Good Cop/Bad Cop: Why cop shows make for complicated entertainment

This article was originally published on November 26, 2021. 

Following the George Floyd protests across the world last year, television shows about police officers have become, for many viewers, a lot more complicated to watch.

Many of these shows, often known as police procedurals, follow the same basic formula  regardless of whether they're set in Miami (CSI: Miami) or work for the Navy (NCIS) or star a fake psychic (Psych): A crime is committed, and by the end of the episode the crime is resolved. 

The challenge is, according to Tiara Sukhan, an assistant professor at Western University, that the image these series paint about reality can be very different from the reality we actually live in. 

They often present people of colour as more likely to commit crimes, and they present a world where a lot of violent crime happens every day in North America, disproportionate to modern crime rates. 

Sukhan is often asked, however, if all that matters — given these shows exist largely for escapism.

"We think that we're smart, and we're savvy, and we understand the difference between reality and entertainment. And [that] we can create that boundary for ourselves. But the ideological implications are often more subtle than we think," said Sukhan.

Sukhan talked to host Tapestry host Mary Hynes about the power television shows can have on us, and whether it's time to rethink our relationship with police shows. 

Police shows on TV are a complicated strand of entertainment. Take me into that complicated, kind of messy place. What goes on there?

Police shows on television have just been a genre staple for a really long time. They go all the way back to the Westerns, the very beginning of television, they follow what we call a procedural format, which means every week, there's a problem, and then it's solved. And it's all tidy, and it wraps up and then we start again the next time, but increasingly, the ideological messages that underpin what those problems are, and the way they're solved, is increasingly at odds with what we're seeing in the culture in terms of what police do, and how some of their interactions with citizens, particularly in the US, are resulting in people getting hurt and dying.

I think it's troubling because police officers are human beings. So it's not even about talking about whether police officers are inherently good or inherently bad. That's a problematic kind of distinction.- Tiara Sukhan, assistant professor at Western University

Tell me a little bit about how the world works in the world of police procedurals. What are some of the ideas they uphold? 

They uphold the ideals of law and order, obviously, but the assumption is always that the police are there to help. They're there to solve our problems. Corollary, the assumptions are also that if the police are after you, you must be bad. So criminals are bad, and police are good. And there isn't a lot of gray area for different kinds of criminality or the systemic issues that cause people to turn to crime. But even more importantly, I think what we really see is a kind of almost superhero narrative where whatever the police need to do to catch the bad guy, that's okay, because he's keeping us safe.

I'm intrigued by something you've written about this, that the world portrayed in these shows is at once a better place and a more frightening place than the world we actually live in. How is it both?

It's both because of the promise of salvation. If police, and people who work in law enforcement, are there to keep us safe then it feels better because at the end of every episode the problem is solved. But at the same time, it does feel more frightening because every week there's a problem. When you look at some of these narratives, especially the ones that are set in small places, you think who would ever want to live where everyone's dying? 

What's troubling about the kind of portrayal that paints the police as the good guys who can do no wrong, good guys, end of story.

I think it's troubling because police officers are human beings. So it's not even about talking about whether police officers are inherently good or inherently bad. That's a problematic kind of distinction. Obviously, we have problems right now with the way law enforcement is operating in certain jurisdictions, and their whole bunch of institutional reasons for that. But I think it just creates this view of a person in a profession, who's sort of superhuman. It creates unrealistic expectations for people who actually do policing, but it also creates a space where they don't ever have to bear any responsibility for their actions.

And what do we learn about bad guys? What do we learn about the criminal element?

That criminals need to be kept in line [and] that criminals will respond to law and order. When we start to look at what happens after the police get you and you end up in jail, the rates of recidivism are very high. Obviously, it doesn't always look at the complexities of like the intersectional identities of criminals. I think more recently we don't have to bear this burden quite as much. But historically, the criminals were often very visibly othered. 

Is that improving from what you've seen in terms of portrayals?

I think so. And that's because content creators are savvy, and they understand that people want to see diversity on screen. So they're smart enough now to know better than to just make all the criminals Black. They're better about the way we talk about sex work, and they're better about the way we use and talk about gender. But at the same time, some of the things that are associated with criminality, it's very time and space specific, post 9/11. Suddenly, all of our criminals were folks from the Middle East. Everyone was a terrorist.

Subtle and nice, right?

Yeah.

If someone were to say to you, "It's just escapism! Let me watch my show. It has no effect on anything in the real world. It's just television." How would you respond?

That's a complicated question, right? Because I'm part of that as well. I can write about this, and I can see it. I can comment on it. But I watch these shows! I enjoy watching them. The sense of wanting to just lay back and let it wash over you as escapism is very powerful. We think that we're smart, and we're savvy, and we understand the difference between reality and entertainment. And [that] we can create that boundary for ourselves. But the ideological implications are often more subtle than we think.

It seeps in over time and so at the same time, you can be watching behaviour on behalf of law enforcement officials, for example, that is really quite terrible, and still be rooting somehow for it, because you've gotten caught up in that's what the narrative is asking you to do. That's the formula. 

I'm tempted to think "Well, you know too much to kick back and relax with the shows," given the kind of scholarship that you're engaged in.

I don't think it's not really possible to ever kind of escape those associations, right? I think we have them about all kinds of things, things where we feel I talked to my students about this all the time. In my classes, I teach a course called "Women's Television." A lot of my kids are really into shows like The Bachelor or The Bachelorette. Kids will sometimes be a little bit bashful. "I know... it's a guilty pleasure." But I have to say we should own our guilty pleasures — because there is pleasure in it. 

But there's also real value in these programs, in some cases, in terms of what they allow viewers to work through or to experience. It's community viewing for many of them. The fact that they're able to see the gaps between what they're seeing on television, and how they think the world should actually be — even being able to see those gaps and articulate them is useful on some level. 

So I never like to encourage anyone to refer to anything on television as trash. I don't know that that's a very productive way to talk about entertainment, because it's out there. It's better for us to try to get in there and figure out what's going on.

This segment was written and produced by Arman Aghbali.