I was coming to say Miami Vice. These guys are in big gun battles every week. But while people are always ending up dead, there wasn’t a ton of gore or anything graphic at all. Completely cartoonish.
–Cliffy
In the UK there was The Sweeney. It had hardly any gunplay, and on a quantitative level there was much less action than Miami Vice (for example), but the quality. Ah, the quality. It was shot on film in the mid-late 70s in London, and all the cast - the stars, the baddies, the extras - were hand-picked for their ugliness. Each episode had at least one brutal punch-up. It’s pretty tame by modern standards but the overall grimness still remains e.g.:
It’s also surprising just how white everybody is. Deathly pale. Dunno if it was the lighting, lack of foreign holidays, or what - John Thaw was never this white when he played Inspector Morse - but this is what the BNP have in store for Britain, if we let them.
The Sweeney was very influential - the BBC followed it with Target, which looked similar but was rubbish, and ITV then followed with The Professionals, but that wasn’t a cop show (and watching it on DVD it wasn’t all that violent). They all seemed to be made to a strict formula - short violent bit at the beginning, some detective work, we see the villains devise their plans, violent bit, detective work, violent bit, end credits. It’s probably a fundamental structure for TV drama.
Justified. The title refers to justified shootings.
I’ll always remember the side note this show had in the book “Cult TV”
It reported how typical it was for a witness or informant to contact the police telling them that they were going to help with an investigation, no sooner the poor soul had hung up the phone or finished a note to the police that the person was dead before the next commercial, “stay tuned for the next pigeon!”