My brother in law was gushing recently about how much better police shows are today than they were decades ago. He compared the examples of CSI vs Adam-12. I’m not sure how fair the comparison was but I would agree that much of the writing in television has become more sophisticated than was the case 50 years ago. Shows like HIll Street Blues and CSI have permanently changed how police are portrayed on television.
That said, I watched an episode of Columbo recently and was struck by how it held up reasonably well. By well, I mean is still engaging and entertaining. Columbo has the advantage of being omniscient and always knows from the get-go whodunnit, but even so, the writers ‘play fair’ and give viewers the necessary clues. It’s easy to criticize a show like Columbo and say it sticks to a rigid formula but quite honestly this is something modern police procedurals are guilty of as well.
How do you think todays police procedurals stack up against against shows from earlier than, say, the mid 80’s? How about modern era detective shows (e.g. Castle, The Mentalist)
Adam-12 holds up very well (as does Dragnet, the ur-text of police procedural shows. It is a procedural in all respects, showing how beat cops deal with the incidents they come across. Malloy and Reed are idealized cops, but the issues the deal with are real (and, of course, they actually happened). Both Jack Webb shows are still good today (for the most part), and the Dragnet radio show is even better.
CSI is good in the exact same way Dragnet was good – watching the cops investigate a crime. They aren’t mysteries; they are less interested in whodunit than they are in how the cops find things out.
A lot of those older police shows weren’t “mysteries” like they are today. You often knew who did it from an opening scene depicting the actual crime. The shows weren’t whodunnits; they were about the cat and mouse game between the bad guys and the cops. Now, the shows start with the discovery of the body, which leads to interviews with three or four suspects. The most superfluous character (usually the second one the police talk to) in the story is always the one who did it.
As a minor aside - is my recollection incorrect that the Columbo plot doesn’t usually involve any uncertainty about who dunnit? I thought it was always clear to the viewer who is guilty, and the mystery is only how Columbo will manage to prove it.
Seconded. The crime itself would often be shown in the first act–even the opening scene–before Columbo had even appeared. It was just a question of where the (most often) killer tripped up.
The Dragnet radio program was unique in it’s time. Dragnet set a very high bar.
Law and Order explores some issues in detail. Homicide was good. Rockford and Hill Street Blues were entertaining. NCIS and Criminal Minds are just filler between commercials.
The one big thing for me about new procedurals vs the old cop shows, is that thanks to L&O I look at some of the old shows and say “they’ll never get a conviction. There’s really no evidence. So what if they had a shootout? The original crime is still unproven.”
Not to mention the absurdity of Batman just tying up criminals (or “criminals” How do we even know?) and dropping them off at the cop shop. How does that even work?
That doesn’t take into account shows like Hunter, who always managed to manipulate the criminal into trying to kill Hunter, so then he could off the perp at the end of act IV. No trial to worry about there! I think Hunter exceeded by himself the total number of people killed by cops for the entire country.
Columbo was very good and still holds up, it was also produced more like a movie than a TV show. They frequently called in fairly big gun actors as the villains, and Columbo episodes were usually 75-100 minutes long. It actually wasn’t aired as a regular TV show, instead there was a block of programming called the NBC Mystery Movie, each week it would show a crime/mystery drama that was borderline cinematic in length, and it would rotate through different ones. This is why Columbo’s “seasons” were only 4-8 episodes, it wasn’t a series in the traditional sense but a long running series of “TV movies.”
Because of this somewhat movie style production, Columbo had some opportunities a typical weekly drama did not. Episodes were generally better written, were intended to be stand alone, they had a rotating cast of directors and writers. Some of the directors were extremely high quality–for example Steven Spielberg directed a Columbo episode. Columbo also won 13 Emmys, I would argue that it was a significant cut above other similar content on television of its day. Particularly in the types of Hollywood figures it could attract to its production.
In that era when television was still seen as bad for your career if you were in film, Columbo kinda was in a weird middle ground where a lot of genuine film stars felt fine taking a role in a Columbo whereas they might be much more hesitant to appear in an episode of Adam-12 or the Rockford Files.
Edit to add: And no disrespect to some of the 60s and 70s crime/mystery actors, but I’d be remiss in not mentioning Peter Falk, he was simply a significant cut above the acting quality found on most TV police shows in that era.
A popular pastime in college for me was a group in the dorm used to watch reruns of Murder She Wrote. We approached it from a ‘camp’ perspective and busted out laughing whenever the show would do something ham-handed like when the camera makes a point to take several seconds showing a security guard putting a log book back into a shelf…uh oh! There’s an important clue!!
Also, I’m sure others here have noted that if Angela Lansbury showed up at your doorstep you can measure your life expectancy with a stop watch.
Do you think maybe she was secretly a serial killer, and all the onscreen depictions of murders are actually just the product of her labors to frame innocent people, depicted (perhaps in her own, deluded mind?) as if they had gone down just as her trail of manufactured (more so than usual) breadcrumbs implied?
:chin_scratch: I could almost see a parody reboot framed as a dark comedy succeeding along those lines…
I remember watching an old cop show years ago. The cops were walking up some apartment building stairs, and exchanged pleasantries as they passed a neighbor, and I said, “that’s the killer!”. I reasoned that they wouldn’t have the expense of having that guy mutter a few words if he wasn’t important later on.
There are really three basic types of cop shows: mysteries that are focused on how the detective will reason out the crime, procedurals that attempt to show how police do their jobs and Bochco-like work place dramas that happen to take place where cops work. I think that the biggest difference with modern shows are they tend to be half or more work place drama and less about the crime or the procedure.
Barney Miller covered this area first. Barney got separated as part of the show’s ongoing story. We learned Wojo had a low sperm count. Harris had housing issues, some for being Black and some for being a police officer. Fish’s imminent retirement was ongoing from the first season. They dealt with Harris’s smoking.
