Toward an Evolutionary History of TV Cops

[DrVolin]

Some very good food for thought there. The outline of a system.

[Nordic]

Interesting thread. I've lately been thinking about the Western, both cinematic and television versions (and the Cinema served the role of TV before TV came along).

The Western is obvious propaganda of a sort, whether conscious or unconscious, as a justification for the crimes of the White Man in stealing all this land and slaughtering all the original inhabitants.

In film school, Film History classes taught us to analyze films as products of the unconscious mind of a culture.

Many people seem to forget about that aspect of it, and instead are always seeing overt covertishness (like Hugh) where it may not exist.

I'm not old enough to really know what was behind the immense popularity and longevity of The Western, but I suspect in many ways it's for the exact same reason as the proliferation of cop shows now.

I.E. the lone macho hero who has to bear the burden of fighting bad guys and the moral ambiguity that goes along with that. Also the gratefulness of the "civilian" population, people who can't be expected to face evil much less fight it and have to depend on the barely controlled impulses of the somewhat murderous hero.

The justification for law and order. To keep the schoolmarms safe.

All of which fits into the M.I.C. -- "keeping the homeland safe from Indians/bad guys/communists/terrorists.

I think all of this hit its zenith with "24". Which was PURE propaganda, and conscious propaganda at that!

Also, as a writer, I recognize the convenience both types of shows present to the writers -- with either genre (and you can include hospital shows along with this), you have a great set-up for new characters every week, new cases, new dramas (in the Western it was always "a stranger comes to town" basically). Let's face it most people are fairly lazy and follow successful formulas, so they keep doing this over and over and over.

I think the Western is dead because it just isn't sexy anymore. No cars, no car chases, no machine guns, no scantily clad babes.

Just my two cents.

I am kind of amazed and appalled that they KEEP cranking out new cop shows. How do you write one of those now? How can you not possibly cover ground that's already been covered? Where do you possibly go creatively? Ugh.

[nathan28]

I am kind of amazed and appalled that they KEEP cranking out new cop shows. How do you write one of those now? How can you not possibly cover ground that's already been covered? Where do you possibly go creatively? Ugh.

They don't keep cranking out anything "new", that's how. It's this obsession w/ sex-crime sci-fi/horror "forensics" and paint-by-numbers gothic "profiling" that means the writers can just concoct absurd scenarios every week. "What if the killer... is one of those 'furries'... who was locked into a closet as a child and forced to watch old Jack Lamotta fights... and the killer wears a prosthetic bull penis while suffocating his victims... that is poorly designed and leaves traces of mail-order farm supply semen at crime scenes... now we only need to spend fifteen minutes finding the receipts... oh no there are ten thousand orders this past month... look when I put the toothpick into the CRIMEOTRON2600 we found new fiber evidence from his costume that matches a fiber from an abandoned vehicle registered to Mark Stupidski's firm Furries International! Get a warrant!!!!!" etc.

[semper occultus]

so could we be saying that the whole meme around serial-killer profiling is a load of deliberately engineered & seeded woo ?
a way of keeping the paranoia pressure-cooker simmering ? ..."they" have these quasi-clairvoyant savants that can look inside your head & discover everything about you by observing the way you stir your tea ?

I reckon this was mainstreamed almost single-handedly by Thomas Harris - so anything spooky about TH ?
Difficult to say as apparently ( wikipedia ):
"Little is known about Harris's personal life as he avoids publicity and has not given an interview since 1976."

Ok so Pynchon & Salinger are pretty reclusive but Harris is rather down the mass-market end in comparison

One of his earlier novels concerned a domestic terror attack IIRC.

I've have heard one "profiler" say Jack the Ripper must have been a twitching muttering unwashed psychotic & another one say he obviously must have been outwardly completely normal not to have alarmed the prostitutes before attacking them !

there was a scandal here concerning a horrible random murder of a girl where the whizzy "profiler" turned out to be pretty much a total charlatan providing a covering-fire of pseudo-science psycho-babble whilst the cops were busily executing an old-fashioned fit-up to close the case !

[Nordic]

FWIW, the man behind CSI. It's a billion dollar business now, worldwide.

http://www.csifiles.com/interviews/anthony_zuiker.shtml

[semper occultus]

...so why the fuck didn't you think of it ?!

[Nordic]

Yeah, well, there's always the Powerball. Feels like the odds are about the same sometimes.

[DrVolin]

CSI makes a billion, but real forensics work is not profitable. Trust me on this.

As for profiling, nothing new since AC Doyle. His ideas have just been harnessed to further the feeling of powerlessness of the masses.

[justdrew]

it's a growing business...

January 2, 2011
TV Viewing Continues to Edge Up
By BRIAN STELTER

Historians may someday note with wonder that by the end of 2010, at least six cable television shows were about auctioneers and pawnbrokers. And all were considered successes by their respective channels.

Countless shows were about cops and robbers, too, and countless hours were devoted to competitive singing, dancing and even figure skating, and they each found an audience, proving again that television remains a refuge in the media revolution. (Except, perhaps, for figure skating. In December, ABC’s “Skating With the Stars” struggled to keep a mere one million viewers ages 18 to 49.)

Americans watched more television than ever in 2010, according to the Nielsen Company. Total viewing of broadcast networks and basic cable channels rose about 1 percent for the year, to an average of 34 hours per person per week. The generation-long shift to cable from broadcast continued, but subtly, as the smallest of the big four broadcast networks, NBC, still retained more than twice as many viewers as the largest basic cable channel, USA.

Cable hits like “Jersey Shore” on MTV and “The Walking Dead” on AMC were showered with media attention and affection, but the most popular new show was CBS’s “Hawaii Five-0,” a revival of a 40-year-old drama.

CBS, stable as always, was the No. 1 network among total viewers for 51 out of 52 weeks, and three of its new shows, “Hawaii Five-0,” “Blue Bloods” and “Mike & Molly,” landed in the top 20 for the year, the only new shows to do so. CBS also used the Super Bowl to introduce the reality show “Undercover Boss,” which cracked the top 25.

“CBS has been able to replenish its lineup as older shows fade,” said Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media. He contrasted CBS with ABC, which bid adieu to “Lost” in May and seeded no new hits since.

Among viewers ages 18 to 49, Fox again ranked first for the year, with a 3.0 rating on average, in part because of “American Idol” and one of the breakout hits of 2009, “Glee.”

Nielsen noted in an end-of-the-year recap that eight of the 10 highest-rated telecasts of the year were football games. The two others were the Academy Awards and the premiere of “Undercover Boss,” which followed the Super Bowl.

The biggest gainer on the broadcast ledger was a Spanish-language player, Univision, which is drawing more attention for its ratings victories. For the year it averaged a 1.5 rating among 18- to 49-year-olds and 3.7 million total viewers. On an otherwise quiet Monday last week, the finale of one of its telenovelas, “Soy Tu Dueña,” or “I’m Your Owner,” averaged four million viewers in that demographic, beating all the English-language networks for the night.

On cable, USA remained the most popular in prime time. Despite some signs of audience erosion, its C.I.A. drama, “Covert Affairs,” was the most popular nonsports program on cable among younger viewers, beating some new dramas on the broadcast networks. USA’s rival TNT had a breakout hit in “Rizzoli & Isles,” an opposites-attract crime-solving show.

Despite a vast oil spill and a midterm election, all of the cable news channels posted declines from 2009. The Fox News Channel remained the most popular of the group by far. MSNBC celebrated a historic win in prime time over CNN, having beaten that channel for the first time among all viewers. (In 2009, it beat CNN for the first time among 25- to 54-year-olds.)

The bad news for CNN did not end there. It lost more viewers than any other cable channel, according to Mr. Adgate’s research, ending the year with an average of 578,000 viewers in prime time, down 34 percent from a 2009 average of 874,000 viewers. Two other channels, VH1 and the Hallmark Channel, also lost more than a quarter of their audience.

The History Channel and Ion Television each grew by more than 25 percent year-over-year. History was helped by “Pawn Stars” and “American Pickers,” trash-into-treasure reality shows that spawned imitators on other channels.

TLC now has “Pawn Queens,” Discovery now has “Auction Kings,” Spike now has “Auction Hunters,” and A&E now has “Storage Wars.” Spike, which had a tough year, went so far as to brag in a December news release that “Auction Hunters” had been beating “Auction Kings”; both shows have been renewed.

Perhaps the most eye-popping growth on television came from the relatively small Investigation Discovery, or I.D., which specializes in nonfiction crime stories and is owned by Discovery Communications. I.D. averaged 283,000 viewers at any given time, a gain of 64 percent over the previous year.

I.D. did it by bulking up on repeatable shows like “On the Case With Paula Zahn,” hosted by the former CNN anchor, and “Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry,” about crimes that ruin relationships.

[JackRiddler]

http://counterpunch.org/cockburn01142011.html

(by Alexander Cockburn)

The American Way of Torture, Continued

I wrote here last week about the present status of torture in America, now in a noonday of public and official approval unequalled since the glory days of waterboarding in the Philippines just over a century ago, or on the domestic front, lynching and flaying black people.

A CounterPuncher wrote:

I think your argument can actually be taken much farther... I don't watch much TV these days, but from everything I've read that "24" series about Jack Bauer had him playing a government agent who righteously tortured people almost every episode, hence a dozen or more times each day in the story timeline. I think for several years it was one of the most popular American shows and Bauer a leading television hero. Now correct me if I'm mistaken, but this sort of thing might be almost unprecedented in modern history. Certainly lots of cruel dictatorships such as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia widely used torture and had professional torturers, but I'd never heard that they actively glorified their professional torturers in the popular culture or portrayed their exploits as heroic in films and such. I'd think if that had been the case, the American history newspapers and books would have endlessly cited that fact. I don't recall Saddam producing movies about his official torturers going about their work. I'm not even sure whether the Spanish Inquisition made huge efforts to draw public attention totheir harsher actions. I think the whole situation in present-day America may really be more remarkable than most people realize. I think I remember a couple of years back some top Pentagon officials complained to Hollywood that "24" and other shows like that were hugely influencing the behavior of American troops, persuading them to torture prisoners even when their superiors told them not to. It's really quite a remarkable story---war crimes flowing from "liberal" Hollywood entertainment media to the military, rather than the other way round...

Here's the wiki-bio of Joel Surnow - the guy who created and wrote the series. He is of Lithuanian descent. His parents were Jewish. He graduated from UCLA film school in 1976.

Soon after graduation, he began writing for film; he then switched to television. Surnow's most successful work was on the TV series 24, which he co-created and also executive produced with Robert Cochran.

"Surnow has described himself as a supporter of the Republican Party, donating money to the campaign of Rick Santorum and expressing particular admiration for former President Ronald Reagan. He is also a close friend of conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh." Surnow is a self-described "isolationist" and has stated that he has "no faith in nation building." He is the owner of an American flag that flew over Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was sent to him as a gift from one of the regiments stationed there.

According to CounterPuncher JoAnn Wypijewski:

“24 was a very interesting show. Technically, in terms of editing, quite brilliant. It was terrible, of course, totally accepting the idea that torture 'works': there was lots of torture, and the victim always gave up completely credible information, or else refused and died. No one ever gave bad information, not once. But the show in its early seasons was interesting because along with the Limbaugh-lover as exec producer there was some liberal conspiracy type making the show, and so there was a continual tug of war in the show between torture as another useful tool in the war on terror and torture as an absolute evil, just as behind every Arab or African or unreconstructed Soviet terrorist there was a major US corporation or a major US political figure -- in one season, the President; in another, the Vice President's chief of staff -- working in concert or actually pulling the strings.

“The ultimate bad guy, in every season I watched, was an incredibly rich and powerful American. The show was a pretty fascinating gauge of American sensibilities, politically a muddle, with there always being someone or ones trying to rein in Jack Bauer, our hero. And as the years went by Jack became more and more damaged by killing and torturing for a living. Keifer Sutherland is a lefty Canadian. He ultimately had some producer role in the show, so maybe that is the reason. But by now Jack was a mess. He kept trying to retire and something keeps sucking him back in, but the plots got increasingly crazier, just as Jack did. I think the show has lost its moorings, and if one wanted to get all metaphorical about it, you could say its degenerated along with the political culture that was its impetus and subject.

“24 was extremely popular with the troops in Iraq, and the Army sent someone to the producers to tell them: Look, the guys love this show and it makes an argument 180 degrees from what we're telling them: that torture doesn't work, you get false answers, etc. You've got to change the show; the troops are confused. What you show is what they're juiced for. At least sometimes have torture result in a colossal failure of intelligence, failure of policy, response, etc. But I think the lure was always too great for the show's makers, and probably the Limbaugh-lover wouldn't hear of it. Nothing changed immediately after that meeting.”

[Joe Hillshoist]

Cheers jack.

[23]

My first exposure of a man in uniform with a badge, on the boob tube, was Officer Joe Bolton.



Officer Joe was later removed from showing Three Stooges clips, and became the host for my second exposure to coppers on the telly:

[JackRiddler]

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Hollywood Scripting
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