‘Good guy’ tales
Even when TV cops mess up, it looks forgivable
On television, cops are the good guys.
They never kneel on a man’s neck for almost nine minutes until he’s dead. They don’t shoot a woman eight times inside her home while serving a no-knock warrant.
But with thousands taking to the streets to protest racism, police brutality and the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the fictional men and women in blue are getting a second look.
“Images matter,” Aaron Rahsaan Thomas, co-creator of CBS drama “S.W.A.T.,” told the Daily News. “We work in a field of fictional storytelling, of pop culture entertainment, but a lot of the stories and the images and the archetypes that we explore certainly have an impact on the way that people perceive not only the justice system but everything around them.”
Thomas likens the impact to “Grey’s Anatomy” syndrome; eventually, a fan of the Shonda Rhimes medical drama sees themself as a trained doctor.
“The brain doesn’t tend to function on logic; it tends to function on familiarity,” he told The News. “Everyone thinks they’re an attorney because they can argue how you would present the case. Everyone thinks of themselves as pocket detectives.”
According to the latest study from Color of Change and the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, which looked at 26 scripted TV series and 353 episodes that focused on crime and police from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Amazon and Netflix during the 2018-2019 season, 18 of the shows featured “good guy” criminal justice professionals committing more “wrongful actions” than the supposed “bad guys.”
“Almost all series depicted bad behavior as being committed by good people, thereby framing bad actions as relatable, forgivable, acceptable and ultimately good,” the study found. “Remarkably, the data show that scripted crime series depicted ‘good guy’ criminal justice professionals committing wrongful actions far more than they depicted ‘bad guys’ doing so. The likely result? Viewers feeling that those bad behaviors are actually not so bad, and are acceptable (even necessary) norms.”
One of the 18 shows, “Blue Bloods,” which stars Tom Selleck as Frank Reagan, the New York police commissioner and patriarch of a family of cops, was the most egregious, according to the study.
NBC shows “more frequently depict wrongful actions,” according to the study, but their justification helps normalize them. CBS shows, on the other hand, “invisibilize” bad actions by not showing them, the study found.
Thomas, one of the few black showrunners on a cop show, said he doesn’t get to pretend bad actions aren’t happening. “One of my biggest concerns, and I told our writers this, is that there’s a luxury to see this as a fad. If you lay low long enough, there’s another hot topic that will take over and you’ll never have to address this,” he told The News.
“It’s not something I leave behind. It’s something that I was thinking about well before George Floyd, and something I’ll continue thinking about.
“Silence is not a harmless thing. It can actually be dangerous when there are real-life stakes involved.”
Stephanie Beatriz, who plays Detective Rosa Diaz on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” donated $11,000 to the National Bail Fund days after Floyd was killed. “I’m an actor who plays a detective on TV,” she tweeted. “If you currently play a cop? If you make tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in residuals from playing a cop? I’ll let you do the math.”
The NBC sitcom donated an additional $100,000, and Warren Leight, the showrunner on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” matched Beatriz’s gift.
Julie Martin, the executive producer on “SVU,” said she and other show writers are “recommitting to holding the writers room accountable, telling stories of racial injustice, police misconduct and bias in the criminal justice system.”
“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” cocreator Dan Goor told The News that he tries “to show that there are good police and bad police.”
“We try to just not paint a sunny picture of police,” he said last year.
Spokesmen for almost a dozen showrunners on network cop shows — including “SVU,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” “Blue Bloods” and “NCIS” — declined interviews with The News.
“We definitely plan to honor and explore and engage and fully represent the world that we’re currently in,” Thomas told The News about “S.W.A.T.”
“We are a show that’s uniquely built to handle this, being about militarized police in an urban environment. In the pilot, we started out as Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter. We’re not a show that’s afraid to go to these places.
“That said, we look at this as an opportunity. This latest round of unrest, which is not unprecedented, just undocumented, we look at it as an opportunity to lean into how this affects our officers who are caught in the middle. These are not issues that we can ignore, nor are these issues that we want to ignore.”