise complaints and picking up DIPs. Or, this represents the racialization of not just white trash class status but also college kids' indeterminate social status.

[beeline]

[IanEye]

Fish Police

[DrVolin]

I am not fond of breaking evolutionary histories into stages. It does violence to the beauty of nature. I would rather look for a limited set of forces acting to produce an outcome. In this case, selection seems to be chiefly at work, but (unusually) in a context of increasing bushiness of the evolutionary tree. We went from a very few niches and a situation of competitive exclusion when there were relatively few television outlets and major film studios and distributors, to a rapid radiation of increasingly specialized and differentiated forms when the number of outlets (available niches) exploded in the late 1990s. At the same time, we have seen very strong selection favouring parallel evolution of a limited number of key traits in all these various forms. For shorthand, we can call these key traits the CSI complex.

Some clearly see strong external (environmental) selection in the form of elite control of production. Others will see internal constraints based on previous system configurations. In evolutionary history, the past constrains the future, and makes certain developments more likely than others. I tend to see a strong role for internal constraints and weak opportunism on the part of rather fractious elites. In any case, the shift from Dragnet to CSI is for me clearly patterned and the result of the operation of forces, rather than a purely historical and undirected development.

[MinM]

not sure where this one would fit in, but it was a big deal, re-ran for years too... Maybe stage 2.5 ? One thing is for sure, even the worst shows pre-80s engaged in far better story telling and general craft than the cookie-cutter plotted by flowchart with checkoff lists of this weeks buttons-to-push pap they spew out today.

The Mod Squad TV Show Theme Opening Season One. Great quality from DVD source. 1960s Clarence Thomas III Peggy Lipton Michael Cole. The Mod Squad was a police drama that featured three young, hip, crime fighters. One White, One Black, One Blonde, was the promotional hype-line. The casting was intended to appeal to a youthful, counterculture audience. The basic premise was that the youthful investigators were offered work fighting crime as an alternative to being incarcerated themselves. The show's primary gimmick centered on the three cops using their youthful, hippie personas as a guise to get close to the criminals they investigated. The show was moderately popular during its initial run of five seasons and 123 episodes. Tige Andrews (Captain Greer), Michael Cole (Pete Cochran), Peggy Lipton (Julie Barnes), and Clarence Williams III (Linc Hayes) starred. The show portrayed a multicultural society and dealt with issues of racial politics, drug culture, and counterculture.

The show was loosely based on Police Officer Bud Ruskin's experiences in the late 1950s as a squad leader for undercover narcotics cops, though it took almost 10 years after he wrote a script for the idea to be given the greenlight by ABC television studios.

viewtopic.php?p=320543#p320543

1968-1973 tv show decoy of the FBI's COINTELPRO program was called 'The Mod Squad.'


Groovy youth helping the cops. Their boss's name was "Greer" as a decoy of suspicious behavior by JFK's limo driver named Greer. Same reason Dr. Greer is fronting the CIA's UFO disinfo culture...

CW goes tomboy, orders Ridley Scott action pilot -- The Live Feed | THR

The CW has picked up another action-adventure pilot, this time from "Numbers" executive producer Ken Sanzel and power producers Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, and David Zucker.

The project is called "Nomads" and it's described as an "adrenaline-fueled thrill ride following a group of nearly broke young backpackers traveling the world who agree to earn money by working secret missions for the CIA."...

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - An offer they couldn't refuse: Hollywood and the CIA

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Why the Oscars are a Con

[JackRiddler]

I am not fond of breaking evolutionary histories into stages. It does violence to the beauty of nature. I would rather look for a limited set of forces acting to produce an outcome. In this case, selection seems to be chiefly at work, but (unusually) in a context of increasing bushiness of the evolutionary tree. We went from a very few niches and a situation of competitive exclusion when there were relatively few television outlets and major film studios and distributors, to a rapid radiation of increasingly specialized and differentiated forms when the number of outlets (available niches) exploded in the late 1990s. At the same time, we have seen very strong selection favouring parallel evolution of a limited number of key traits in all these various forms. For shorthand, we can call these key traits the CSI complex.

Some clearly see strong external (environmental) selection in the form of elite control of production. Others will see internal constraints based on previous system configurations. In evolutionary history, the past constrains the future, and makes certain developments more likely than others. I tend to see a strong role for internal constraints and weak opportunism on the part of rather fractious elites. In any case, the shift from Dragnet to CSI is for me clearly patterned and the result of the operation of forces, rather than a purely historical and undirected development.

So good, I just had to put my own Shakespeare mug next to it!

MinM: Mod Squad as camouflage for COINTELPRO? Now there's HMW at his finest! (Unironic.) And what does that make 21 Jump Street and other teenage/high school detective pablum? Preparation for the cops-in-schools normal of the last 15 years?

I am sure there's more planned, directed psyop as a factor selecting in the cops and war genres than in any other. I mean the war genre in an extended sense that would also include something like "Independence Day" (one of the all time fascist blockbusters).

Though it's very hard to separate what's enthusiastic opportunism in conformity with authoritarian zeitgeist (support the troops!!!) and what's psyop front to back. Mod Squad is a very likely candidate for a show idea that some spook friend of a producer at some point helped to advance. SWAT and "The Agency" look like out and out spook lab inventions (there's some confirmation on the latter thanks to press about the post-9/11 spook-Hollywood conference and Chase "Can My Name Be More CIA" Brandon III).

Children's programming is the other great field for propaganda, but looking at that I usually feel the commercial-corporate-capitalist-cannibalist mentality explains most of it.

[MinM]

Columbo was one of my favorite shows growing up. Thanks to my Rigorous Indoctrination though I wonder if the inquisitive curmudgeon was providing cover for the corrupt as hell LAPD. Much like the show FBI framed Hoover and the FBI in the best possible light. Specifically attempting to put scumbag intelligence operative Hank Hernandez in a more positive light...

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Silencing Sandy Serrano (the RFK killing)

rigorousintuition.ca - View topic - Daryl Gates Ran an International Spying Operation

[JackRiddler]

In any case, the shift from Dragnet to CSI is for me clearly patterned and the result of the operation of forces, rather than a purely historical and undirected development.

Just to be clear, I didn't think otherwise. Just started with the seeming most common DNA and how it changed.

In response to DrVolin's beautiful post... let's indeed go with evolutionary theory and list the possible selection, morphological, and niche factors, as a prelude to hypothesizing how they weigh and relate.

brainstorm... the categories are not clear-cut

VARIATION
Producers and writers
Actual cops and crime trends, perceived and real
Available templates (e.g., books to adapt)
Ideology/dominant or official
Ideology/specialized
Spook and psyop influences or initiation of projects
Studios
Influences of the era in programming
Influences of zeitgeist and current events
Budget!

SELECTION
Audience/ratings
Audience/fandom and subcultures
Audience/adverse reactions, protests
Advertisers
Producers and writers
Studios
Critics and media reception
Hidden sponsorship (i.e., counter to ratings, not just spooks but powerful fans)
Media corps/owners
Pick-up by foreign television
Budget
Censors!

MORPHOLOGY
Ancient form of story, esp. morality play
Attraction/parameters/demands of genre
Formal demands of plot and character
30/60-minute block format and other time constraints (commercial break)

NICHE
Number of channels and producers
Syndication possibilities
Advent of specialty channels
Advent of video/DVD/Internet
Minimum ratings required for viability

For a start...

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