Paramount ends Cops run
In 1989, media outlets across the U.S. clamoured to cover the debut of Cops.
The documentary-style crime program promising an intimate look at the daily lives of law enforcement officers marked one of the earliest forays into reality TV — and many at the time couldn’t get enough.
“Vice was nice, but Cops is tops,” read the headline on one Boston Globe article, comparing the reality show, which aired on Fox, to Miami Vice, the wildly popular NBC series that was approaching the end of its five-season run.
Cops would go on to run for more than 30 years, enticing loyal viewers with tense scenes of foot chases, prostitution busts and drug-house raids.
But as its popularity rose, social and criminal justice advocates charged that the very elements fans loved — namely raw footage of action-packed arrests — glorified officers, normalized questionable police tactics and reinforced racial stereotypes.
On Tuesday, Cops, which was scheduled to première its 33rd season this month, came to an unceremonious end after its network cancelled it amid widespread protests against racism and police brutality sparked by George Floyd’s death. Floyd, a Black man, died last month in Minneapolis after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while he was handcuffed on the ground.
“Cops is not on the Paramount Network and we don’t have any current or future plans for it to return,” a spokesperson for the show’s current network said. The Paramount Network, formerly Spike TV and owned by Viacomcbs, picked up Cops in 2013 after its cancellation at Fox.
Critics of the show widely praised Tuesday’s announcement, which comes after episodes stopped airing on Paramount earlier this month. Similar shows such as A&E’S Live PD, which follows police in real time, and Body Cam on Discovery’s ID channel also had episodes pulled by their respective networks in recent days, The Hollywood Reporter says.
Cops was the brainchild of John Langley and Malcolm Barbour, who both wanted to create a documentary-style show shot from the perspective of police, The Wall Street Journal’s John Jurgensen reported in 2012. Though the idea initially failed to garner much interest, the pair held onto the concept for their show and in 1988, they pitched it to a young Fox executive named Stephen Chao. As Jurgensen wrote, Chao had helped launch America’s Most Wanted and “was hunting for other fresh concepts that could be made on the cheap.”
By 1989, millions of people around the country were listening to the telltale opening strains of Bad Boys, a song by the reggae band Inner Circle, as dramatic montages of police officers chasing and tackling suspects flashed across the screen.
Cops was a huge draw for Fox in the ’90s. With more than eight million viewers an episode, the show often topped the list of most watched reality TV programs during those years, according to the Marshall Project.
As the popularity of the series increased, so did the criticism.
In 2004, a paper examining episodes was published in the peer-reviewed Western Journal of Communication, and researchers observed that Cops disproportionately showed people of colour as perpetrators of serious crimes.
The show hit another snag in 2013 when Color of Change, a civil-rights group, launched a campaign urging Fox to drop the show, which the network ultimately did later that year. At the time, Cops had been on Fox for 25 seasons.
But the victory was short-lived. The program was soon picked up by Spike TV, now the Paramount Network, where it continued to draw viewers even as additional reports emerged in recent years raising concerns about the show’s potential to further inflame racial tensions and cause harm to marginalized communities.
Many cheered Paramount’s decision to cancel the show Tuesday, including Arisha Michelle Hatch, vice-president and chief of campaigns at Color of Change, who tweeted: “Crime TV plays a significant role in advancing distorted representations of crime, justice, race & gender within culture & #Cops led the way, pushing troubling implications for generations of viewers.”
The Washington Post