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OT: Movies/TV Shows

MyNameIsJonas said:
If someone told me that all of the Law and Order episodes and ensuing spinoffs had been written and created by a racist AI program and that Dick Wolf had been dead since 2001 i would believe you.

The most generic mindless garbage that perpetuates police work as a) easy and b) okay to use physical force to coerce confessions that only serves as a scripted non musical lullaby that whisks boomers away to sleep without being too complicated to upset them
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Well to be fair, the Shield is about a group of criminal cops so their excesses are portrayed for good reason. But they are clearly the protagonists of the story so a lot of viewers become emotionally invested in seeing them get away with it. For me, the way that series ended was perfection. They didn't get away with it and Chiklis in particular, the ringleader, came to a poetically fitting end without ever dying in a hail.of gunfire.

I loved the OG L&O (never really cared for SVU or the other spinoffs) It was formulaic but so are James Bond films and I liked those too. But Dick Wolf has always backed the blue mostly by sucking it off and cupping its balls. The reality is that the rate of solving crimes in real life is minuscule compared to the success rate that Briscoe and Logan had.
 
Bleedsblue&white said:
Long threads, some quick resolution but really about the people not the crimes.

Forgot how funny it was, too, necessary for sure, cause it could get bleak.
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L&O was different from Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue in that it was always about "the police who investigate crime, and the District Attorneys who prosecute the offenders". It was about the job, not the person in the job. Yes the characters had back stories and there were always a few scenes where a character's non-working life was shown. But for the most part, L&O didn't follow their characters home when they clocked off for the day. It was a show about the case. HSB and NYPD Blue were mostly about the private lives of the characters, just like Grey's Anatomy is more about the life's and loves of the doctors rather than about the practice of medicine.
 
Habspatrol said:
Funny, I'd never really thought about it, but I never watch any cop shows. I didn't consciously hate them... but I hate zero interest in any of them. Loved The Wire, but as you said, that not really a "cop show." Even movies, I'll watch a comedy cop movie but otherwise I've only watched a couple, very highly touted cop movies, like Training Day and never like them as much as the masses seem to.
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I watched the original L&O but haven't watched many episodes of SVU (although there's a couple of episodes with guest stars that are excellent, particularly the one with an evil and sadistic Martin Short playing against type)

And L&O was not without humor. The banter between the detectives and the snarky female medical examiner were always classic. The best was, as ME Rogers.was wrapping up an assessment, she said "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and take a javelin out of a guy's chest." So Logan says "Why do you do this job?" to which she replies "Well, for one thing, free javelins."

One of the producers of the show is Rene Balcer, who's from Montreal and is forever inserting subtle references to Canadiana and hockey. I recall the detectives going to interview someone at a law firm and the name of the firm was "Bower and Brimseck", which I'm sure most US viewers didn't get.

But nowadays I don't watch much of anything on network television, including cop shows like Chicago PD Blue Bloods, etc. I prefer shows from the UK like Line of Duty and Unforgotten.
 
I watched some of the original Law and Order back in the day, like when I was living in Toronto. It was always a very good show. Sam Waterston was excellent in particular.

I haven't watched any since then, and almost as a rule avoid all cop and law shows, which I find totally boring and lame. Except for The Practice which was fantastic.
 
LeafOfFaith said:
I watched some of the original Law and Order back in the day, like when I was living in Toronto. It was always a very good show. Sam Waterston was excellent in particular.

I haven't watched any since then, and almost as a rule avoid all cop and law shows, which I find totally boring and lame. Except for The Practice which was fantastic.
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Waterston’s final scene on Law and Order (Feb. 2024)


View: https://youtu.be/qDFODzerdM0?si=SYacfwD_UXuMcchl
 
cOp sHoWz aRe hOrRiBlE!!!

Habspatrol said:
I don't think they count as "cop shows" but shows like Broadchurch and The Killing were outstanding. The main characters are cops.
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…and The Wire, True Detective, Mare of Easttown, Miami Vice, Columbo, Homocide: Life on the Streets…etc etc ad infinitum.

It’s almost as if writing off an entire genre as one simplistic thing, is moronic and reductive to the point of parody.


Also don’t think recognizing something is told from a perspective you might not agree with politically, philosophically, spiritually, whatever, is reason enough to dismiss something whole cloth…it’s hardly an epiphany that cop shows are told from a conservative borderline authoritarian perspective….but so is Batman.

I’m as liberal as they come, but I’m hardly going to be scared off quality cop shows simply because I’m a proponent of drastic police reform……no more than I’m scared off watching The Sopranos because I’m anti-murder, extortion, rape, etc…or Game of Thrones because I’m anti-Dragons.



If the argument is just “network genre tv sucks”….well yeah, no shit, all the cut & past cop, doctor, lawyer shows on the big networks is lazy cookie cutter pablum.

We all knew that 20 years ago tho.
 
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