Every once in a while, I’ll try watching an old episode of a vintage cop show. The pacing is painfully slowwww…
One episode opened with a detective sauntering into the police station, getting a cup of coffee, stirring sugar into it, greeting other workers, walking to his desk, taking off his sport coat, sitting down and getting out a pen, starting to do some paperwork (seriously, we are watching him pick up a piece of paper, scribble something on it, put it down on a different pile, and reach for another paper!)… But then, thank God, the boss calls him into his office. Good, now we’ll get the plot rolling! But no, we watch him casually stand up, finish his coffee and slowly put his sport coat back on…
At this point my wife walked by and asked “What is this?”
I was thinking that Joseph Wambaugh might have been the dividing point between old and modern cop shows. Maybe, maybe not, but I found this quote by Robert Aldrich, who changed The Choirboys onto a different movie than the book:
“Aldrich said he did not feel the same way as Wambaugh about “the problems of the cop… I don’t find the fact that cops can’t “cope” particularly rewarding; I can’t relate to it. I don’t know how to feel sorry for a cop. It’s a volunteer force. You’re not drafted to become a cop. So you’ve got to take some of the heat if you don’t like what people think about you. After all, that’s an extraordinary pension you get in twenty years; nobody else gets it. In fact, I disagree with Wambaugh to such an extent that I don’t think people really like cops.”
Aldrich said the book “doesn’t go far enough for me” for instance not showing them to be racist, taking bribes or wanting to be stormtroopers. "I think you’ve got to show L. A. cops as brutal as they really are. And Wambaugh can’t face that problem, so it’s never touched in the book. "
Wikipedia citation: “I CAN’T GET JIMMY CARTER TO SEE MY MOVIE!” Aldrich, Robert. Film Comment; New York Vol. 13, Iss. 2, (Mar/Apr 1977): 46-52.
By being in custody, you mean Friday waiting until the suspect is in the interview room at the station and not by reading the rights on the spot before the suspect is cuffed? Because I just randomly opened 8 Dragnet episodes (1960s version, don’t know about the 50s) and 3 of them had scenes of Friday or other cops advising people of their rights before they were cuffed or taken to the station. That’s a totally scientifically valid sampling, of course.
I dunno, I think you can praise Dragnet for “opting for realism” insofar as the mundane aspects it portrayed, like watching them do paperwork, or working an intake desk instead of getting into a car chase which is important stuff, but you also still have to consider that the show was very propagandistic. That made it decidedly less realistic. There are practically no shades of grey in Dragnet (60s version at least). All cops are good, all hippies or drug users are bad, except for the time that one hippie shaved his beard by the end of the episode and confessed to how wrong he had been to be a hippie. The show was also no stranger to glossing over issues of racism and other inequities in policing (which, if you’re into depressing irony, actually does make the show more realistic, I guess).
The 1969 revival was more propagandistic (I recall one show where Friday discussed the dangers of drugs with a drug dealer), but the radio show and 50s version concentrated on the mundane aspects of investigating a crime. Few minorities were portrayed, but that was true of most every show of that era.
Perhaps I should elaborate. Dragnet and Adam-12 are fine, stylized shows, and they may seem stiff because of that. But The Untouchables? Stiff? You are aware that the stoic Mr Stack is not the whole show, right? The Untouchables was one of the few programs that relied on the bad guy for the viewpoint. Watch the interchanges between Bruce Gordon as Frank Nitti and Nehemiah Persoff as Jake Guzik, and then come back and tell me that the show was stiff.
I never even knew Police Story was a show until I happened to catch a few episodes this year. I was surprised at how gritty it was compared to the shows I typically associate with that time period. Like in one episode, a detective with a drinking problem comes home, fights with his wife, throws her all around in front of the kids, trashes the place, fights with the police who come to break it up, etc. The violence felt a lot more personal and intimate than the cop shows we have today.
And few shoot-outs, no car chases, and the murder isn’t solved in one episode. Barney Miller was pretty realistic, although having that many top wisecrackers in one shift is unlikely. Bad coffee? Check, filthy restrooms? Check. Lots of paperwork? Check. Uniform wanting a shot at detective? Check.
Yeah, although they were fairly well written, he was too homophobic to make me comfortable. he had a cop burn the head of a gay guys penis with his cigar, and that is portrayed as a “Good Thing”.
With those ridiculous snub-nosed .38s. But a fat cop back then? Totally realistic.
Monks started out as a detective with a quirk, then degenerated into a sorta kinda quirky comedy about a guy with some serious issues… who also sometimes made the police look like morons. Early seasons were quite good.
In retrospect, Homicide was essentially a proto-“prestige” series. It had more in common with the cable dramas of the following decade like the Sopranos or Breaking Bad (or the Wire, of course) than it did with anything from its own era.
