Cops Are Always the Main Characters

I stopped watching "cop shows" long ago. It blew my mind when new ones were created. I don't care if a new show gets good reviews, I refuse to watch another damn cop show.

Won't watch TV shows about lawyers either. Enough already!

https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/tv-cops-are-always-the-main-characters.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

At 8 p.m. on Saturday, at the same time CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News were airing live coverage of the nationwide protests against police violence, cable audiences also had other options for what to watch. On PopTV, there was a marathon of NCIS: New Orleans. On WE, Criminal Minds. On WGN, Blue Bloods. On Ion, Law & Order: SVU. And on USA, a marathon of Chicago PD that began 11 hours earlier and continued until Sunday morning, followed by an episode of CSI.

These aren’t identical shows, exactly. Criminal Minds is about FBI profilers who try to anticipate crime before it happens. The NCIS franchise is about a team who investigate crimes involving Navy and Marine personnel. Blue Bloods and SVU are about New York cops; Chicago PD is about Chicago police. But they and dozens of other popular, profitable TV shows share a fundamental ideology: The cops are the protagonists.

TV has long had a police’s-eye perspective that helps shape the way viewers see the world, prioritizing the victories and struggles of police over communities being policed. Order, a police imposed status quo, is good; disruption is bad. There are many, many reasons why a cop’s point of view has become the default way to frame national unrest, including institutional and systemic racism, the capitalist urge to prioritize property over human life, and a political system that benefits those already in power. But TV plays a role, too. The overwhelming mountain of cop shows amounts to a decades-long cultural education in who deserves attention, and whose perspective counts most. In stories of American crime, TV teaches us that cops are the characters we should care about.