A History of Violence: Why I Loved Cop Shows, and Why They Must Change

[Nevilledog]

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/cops-on-tv-hollywood-policing-sepinwall-1039131/


I broke into television criticism because of my love for a show about a racist, sexist, alcoholic cop who used the N-word and beat confessions out of suspects. I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the past few months.

In the fall of 1993, the hottest show on TV was ABC’s NYPD Blue. It had been promoted as the first truly adult drama in the history of the medium, with words that had never been said and body parts that had never been shown on network television before. The most shocking part of the series, at least as first, was Detective Andy Sipowicz (played by the great Dennis Franz), a fat, drunk, violent, foulmouthed bigot. In any earlier era, Sipowicz would have been a cautionary tale at best, but more likely a pure villain. Instead, he quickly became the show’s hero, and one of America’s. Viewers loved him. George Costanza and Homer Simpson wished they could be him. The Washington Post called him a “six-pack sex symbol.” I revered him so much that I began recapping every episode of the show, recording every Sipowitticism, and celebrating every time he got rough with a skell in the pokey room. (Each recap had a Line of the Week at the end; one was Andy telling a suspect, “I’m gonna get a migraine tonight because I didn’t beat you.” An inspiring moment, no?)

I’ve been thinking nearly as much about an afternoon spent reporting on a much less famous cop drama, albeit one from Sipowicz’s creators. In the fall of 1997, CBS premiered Brooklyn South, from the NYPD Blue team of Stephen Bochco and David Milch. Designed as a uniformed counterpart to the plainclothes-detective work of NYPD, it lacked the earlier show’s vivid characters, and lasted only a season. What it had, though, was the bad timing to debut with a storyline about a black man dying in police custody, only a few weeks after a quartet of real-life Brooklyn patrol cops brutally beat and sodomized security guard Abner Louima. The Brooklyn story had been written long before the attack on Louima, and the details were different — the show’s suspect had just murdered multiple cops and civilians in cold blood, and bled out from wounds suffered in the ensuing shootout — but the overlap was too big to ignore.

So when I shadowed a day of location filming in New York City, I of course asked the cast and crew for comment on Louima, alongside boilerplate questions about being a first-year series, their commitment to verisimilitude, etc. They were prepared for this, and their answers tended to cover three talking points: 1) the violence committed against Louima was horrific; 2) the officers involved had betrayed not only their oaths, but their upstanding fellow officers whose reputations would be stained by association; and 3) they worried that the show would suffer its own stain as a result. Bill Clark, the series’ technical advisor and a real-life NYPD legend who helped catch Son of Sam, summed it up by first acknowledging, “My initial thought was disbelief — what a horrible crime it was. To me, policemen are something special, and that shook me up.” Then he shifted into concern for the reputation of his new TV project, adding, “After it hit me, and I realized it was Brooklyn, I thought, ‘Why not the Bronx?'”

*snip*

[abqtommy]

1. If I review my knowledge of world history I find that I've never read about a non-violent/pacifist

group that deposed a King or Sultan or religious leader. It's always violence and it's a feature, not a
bug...