December 13, 2013
Who Made Those Cop Shows?
By DANIEL ENGBER
When David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,”
pitched his pilot to HBO, he promised to deliver “a cop show that seizes the
highest qualitative ground through realism, good writing and a more brutal
assessment of police, police work and the drug culture.” His show would reveal
the gritty truth of law enforcement — with all its politics and sleaze — and
give the lie to other cop dramas like “CSI” and “Law & Order,” where “every
punch was pulled.”
But Simon’s project, which went on the air in
2002, wasn’t the first to play the gritty-realist card. It’s a quirky fact of
cop shows on TV that a more authentic one arrives with every generation and
loudly stakes its claim to credibility. The first police procedural on TV, from
the actor and producer Jack Webb, made its debut in 1952 as “Dragnet,” with
consultation from the L.A.P.D. “We’re trying to play fact, not fiction,” Webb
told the press at the time. “We try to make cops human beings, guys doing a job
for low pay.” To make his stories seem more realistic, Webb had his actors hurl
department slang and rarely draw their guns.
Even Webb was following a trend that began in
radio. “The procedural has roots in the 1930s,” says Kathleen Battles of
Oakland University, in Michigan, author of the media history “Calling All Cars:
Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing.” Radio producers worked closely
with the police so their shows could give the ins and outs of actual
investigations. In 1933, the L.A.P.D. collaborated with a West Coast network to
create “Calling All Cars,” an early version of the reality-style police drama,
and the practice quickly spread.
In contrast to today’s cop shows, the early
programs were very pro-police, without much moral ambiguity, says Michele
Hilmes, a University of Wisconsin historian of television and radio. Policemen
could even be funny, starting with “The Andy Griffith Show” and “Car 54, Where
Are You?” and running through “Barney Miller” and “Police Squad.” But that
lighter strand has mostly gone away. (This season’s “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is an
exception.) “Our ideas about law and order are a little more complicated these
days,” Hilmes says. “People are more aware of how crime intersects with race
and ethnicity and social problems. Maybe it’s not so funny to be dispensing
comedic justice.”
POLICE STORY
The novelist Joseph A. Wambaugh Jr. served in the
Los Angeles Police Department from 1960 to 1974. His Emmy Award-winning cop
show “Police Story” first aired in 1973.
What made “Police Story” special? It
was an anthology, and that gave us such incredible freedom. We could kill off
our main characters if we wanted to. We could have them go bad. We could have
them be weak. We could have them be duplicitous. We could have them do anything
from week to week.
Did the network push you to make the show more
exciting? The editors on the show were all Irish, or
mostly Irish. Three of my four grandparents were from Ireland. We had the
producer, Stan Kallis, our Jewish leprechaun. David Gerber, the show’s
executive producer, used to get so frustrated. He’d say: “Jesus Christ, I’m
doing a cop show, and cops have guns; they get in cars and chase people. But
the Irish Art Theater over here doesn’t like it. The Irish Art Theater wants emotion!”
On “Dragnet,” Jack Webb tried to get away from
guns and car chases. Sure, they minimized the gun play — that was
good. But “Dragnet” was sanitized police work. At L.A.P.D., there was a police
sergeant who was working in the chief’s office, a wonderful guy. He approved or
censored every script that Jack Webb came up with. You weren’t seeing the cops
with all their vulnerability and flaws and sins.
So that’s what you were going for — flaws and
sins? We were getting right into the marrow of their bones. We did shows
about PTSD, depression, premature cynicism. At 22 years old, these guys become
world-weary cynics. It’s dangerous! Police work isn’t the most physically dangerous
job in the world; it’s the most emotionally dangerous.
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