By Luke BuckmasterFeatures correspondent
Alamy(Credit: Alamy)Crime dramas and police procedurals are some of the most popular types of TV, but with trust in authorities waning and audience expectations changing, what could be the future of the genre?
You know this scene, you've watched it a thousand times before: the maverick police officer, who breaks the rules but gets the job done, hands over their badge to a disgruntled superior. This trope has been hardwired into the TV cop drama, or police procedural, one of television's oldest and most dominant genres, which accounts for (according to research undertaken in 2020 by The Hollywood Reporter) almost a fifth of all scripted series on US network television. It is also hugely popular elsewhere, with dramas like Line of Duty and Vigil booming in popularity in the UK.
In almost every example of the "hand over your badge" scene, the audience is asked to sympathise not with the by-the-book boss – insisting on accountability and due process – but the protocol-breaking cop. The conditioning of viewers to root for the law-enforcing protagonist, no matter what, speaks to one of many problems some see as endemic in the cop drama: the vast majority of these productions offering flattering depictions of the police.
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Until recently this has been broadly in line with public sentiment – opinion polls in the US published in 2019 showed police were among the country's most-trusted public institutions. But, in the wake of the recent deaths of George Floyd and other black Americans and the subsequent resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is evidence that trust had collapsed, and that the public now see police brutality as a major problem.
The TV cop drama has subsequently faced hitherto unexperienced scrutiny, with some calling for the genre to be completely transformed. Last year the Washington Post went so far as demanding it be scrapped altogether, publishing a pull-no-punches op-ed headlined Shut down all police movies and TV shows. Now. The consensus however is that the cop drama is here to stay; the important question is to what extent it will change going forward.
AlamyBrooklyn Nine-Nine actor Terry Crews said the rewrite of the eighth series in the wake of Black Lives Matter was an "opportunity" (Credit: Alamy)Dr Mareike Jenner, senior lecturer in Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University in the UK, and author of American TV Detective Dramas: Serial Investigations, is among those calling for the genre to adapt to the times, telling BBC Culture: "I'm hoping we're in a period of transformative change. I'm hoping the Black Lives Matter protests will have a huge influence on the way police are depicted, because that can help push a general ideological change. I am cautiously optimistic."
The Black Lives Matter movement had a short-term impact on cop showsProfessor Yvonne Tasker, Chair in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, who has written several books including a comprehensive overview of the Hollywood action and adventure movie, is less optimistic. She says that instead of observing "evidence of significant transformation" she sees so far "more continuity than change", and no evidence that the procedural genre is looking to meaningfully address the issues highlighted by Black Lives Matter activists.
The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement certainly had a short-term impact on cop shows. It prompted, for example, the cancellation of long-running reality TV series series Cops (axed a couple of weeks after Floyd's death, but subsequently brought back this year on a new network) and Live PD, another hugely popular police reality series scrapped around the same time.
In the wake of Floyd's death, police sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine ditched its first four episodes of season eight, with the writers returning to the drawing board to configure plotlines reflecting a post-Floyd world. In an interview with Access Daily, actor Terry Crews said: "We have an opportunity and we plan to use it in the best way possible… they had four episodes all ready to go and they just threw them in the trash. We have to start over." The opening five minutes of season eight's first episode contain several references to Floyd and police brutality, and a key plotline involves a black woman reporting the inappropriate behaviour of police officers whose body cam footage was "mysteriously corrupted". This season turned out to be the show's last. Similarly, episodes in season seven of NCIS: New Orleans also incorporated contemporary references, including a plotline involving a Black Lives Matter activist.
AlamyNCIS: New Orleans included contemporary references and a Black Lives Matter storyline in their final season (Credit: Alamy)The "cowboy cop"
The ways in which both Brooklyn Nine-Nine and NCIS: New Orleans reacted to a changing cultural and political environment were rudimentary: some timely references inserted into scripts and plotlines touching on contemporary issues. Going forward there are deeper issues to confront, in redressing key elements of the genre which have long been considered par for the course. These include the longstanding prevalence of the "cowboy cop" trope, immortalised in films such as Dirty Harry (1971) and Die Hard (1988), but long standing within film and TV before and since. Take for example Justified, the Elmore Leonard-inspired neo-Western TV series that ran from 2010 to 2015 and starred Timothy Olyphant as a trigger-happy US Marshal. This man is a literal and metaphoric cowboy cop, in that he wears a Stetson and enforces – to quote the show's official synopsis – "his own brand of justice".
The heroic outsider who does not play by the rules will always be a principal staple of the genre – Dr Ben LambThe first episode opens with Olyphant's character, Raylan Givens, confronting a man he has asked to leave town. The man did not oblige, so Raylan makes good on his promise to shoot him if he didn't abscond within 24 hours – killing him at a restaurant mid-meal. When this disturbing event is raised by a colleague, the protagonist claims he was "justified" – a title drop which reflects the essence of the show (that it is about a man who considers himself above the law) and speaks to the problem of the cowboy cop trope.
It’s hard to believe a new series launching today would open with, or even include, such a scene, plucked straight from the Dirty Harry playbook. Dr Ben Lamb, author of the book You’re Nicked: Investigating British Television Police Series, tells BBC Culture that nowadays "cop movies and television series are more nuanced" than Clint Eastwood's ideologically problematic classic, but the maverick cop trope is nevertheless here to stay. "The heroic outsider who does not play by the rules will always be a principal staple of the genre," he says. "They're the figure we find cathartic yet inspirational as they can stick it to the man in ways we wouldn't dare to, in our mundane existence of meeting KPIs and filling out spreadsheets for our superiors. We can also relate to them in terms of just how hectic and stressful modern life can be."
Tasker says this kind of portrayal will always be appealing because it "exposes and expresses a frustration with systems of criminal justice". The maverick investigator who bypasses rules is "presented as an agent of justice, in ways that function only from the basis of a fundamental belief in that character's integrity".
That belief in a character's integrity is (among other things) a matter of focus. If a show unfolds from the perspective of a single person, the audience are likely to empathise with this character even (sometimes especially) when they break the rules. An interesting recent example occurred in the critically acclaimed series Mare of Easttown, when (spoiler alert) Kate Winslet's Pennsylvanian detective gets busted for planting drugs on her daughter-in-law.
AlamyTimothy Olyphant's Raylan Givens in Justified enforces "his own brand of justice" (Credit: Alamy)This series is more nuanced than Justified, not necessarily telling viewers that what Winslet's character did was, indeed, justified. It operates in a moral grey area often necessary for interesting drama. Other shows draw an ethical divide between police figures by contrasting good and bad behaviour, and honing in on subjects such as corruption and malfeasance – creating unflattering impressions of the police force.
In recent years these more sobering series have included Line of Duty, which follows a self-professed "proper copper" (Martin Compston), along with Vicky McClure's DI Fleming and Adrian Dunbar's tough-talking quip machine Superintendent Hastings who take a moral stand against their colleagues in their work on the anti-corruption unit. In The Shield, the "bad cop" is the principal character: a dirty, in-your-face loudmouth (Michael Chiklis) who partakes in all sorts of unethical behaviour, including beating a suspect in an interview room with a telephone book.
A more cynical future?
Lamb predicts that, going forward, we are likely to see more in this already popular trend of cynical productions. He says that "at no other time" have cop dramas from both sides of the pond been "overwhelmingly invested in police corruption and going to great lengths to uncover why things are not as they first seem. To me this seems indicative of a time when faith in political leaders has been more sectarian than ever, and public trust is at an all-time low."
On the question of what else is in store for the future of the TV cop drama, like television more broadly the genre will almost certainly produce fewer shows anchored by white men. More will join a growing list of female-led procedurals, that includes Top of the Lake, Happy Valley, The Fall and Mare of Easttown. This modern twist on the genre however is not without its own challenges. Jenner, for instance, notes that female police characters often suffer more than male characters: "the outcome is always that the worst things that can happen to a person happen to them in the end," she says.
Within this relatively new tradition of the female cop in gritty narratives, you have quite a lot of these women who shouldn't be investigating who they are investigating - Dr Mareike JennerFemale cop characters can be problematic figures, she says, due to a tendency for writers to make them closely associated emotionally with the people they are investigating: “Technically the police shouldn't investigate people they're related to, or they're friends with, or anybody who's too close to them emotionally speaking. Jenner recalls that in Top of the Lake, Elisabeth Moss' character was "way too close, far too much in the middle of everything that was going on", while also an outsider to the accepted boy's club of the police establishment. "Within this relatively new tradition of the female cop in gritty narratives, you have quite a lot of these women who shouldn't be investigating who they are investigating."
Altering the nature and fabric of the cop drama is no small task, given its deeply entrenched status and ongoing popularity, though transformative change to it is not without precedent. In 1913, following years of Hollywood depicting the police as blundering clowns – a kind of portrayal famously called "Keystone Cops" – the International Association of Chiefs of Police passed a resolution to clamp down such representations, ultimately ushering in a new era of flattering portrayals and puff pieces. However, if the genre again experiences a period of transformative change (which is a big "if"), it will not be in favour of irresponsible authorities – and especially not those maverick cops who grudgingly hand over their badge to disgruntled superiors.
Read more about the 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century:
– The 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century
- Why The Wire is the greatest TV series of the 21st Century
- The dark side of 21st Century TV comedy
– Why I May Destroy You is the future of TV
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