Today, Explained - Copaganda

Episode Date: June 13, 2020

After 33 seasons, the reality TV show Cops was canceled this week. Should scripted police dramas follow? Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. There's been a lot of talk lately about how heroic our essential workers are, the people working in factories or stocking shelves or delivering our mail. But in the before times, a lot of that adoration was reserved for emergency workers. And it's no surprise when I think about how heroic EMT workers are, I'm thinking about this moment right now, the coronavirus, where we've seen it time and time again. When I think about firefighters, I picture firefighters battling California wildfires or running into the World Trade Center on 9-11. But when I think about police, I mostly picture a bunch of fictional characters I've seen on TV.

Every Friday night when my brother and I were growing up, we'd watch Homicide Life on the Street with our parents, which maybe we were too young for, but that's another story. If you've never seen it, it's a gritty police drama that revolved around Baltimore homicide detectives. It presented them as flawed, complicated people, but their work always came first. There was nothing more important than booking the bad guy.

In recent weeks, there's been a lot of reflection about how the cops are portrayed on TV and whether or not it's problematic. The reality TV show Cops, which has been glamorizing police work for over 30 years, was canceled this week. It's been criticized for years for overemphasizing crimes by Black and brown people. And now people are wondering what will happen to the countless TV dramas about cops. Will they get canceled too? Will they adapt to this moment? Will they pretend the reckoning that's taking place across the

country never happened? On today's show, we're going to try and figure it out with the help of a guy who writes a cop show on TV and Alyssa Rosenberg, who writes about culture for The Washington Post. I asked her how far back cop shows on TV go. Really, really, really far. But to be fair, it all started with a silent picture. And this is from the teens and 20s. Buster Keaton makes an early movie called Cops that is very critical of the police and is concerned about sort of overreach and wrong suspects being identified. So there's this early sort of skepticism of the police that shows up in pop culture where they're either sinister or ridiculous. And that is something you gradually see sort of leech out of the culture as folks who are making these shows realize that cops are really compelling characters. And police departments have often been glad to acquiesce in this because they get free advertising and not just free advertising, but, you know, ongoing storylines that make

people feel attached to their institutions. They don't have to pay for them. It's the greatest recruitment scheme in history, at least in the history of American popular entertainment. Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. The person who really kind of pioneered this formula for having Hollywood and the police departments work together is Jack Webb, who created Dragnet. This is the city. Los Angeles, California.

I work here. I'm a cop. The cops in Dragnet are, you know, competent, they get their man, they're concerned about the community, and they're really good at their jobs. And that template has never really wavered. And Webb got the collaboration he needed by essentially enlisting the LAPD as a partner. And then you start to see the genre really get reinvented to a certain extent in the 80s and 90s with more psychologically complex shows like Homicide, Life on the Street, and NYPD Blue.

If you think I'm a racist, if you You rubbing my nose in it here a little bit? Let me tell you something, okay? I'm entitled to my feelings and my opinion, so long as I do my job the right way. And then Dick Wolf, his Law & Order shows, does start to bring attention to the specific problems of sex crimes and how the police investigate them or don't investigate them terribly well. In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.

And then, you know, in the sort of so-called golden age of television, you have two shows about cops, one of which everyone likes to talk about endlessly, which is The Wire. Pandemic. Pandemic. Pandemic. Pandemic. Which is, of course, great and innovates by placing the police in juxtaposition to a lot of other institutions that have similar issues of bureaucracy and sclerosis and corruption. And so the genius of The Wire is that it kind of dares to treat the police as yet another bureaucracy that can be examined using sort of all the same tools. And then The Shield, which where the innovation, I think, is really to make the cops the antiheroes and to focus not broadly the way The Wire does, but narrowly on the contest between two sets of cops for essentially control of policing in this one precinct. And so the ending of The Shield in particular has really stuck with me as an

argument about how difficult reform is. We've been talking about police dramas, but that isn't the full story, right? One of the most popular police shows on TV right now is Brooklyn Nine-Nine. So I love Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It's a show that I found just incredibly comforting and just incredibly funny. I mean, as sitcoms go, it has to be one of the most joke-dense shows on the air. But, you know, it's also a show that, where the showrunners, you know, took the prospect of looking at the police incredibly seriously. And even though it's a comedy, you know, they want it to be a model. They want it to be the story about sort of what policing can be.

I'm not saying anything. Look, Punk, there are two ways we can do this. The easy way or the hard way. Tell them what the hard way is, boss. Well, first, Steven, we're going to fill out form 38E-J1 stating noncompliance. We send it to the DA, but do they process it right away? No, because they're overwhelmed because Deborah's on maternity leave.

So your court date won't be set for six or eight weeks. And even then, you're going to have to block out the whole day because they don't give you a specific time. No, no. It's a window. But it exists in kind of a funny space, right? Because it's very optimism and an effort to set a model for what policing can be can make it feel incredibly discordant. Tell me more about that discordance. How do cops on TV generally differ from those who police our towns and cities? In totality, I would say there are a couple of messages that come through really clearly. One is that the police are very effective.

And if you look at the numbers of, you know, the number of crimes in various categories where a suspect is arrested or identified, you know, the numbers are just often really low. The idea that roughly 40% of homicides, those cases aren't cleared, I think that is not something that shows up in American pop culture. You know, if you go to property crimes, in some cases, less than 20% of those crimes are cleared. And so these shows suggest that the police solve is that there aren't bad police shootings, that there are police shootings where people feel grief or ambivalence, but not like the death of Philando Castile, where you have someone just panic and shoot into a car. That's just not something that shows up in pop culture. So, Alyssa, you wrote this argument an email from like every company who's ever had your email address being like, you know, I'm like emailing you from Alice's Tea Shop in New York, and like we sell really great scones, and we hope you support us through the pandemic, but most importantly, like Black Lives Matter. But much more so than many other industries,

Hollywood can do something about that. I mean, if you're NBC and you want to directly contribute to the fight to have a different kind of policing in America, you have an entire night of programming that's like Dick Wolf's Chicago shows or Law and Order iterations. Entertainment companies have much more direct power to shape the conversation about policing in America. And so I love cop shows. I wouldn't have spent this much of my career watching police stories if I didn't find them just really dramatically satisfying and interesting. And so to a certain extent, like, I don't want cop shows to go away. They're great.

They're engaging. But, you know, this is a corporate put up or shut up moment. And you could conclude that you think your stories are fine, that they say what you want them to say. They contribute to the impression that you want them to contribute to. But, like, if companies want to be taken seriously as contributing to an argument about policing in America, just start with the stuff you already do. Look at whether you are commissioning and airing work that lives up to the ideals that you say you want to express in your work. That's it.

It's not that hard. After the break, we go straight to the source to find out whether Hollywood is ready to change how it presents cops on TV. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.

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betmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Like a lot of us, Aaron, Russ, and Thomas grew up watching cops kick ass and take names on TV. My earliest memory of cops on TV were some of the popcorn shows of the late 70s, early 80s. You know, things like Starsky and Hutch. -♪ Reruns of the original SWAT. -♪ And then eventually, the kind of the start of prestige cop shows. Hill Street Blues was a staple in my household.

The theme music was one of the first scores on TV that I really admired. We have a 911. I'm robbery in progress. Seat surplus door corner People's Drive, Mark 24th Street. I still remember even the rain-soaked images that we saw on the original opening for Hill Street Blues, that those were the first impressions on my interpretation of police officers on TV. Unlike a lot of us, Aaron grew up to run a TV show about cops. Even better, he got to reboot one of those shows he watched as a kid, SWAT.

But it ended up being a movie about one shiny example of a cop that made him want to write about them. Where the tie changed for me was when I went to see, of all things, I went to see RoboCop, the movie. What are your prime directives? Serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law. Within the first 10 to 12 minutes, the main character, who's a police officer, Murphy, gets shot to hell in a way that I've never seen anyone before since, gets shot to hell.

That imprinted on my brain as a kid, oh, that's a very dangerous job in a way that I hadn't anticipated. I don't know if I want to do that, but I do admire the ability to write and to live vicariously through that prism. And so, funny enough, seeing that movie kind of dictated two things. One, I don't want to be an actual cop. I think there you know, there's a specific personality and a specific type of courage that's required for that. And I have a lot of respect for that. But number two, the challenges of being a cop are very, very compelling. I would love to write about that. Aaron wanted to take a different approach, though, not just graphic violence or

vintage morality tales. He wanted to make a show that reflected his own experience with the police as a black American. I always say my neighborhood had a love-hate relationship with the police. There was love in that there were police officers around us. There was a police officer who lived in my neighborhood. There was a police officer who was, you know, a bit of a mentor of mine in my church. You know, there were police officers known to be the ones who taught kids how to ride bikes and to throw spirals. On the other hand, you know, there were elements of policing that affected us adversely.

You know, when I was young, you know, my first adverse experience was a neighbor of mine, 12-year-old kid who lived right next door, who had gone to a video arcade at a local mall and ended up in a questionable situation with the police officer there and ended up getting shot in the head and killed. Aaron's written experiences like these directly into SWAT. I mean, certainly in the pilot of SWAT, the very first A story that we work in our series is a black kid, Raymond Harris, who was shot accidentally by the leader of our SWAT unit, who in that case is a Caucasian guy, Buck Spivey. Raymond doesn't die. But in a way, the spirit of that event and many others, by the way, that wasn't the only.

That was just the first that I remember, inform almost every police story that I tell. who grew up with a complicated view of police officers but chose to try to be part of the change through joining the Marines and then later the LAPD. If you want change, get out there and be the change. But at the same time, do it through a lens of a guy who's been on both sides of the Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter debate and take that nuance and that understanding to interacting with the community and also at the end of the day, saving the day.

Watching these protests, you know, you don't necessarily see SWAT teams out there, but you see a lot of police in SWAT looking gear out there blasting tear gas at protesters. At any point, did you feel nervous? Like, oh gosh, this is like the people I write a show about out there. Yes. Up against the people I care about? Yes. Some of the most horrible images we're seeing are officers that look like our heroes on the show. To say that that concerned me would be an understatement. Yes, the images are terrible, and that's something we shouldn't shy away from.

That's something that our main character would recognize, and also recognize that those images make his job a thousand times harder. For every single graphic video or misappropriation of police force that you see, it makes the next police officer who's trying to do the job right or in a different way have to work that much harder just to be able to try to do the job effectively. And that to me is where a perspective of an African-American SWAT officer might be different. When you heard cops got canceled this week, did you get nervous that they might cancel fictional cop shows too? I wouldn't say nervous. We've received tremendous—well, let me rephrase that.

I would not say I was nervous once Cops was canceled. After 33 seasons, I believe, I was not nervous that scripted police shows would be canceled in connection with it. I'm a big believer in not being nervous about the things I cannot control. What I do look at, you know, is always, you know, what are the conversations that are going on around police, around community? I feel as though it would be a real service if we have an opportunity now to be able to tell the stories that we are perfectly set up to do. I would argue that the intention of scripted television is never to really be realistic. I don't even think people tune in for that purpose.

What you want it to do is to feel real. You want the emotions to feel real. But it's never going to be a realistic portrayal of the actual job. People oftentimes want some type of satisfaction. It's a complicated world. When they tune into television, you know, they want to know if, you know, what type of verdict did we get, guiltier or innocent, whether that's in one episode or over the span of episodes. People tend to want some type of completion. You know, whereas in real life, you don't often get that.

You know, people often want some type of clear statement and stance. Whereas in real life, you definitely don't get that. But we can offer questions and look to open up the conversation regarding is this the best way to do the job? And if it's not, what are better ways to do it? Aaron Russon-Thomas is the co-creator and executive producer of SWAT on TBS, which I will personally forever call the Superstation. I'm Sean Ramos-Firum. This is Today Explained from the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Dream Team is Muj Zaydi, Afim Shapiro, Jillian Weinberger, Bridget McCarthy, Amina Alsadi, Halima Shah, and Noam Hassenfeld, who does some music too. The rest of the music comes from the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.

Cecilia Lay checks our facts, and Liz Kelly Nelson is Vox's editorial director of podcasts. A day or two ago, I let you know that we're going to make more kids episodes this summer and wanted to hear from people who are keeping groups of kids company this summer. Thanks to everyone who responded. And here's another request this time for all the kids. We want to hear your questions about all the stuff we've been talking about on the show for the past few weeks, the protests, racial justice, police reform. What have the kids in your lives been asking you? What questions remain unanswered? Have them record a voice memo and email it over to us todayexplained at vox.com or they can call and leave a message at 202-688-5944.

Again, that's 202-688-5944. Thanks.