Cop TV

Discover why cop shows endure as America’s most telling—and un-cancellable—cultural mirror.

Synonymous with the advent of television, the reality is that cop shows—for better or worse—represent the collective social history of America and beyond. They are imperfect but otherwise immutable cultural artifacts that will one day, as they already do now, impart for future generations the often grim day-to-day realities of (chiefly) urban life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Cop shows are allegories about natural, procedural, and social justice, of course, but they are also exposés about the inevitability of violence, fate, redemption, family, sacrifice, addiction, and discrimination, as well as the social constructions of evil—the entire spectrum of the human condition.

Even amid one-time calls to entirely defund the police, the cop show never got cancelled. Not even close. In fact, it remains, as the statistics and anecdotes contained in this book elucidate, the leading and most indelible form of fictional home entertainment on record, regardless of broadcast platform or territory. Until now, however, no one has really ever bothered to ask why.

Nostalgic, campy, often violent and unsettling, and frequently politically incorrect, cop shows—having at various points been formative viewing by both future cops and criminals alike—also remain in many cases the general public’s main, and often illusory, access point to forensic investigative procedure and greatly shape their perspectives of law enforcement and the criminal justice system writ large.