Now that I’m retired I may watch a little too much television and because I live in two countries -- the U.S. & the U.K -- I can compare certain shows in both countries.
I love to watch police -detective dramas in England; I hate to watch police-detective dramas in the U.S. I think I finally figured out why. In England they realize that policemen & criminals are a lot alike; in America we think the police are the good guys, the criminals are the bad guys.
In one British television show a former prostitute, who is now leading the life of an upstanding citizen, is forced by the police to testify against her former pimp: the police threaten to tell her husband about her past life. The former prostitute says to the police: I can’t tell the difference between you guys & the bad guys -- both of you threaten me, both of you blackmail me.
In another British police drama, an unscrupulous landlord tries to burn down a decrepit building that he wishes to rebuild so he can charge high rents. The tenants are afraid to testify against the powerful landlord, & the police, seeking to bring a criminal to justice, put so much pressure on the innocent civilians to testify that once again the innocent civilians begin to feel that the tactics of the good guys are very similar to the tactics of the bad guys.
In show after show in England policemen are shown as human, fallible, at times corrupt, often impatient, and almost always so bent on coming up with a good result that their behavior is bent, questionable, often outside the law. One policemen is so harassed, so frazzled that he pulls his car out into traffic too hastily, almost causes an accident and curses the perfectly innocent civilian who takes him to task. The civilian presses charges against the policemen -- witnesses uphold his side of the story -- but a fellow policemen gets the civilian to drop the charges. How does he get him to drop the charges? The civilian is a car mechanic and when the car mechanic is suckered into a cash deal for repairs -- or illegal, outside the taxes deal -- the policeman says I won’t report this if you drop the charges against my friend.
Dirty deals, human mistakes, fallible people, that’s the British policeman, plain clothes man. American TV police dramas have taken over from old western cowboy dramas: there’s the good guy in the white hat & the bad guy in the black hat & the black clothes. Police dramas in the U.S. are false, contrived, not believable. The cops are too good, the bad guys are too bad. Of course there are exceptions -- the bad guys in the Sopranos are very human and the show is very successful -- but that’s human bad guys, not all too human & fallible good guys. I don’t like to watch police dramas on American TV: they are too false, the police are too good to be believable.
Copyright © 2004 Henry Morgenstein