For the Shield or for the Cash?
Trollheart Investigates the History of Television Crime Drama
Crime drama has been with us for a while now. The first real proponent of crime fiction, and recognised as the father of the detective story, was Edgar Allan Poe, who, though more known for his dark horror works, did introduce the first fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to the world, most famously making his debut in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”. Following him was of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes far outstripped Poe’s detective and took the idea of investigation and deduction to new heights, becoming the template for most of the fictional - and even real - detectives who followed. The detective fiction or crime fiction novel gained great popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, with writers like Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler and of course Agatha Christie all gaining huge followings.
With the advent of film, Hollywood jumped on board, and cop and gangster and private eye movies were the thing, making stars of people like Humphrey Bogart, David Suchet and Robert Mitchum. But movies were then at best a two-hour event, an insufficient amount of time to truly explore a character, the world he lives in, the choices he makes, the life he lives. This really only became possible with the advent of television, where shows could be scripted that would run for twenty or more episodes, perhaps even several seasons, through which the whole grimy world of the private detective and the dangerous world of being a cop could be shown to its fullest extent. As a result, “cop shows” became very popular in the western world, and their popularity has never really faded. Why is this?
Maybe it’s because first of all, they’re exciting. As kids, we all played cops and robbers, and to be honest, I doubt it mattered which side you were on, though chances were if you belonged to the latter you were going to end up getting shot or put in jail. Even then, I suppose playing the robber was a way for us kids to rebel against authority and the establishment, even if we didn’t realise we were doing it, or it mattered little to us. “You dirty cop!” How many of us yelled that as we were machine-gunned in the streets outside our houses? Or when thrown in “jail”, vowed to break out and get even with the damn cops who had put us there? To be fair, we didn’t - well I didn’t, and I haven’t heard of anyone who did - play detective, private eye or anything like that. I guess it wasn’t immediate enough for us; too much brainwork, not enough shooting your way out of a setup. For kids, I reckon that was just too much like work.
Anyway, we saw enough of them on the television. By the time I was growing up, around the mid-seventies, you couldn’t turn on the telly without seeing a cop or a private eye show (and we only had four channels then!) and of course this tradition goes way back to the very advent of television. We’ve always been fascinated, both by trying to work out the clues in a mystery and catch the murderer, and by how the whole legal system works. Shoot-outs are fun, but mostly they belong in westerns, where there is no real law, as such. On the mean streets of San Francisco, Chicago or Detroit, you couldn’t just shoot first and ask questions later. Procedures had to be followed. Police departments were sworn to protect and serve, and they were trusted to uphold the law.
Not all, of course, did, and this began to filter in more and dovetail perhaps with reality when shows like Hill Street Blues, Murder One and The Wire appeared on our TV screens. These showed cops as humans: flawed, tired, struggling to survive on what they were paid, susceptible to bribes, disillusioned with the broken system. The shows of the 50s, 60s and 70s mainly gave us “good cops.” It was seldom that one went wrong, and if he did, his compatriots hunted him down and turned him in. There was nothing like widespread corruption, racism or sexism in these forces. Well, there was of course, but it was brushed to one side or just glossed over. They were the good guys, and they always got their man. Similarly, the bad guys were the bad guys: there was no real attempt, generally, to try to explain or understand the motivations of a criminal. Oh, you might see him being pushed into something due to circumstances beyond his control, but there would be little sympathy for him and he’d still end up locked up, or shot in a gun battle.
As we move into the third decade of the twenty-first century, even with the general bad reputation many police forces are - often rightly - getting now, cop shows are just as popular as they ever were. People like Dick Wolf and Jeff Davis continue to produce high quality TV shows that often uncover the seamier side of the police force, or the more questionable methods of private detectives, though the latter has fallen away recently as producers and writers concentrate more on stories of the legitimate law enforcement departments. Wolf’s FBI series now has two spin-offs, Tom Selleck is starring in season eight of Blue Bloods and neither CSI nor NCIS seem to be able to stop spinning off into new series, and look like they’ll last forever. We’ve had every level of policing, from The Rookie to The Chief, and everything in between. We’ve had procedurals, mockumentaries, all-action shows and cerebral looks into the real police. We’ve had Line of Duty and The Wire, The Shield and Shots Fired, and there’s no sign of it ever stopping, or that we want it to.
We’re even at it ourselves. Stuart Carolan’s hard-hitting Love/Hate looks at the other side of the story, the microscope from the point of view of the sample, as it were, chronicling the lives of a major crime gang in Ireland, as does Kin, and events that play out on a daily basis in a fictional Garda (Irish police) station form the basis of the soap-like narrative of Red Rock, There’s also recently been Criminal Assets, a joint production with Norway looking into the activities of CAB, the Criminal Assets Bureau, and Redemption follows the exploits of a British police officer who returns to Ireland to investigate the murder of her daughter.
There’s been an interesting trend though from the seventies to the nineties, as private eyes, often the more numerous in the TV shows, have slowly been elbowed aside and retired as the official police take their place. PIs often involved the police in their investigations, or gained information - usually unofficially, through friends of theirs in the force - that would help their cases. Most are treated by the cops with a mixture of contempt and perhaps sneaking admiration/jealousy, based on the way they don’t have to play by the rules the police do. But gradually the television demographic on cop shows seems to have shifted in favour of “real” police, and there are much fewer shows these days about private detectives.
In this journal I’ll be looking through the history of the cop show, the detective show and any series on television that featured primarily those tasked with or attempting to uphold the law. I should make a few things clear: there will be no reviews of episodes, just an overview of each series and some information about each. If one contributed significantly to the development of the genre I will note that, as well as any “gimmicks” used in their series. I will be going chronologically, and will try to look at all cop/detective shows, not just American and British, though these will of course form the mainstay of my research.
What I will not be looking at is police reality shows - COPS. 911: What’s Your Emergency. The First 48. Police Stop! Border Patrol. While there is nothing wrong with these shows, they are not scripted drama; they follow real people doing real jobs, and that’s not the remit of this journal. Everything covered here has to be fiction, even if based in some way on real events (Appropriate Adult, A Confession etc. I will however, despite the title, be looking into any comedy or spoof cop shows, so Sledge Hammer!, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Police Squad!, all that kind of thing is in.
