Cop Shows Make Cops Look Exciting

Not the other way around.

There are very few television series focused on newsrooms. There are a ton of television series focused on cops. What’s with that?

TV critic Emily St. James asked this question on social media the other day, and she pointed to a post she wrote a few years ago to provide a possible answer. After a thoughtful deep dive into the history of the singular newsroom show success (Lou Grant), and list of failures—by showrunners from David Milch to Dick Wolf to Shonda Rimes—St. James concludes that the problem is that journalists are just…kind of boring.

my real answer to why newspaper dramas don’t work is that after Lou Grant paved the way for Hill Street Blues and its ilk, the life-and-death stakes of the cop show, the medical drama, and the legal drama made the stakes of the journalism drama — which are typically one degree removed from life-and-death stakes, because the journalists are rarely in actual danger (or in contact with people in actual danger) — feel small in comparison. Cop shows quickly took over the airwaves even more than they had before because of how much easier it was to tell stories where the characters were in tense, potentially lethal situations every single episode. A journalism show just can’t compete.

This sounds reasonable; cop shows are fun because real cops do dangerous, exciting things. Newsroom shows are less fun because journalists do less dangerous, less exciting things. QED.

There are only two problems with this explanation. First, police do not do dangerous, exciting things. And, second, journalists often do.

St. James’ description of reality is reversed. Which I think tells us some important things about cops, about journalists, and about how genre drives our understanding of reality, even though we feel like it should be vice versa.

Police do not have dangerous jobs

On most cop shows, police are constantly getting into shoot-outs with devious, ruthless killers. They often are in great peril; not infrequently they are wounded or killed. Policing on Hill Street Blues, or True Detective, or Law & Order, or even on The Wire looks like a job where people put their life on the line, day in and day out, to protect civilians and fight for justice.

Television is not always true to life though, and it isn’t here. Policing is not especially dangerous in comparison to many other professions. One analyst, looking at police fatalities found that there were about 14 on-the-job deaths for police per 100,000 officers in 2019. Compare to the 10 most dangerous jobs:

· Loggers 136 fatalities/100,000.

· Fisherman 86/100K.

· Pilots 55.5/100K.

· Roofers 48.6/100K.

· Refuse & Recyclable Material Collectors 34.1/100K.

· Structural Iron and Steel Workers 25.1/100K.

· Truck Drivers 24.7/100K. 24.7/14.

· Agricultural Workers 23.1/100K.

· Construction Workers 18/100K.

· Maintenance & Grounds Workers 17.4/100K.

If television was actually just riffing on which jobs were the most dangerous in order to fill its quota of excitement, we would have lots of shows about loggers, fisherman, and roofers, and almost none about police.

Journalists sometimes do have dangerous jobs

“Okay,” you might say, “so policing isn’t really that dangerous. But it’s at least more dangerous than journalism. If the choices are newsroom or precinct, it makes sense to focus on the precinct, since that’s the one where you’ll see more life-threatening situations.”

But this isn’t true either. There are a huge range of journalism jobs, and obviously neighborhood arts reporting is unlikely to be especially high impact.

But journalists sometimes report from war zones. They sometimes report on leaders in authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian countries (like the US). And those reporting jobs can be extremely dangerous. So much so that the human rights org the WHY estimated that worldwide, a journalist is killed every 4 days. In Gaza, since the beginning of the genocide, journalists have had a terrifyingly high mortality rate of around 10%—"higher than any other occupational group” according to the International Federation of Journalists. UNESCO reports that globally imprisonment of journalists is at a record high, while death threats, intimidation, and physical attacks are an increasingly common part of the job.

While it’s true that there are journalists who face few threats in real life, it should be trivially easy to come up with stories based on actual events in which journalists are directly threatened. And in fact, there are no shortage of such stories in other mediums that are not television.

Last year’s Alex Garland film Civil War showed the serious risks journalists can take in a combat zone. The original Superman comics, way back in the late 30s, were basically a newsroom drama, as hard-nosed reporter Lois Lane and nerdy, less impressive reporter Clark Kent chased down stories about coal mines collapsing or gangland conspiracies, got into trouble, and had to have Superman bail them out.

Genres have a life of their own

So if cops are not actually facing life-threatening danger on the job, and journalists often are, why so many cop shows and so few newsroom shows? If real life isn’t driving these narratives, what is?

The answer I think is that genres are often driven less by real life than by…well, genre. Particular mediums have particular histories, and those histories can have their own momentum. In the US, superheroes dominated comics in the 40s, and they just never really stopped dominating them. In film, romcoms are the default romance subgenre to such an extent that there’s not even really a name for romantic tragedies, despite the example of Romeo and Juliet. Hyperpop moved from a subcultural phenomenon to a major force on the charts; footwork didn’t.

You can try to figure out explanations for why this and not that, but often it’s just about what caught who’s ear or eye when. Pop culture follows trends; one big hit and everyone rushes out to find the next thing that looks like the old thing, and then you’ve got more and more chances for the next cop show to blow up. People like to like things that other people like, so pop culture success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. At some point, newsroom shows aren’t successful just because they haven’t been successful; they don’t have a fandom, they don’t have studio commitment, they don’t feel like the sort of thing you go to tv for. It is what it is.

Also, though, maybe copaganda

I do think it’s probably true that if we’d happened to have a big hit newsroom show in the 80s, we might well have a ton more newsroom shows now. I also, think, though, that cop shows get a big boost from copaganda.

Copaganda is pro-cop propaganda, and it’s ubiquitous. Police themselves are powerful institutional and political actors who regularly issue press releases warning of the dangers of crime and touting the bravery of cops (who, as we’ve established, do not in fact have especially dangerous jobs.)

Cops aren’t alone, though. Lots of politicians, businesspeople, journalists (ahem) and other people in power spread copaganda. Anyone with an investment in the status quo has an interest in convincing the public that critics of the status quo are violent, dangerous agents of anarchy who must be repressed by the forces of law and order. Narratives about crime and criminality are a useful way to demonize and scapegoat marginalized people (especially Black people in the US). Copaganda is a handmaiden to capitalism and white supremacy, and capitalism and white supremacy have powerful constituencies in this country, as the last election demonstrated.

Television cop shows tend to be copaganda; they show cops in general as virtuous, or at least as important and engaged in dangerous work. But cop shows are also corporate products in themselves. Cop shows market cops, and by the same token the copaganda spread by cops and other powerful interests serves to market cop shows. Politicians bellow about the dangers of assault by immigrants, or about the evils of nefarious shoplifters, or about the dangers of fentanyl, and then you can turn to your favorite tv cop show and watch brave cops track down shoplifters, fentanyl traffickers, and violent assailants. That’s synergy.

Will the real genre please step up?

St. James was trying to answer a question about genre (“Why aren’t there newsroom series?”) and to answer it she turned to reality (“What is journalism really like?”) This makes intuitive sense. Television, and art in general, is based on reality; therefore television should reflect reality.

And sometimes genre does reflect reality. Sometimes, though, it’s the other way around. Genre can influence how we view the real world, and what we think we know about it. On television, the police have a dangerous job and journalists do not; we therefore extrapolate backwards, and believe that we have all these cop shows because policing is dangerous, unaware that the tropes have overwritten the truth to such an extent that we now think that the truth generated the tropes.

More, the tropes we believe are true can end up affecting the way the world works. Copaganda, including cop shows, helps make people believe police are under threat, which is part of the reason juries won’t convict police when they shoot civilians. Copaganda, including cop shows, helps convince people that police are important, necessary, and sympathetic, which is part of why people support bloated police budgets. And the lack of news shows helps encourage people to believe that journalism is a cushy, safe, and not especially necessary job—which makes life a lot easier for fascists who attack the press.

It would be a reach to argue that the prevalence of cop shows, and the dearth of newsroom shows, is what made the US ripe for Trump. But I do think that the dynamics which brought us cop shows, world without end, and the dynamics which brought us Trump are related one to another. Genres aren’t real, but they shape, and are shaped by, our sense of the real. There doesn’t necessarily have to be direct causation either way, and again I think random chance plays some part. But at the same time, it makes sense that a fascist society would spend a lot of its leisure hours watching hero cops.