Word: copping
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...most in the little-watched network's history--and FX stood only to gain from taking the chance. That extended to the content: frontal nudity, extreme violence and, instead of the standard TV euphemisms, nearly every curse word short of the big F. "Whenever I hear somebody on a cop show say, 'Get on the ground, dirtbag,' I think, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, I'm an adult,'" says Chiklis. More important, The Shield did what network cop shows have lately abandoned: it created a richly imagined world with continuing story lines, driven by L.A.'s roiling racial politics--achieving...
Ironically, it was a network cop show, Steven Bochco's Hill Street Blues, that introduced serial "story arcs" into genre drama. But networks have retreated to the pre-Bochco era of "procedural" cop shows, in which character comes second to plot. The cops may have perfunctory personal stories, but you can easily ignore them and still enjoy the mysteries--that's why L&O has lost every original cast member yet enjoys its highest ratings ever. Cop procedurals are the new sitcoms: easily digestible, with stories wrapped up in one episode, they demand little commitment (and sell well in syndication...
...Wire (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), a sprawling octopus of a story that follows a single drug investigation over 13 episodes. (Later this month Showtime adds Street Time, an earnest but somewhat tone-deaf series about parolees and parole officers.) Creator David Simon says The Wire is "not a cop show" but a series about how the drug trade and the war against it have become institutions that chew up and spit out the people who work in them...
That said, it is a cop show--though one that, unlike those on network TV, suggests that not only cops but their objectives as well can be flawed. When Detective James McNulty (Dominic West) pursues a drug kingpin in the Baltimore projects, he's undermined by higher-ups who want quick, low-level "buy and bust" stings to generate p.r., not the painstaking investigation required to ensnare the bosses. The series also plumbs the Byzantine world of the criminals, focusing on D'Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr.), a midlevel captain who wants to rise in his organization but questions...
...this point, as when D'Angelo teaches his crew members chess to show that they're pawns in a game (chess metaphors are always a reliable DIDACTICISM ahead sign). But it slowly develops into an engrossing look at the methodical nature of police work and the limits of individualism. Cop dramas are dispatches on America's relationship to authority, and like The Shield, The Wire is a daring and timely one. We responded to 9/11 with a national narrative of teamwork: unite behind our institutions, and let's roll. (Waco? Diallo? Old news.) The rhetoric of good and evil...