The impression came to me maybe a TV season or two back. The new TV season confirms is. For me, most crime drama shows now have cops, even those who are standup folks, regularly flouting the law. And Hollywood is making that appear just fine and dandy.
We watched NCIS tonight (Comcast On Demand). Gibbs robbed his own evidence locker to steal a million dollars as part of a ransom. An intern watching all this questioned him about it. As usual, no response. Most episodes McGeek is ordered to illegally wiretap phones, Internet connections, etc. In years past he objected. How the Hollywood writers have him doing this without batting an eye.
On Hawaii Five-O a suspect is left hanging by his legs over a building’s roof while McGarret pumps him for information. Normal course of business.
Other shows and similar indifference to the law and ethics.
Yeah, I know. Entertainment television. Move on. Nothing to see here. But has Hollywood not only drunk koolaid with the illegal wiretaps, no warrants, no civil rights for suspects that the previous real life administration was accused for implementing? Yeah, yeah, entertainment television. But come on. Has Hollywood entered the self-fulfilling game of life imitates art imitates life the average person is now becoming immunized that honest to goodness civil rights are meaningless?
Even though we pay lip service to the idea that the ends never justify the means, I don’t think most people see it that way. The only real issue is how far do you have to push someone before they’re willing to make the trade off.
You’ve caught a terrorist who has planted a bomb. He won’t tell you anything, but you have a drug that will force him to tell you the truth. The only problem is that after he does, he dies. I think that until you get out to several standard deviations on the bell curve, virtually everyone will have a point at which they will administer the drug. For some it might only take a dozen innocent civilians being at risk. Others might up the ante to a hundred or a thousand or more. But sooner or later, everybody caves - ok, virtually everybody.
The only thing I would criticize the shows for is making it seem like it’s a choice to be made lightly and with only the slimmest of justifications. Any line you draw is going to be crossed, but you at least want to be damn sure that when that happens, the person who did so had something approaching a divine imperative.
Yeah. Right. OK, at least a really, really good reason.
Or watch some old episodes of Perry Mason. Both Perry and the cops were not above skirting the law, and in many cases Perry broke the law outright, as long as he could maintain plausible deniability.
Writers can sell what has worked before very easily, and if we have “edgy” cops or quirky detectives that are popular, then we’ll get more of the same in the future. Which is a damned sad state of affairs. Now I’m off to Netflix to see what Perry Mason stuff they have, because I loved that show, flaws and all.
Now that I think about it, this may have its origins (as many parts of American culture do) in the starry-eyed view of the Old West (in this case, its lawmen), especially as shown in the Westerns of the genre’s heyday. How often do you hear lawless areas being compared to the “Wild West”? That carries with it implications of what is needed to bring it back to order.
How do you know you’ve caught a terrorist? In movies, the camera shows us everything. I just saw Dirty Harry. There’s the scene where he finds out that Scorpio lives at the football stadium, chases him, and shoots him in the leg. (Scorpio has kidnapped a girl and buried her alive, demanding a ransom. Harry is trying to find out where she is.)
It’s one thing to do that in a movie, because we’ve seen things that Harry hasn’t. We know that’s the right guy. But what if it wasn’t? All they had to go on was a doctor who reported treating someone who got stabbed in the leg. Is that enough of an ID to be sure? Sure enough to shoot someone?
That’s the problem with fiction and hypotheticals; they pre-suppose a degree of certainty that’s very rare in the real world.
My recent pet peeve has been threatening to invoke the Patriot Act whenever a suspect actually has the sense to lawyer up (a sure sign that the guy’s guilty, of course, since on TV only the guilty ever ask for an attorney).
Not what you said, what they think. That people in “flyover country” all think one way politically and that you can create a successful product by trying to pander to them.
The only thing people in flyover country have in common they also have in common with people on the coasts: the lack of taste and intrusive, trainwreck curiosity that makes shows like Big Brother successful.
