Good/Bad Cop

Published October 30, 2007

By Ben Silverman
Illustration by Erin Daigle

Like synthesizers and S&M in the middle 80s, television Cop Dramas are spreading across our cultural universe bringing with them a miasmic wave of sadism and masochism.

I mean, is there anything more sadistic then these 21st-century Dragnet knock-offs, painting an idealized and fantasized view of the criminal justice system where self-righteous cops always catch their man? And the robbers are always the embodiment of evil in the form of a minority, or at best just a kid who made some wrong decisions and whose time in the pokey can only do him good?

What more feeds into the cloistered middle class’ self-instituted paranoia and content with the status quo than this puritan dialogue of wrong-doing followed by righteous punishment where the interned, racked with his outside imposed guilt, gets religion and redeems himself.
The sheer titanic deluge of these programs could flounder Noah’s Ark. Every major city’s police department (with triple emphasis on the Apple of Bigness) has its own representative in prime time TV universe. Even Fox is coming out with a New Orleans cop drama— since when you think about who’s best to represent a fair and balanced version of the worst quagmire on the North American continent through the eyes of the badge, you think of Fox.

Like Adam and Eve out of the Garden (they had every right to eat that apple, I don’t know what Jehovah’s problem was) cop shows have been fruitful and multiplied into every color under the sun. Every sub-department of the police departments gets its own half hour, hard hitting time-slot of doom. “Meet Officer McGovern. The in-your-face, gritty, streetwise mail clerk of the Yosemite Rangers Office.”

Flip through your TV guide sometime; you’ll see those professional con artists called Psychic Detectives with their own program. Quirky OCDs solving mysteries. Grannies on Lifetime stopping murderers. The entrapment of child molesters is a hit reality TV show. Nancy Drew with a movie coming out and the Hardy Boys on South Park (Hi-Larious episode though).
We gobble these programs right up, devouring the popcorn content and shadow-puppet morals, some of us even taking Criminal Justice as our major after watching too much CSI. But do we grow in the end?

Does society as a whole benefit from an over surplus of wannabee vigilantes bent on unquestioningly imposing the will of the Most Supreme of Courts onto the free citizenry of this republic? Or do we just doom ourselves to a world where justice and revenge are inseparable, and our economy is as helplessly addicted to the Prison/Industrial Complex as it is to its
Military counterpart?

If Lady Justice is blind, then she most certainly doesn’t watch TV.

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