If I ran the network, part 2

Recently I kicked off a new feature, "If I Ran the Network," a series of TV concepts that would never have made it to the small screen without network executives screwing them up. If you have similar ideas, please share them in the comments section; if I get enough, I'll use them to put together a complete prime-time lineup for the fictional HBC Network!

I've mentioned this idea before, although not under the name: Scales of Justice.* It's not an original concept as much as it is a refinement on an existing one, but it appeals to my core belief that good television ought to stimulate conversation, to give you insights you might not have had before, to make you think about what you saw and speculate about what might have happened after the episode ended.

*Since this series is based on the premise that you couldn't get it past meddling network executives, it's worth mentioning that the first thing a VP of Programming would do is insist that the protagonist be a Justice Department maverick named Jack Scales. The title sequence each week would include him introducing himself as Scales of Justice. Get it?

Scales of Justice most closely follows Law and Order, in that each episode consists of two parts: the crime and subsequent investigation, and the trial. It's a whodunnit, in the sense that we don't actually see the crime committed; instead, we experience the aftereffects of said crime. In other words, we do not know for sure that the person arrested and put on trial is, in fact, the guilty party.

So far, so good. (I hope.) But where Law and Order suggests that the authority figures (the police and the lawyers in the DA's office) are the protagonists, there is no such guarantee in Scales of Justice. Think of it more as a version of The Wire, or a similar gritty police show, where the authorities are, in the best of circumstances, antiheroes. Sometimes, it will turn out that the police arrested the wrong person. Sometimes, during the course of the investigation, the detectives will make a fatal error, either by questioning the suspect without legal counsel or by discovering evidence without following the proper constitutional procedure, which winds up with the judge throwing the evidence out. Sometimes it will simply be a case where the police focus on one suspect early on, to the exclusion of others, and stop looking for evidence that might be inconvenient to their case. (A favorite accusation that Perry Mason makes against Burger, Tragg, et. al.) You'll like some of these characters more often than you do others, but you'll neither like nor dislike any of them all of the time.

Speaking of Perry Mason, another element I wanted to introduce in Scales of Justice is a defense attorney who becomes a semi-regular, appearing a few times each season (depending on how many episodes we have). For this character, think of someone like Gerry Spence—an attorney who has never lost a criminal case. One of the aspects of Perry Mason that I never thought held water was the idea that Burger was always complaining about Mason's "courtroom theatrics," even though those theatrics had helped clear his client and identify the real killer every single week. You'd think that Burger, having lost to Mason every time they go head-to-head, would start to worry about his case one he found out Perry would be defending the accused. I suspect he'd demand that the homicide detectives double-, triple-, and even quadruple-check everything before he even sought an indictment. (Of course, that's the way it should be anyway, but we'll let it pass for the time being.)

And that's the reason why I wanted to introduce this Mason-like defense attorney. By the time he appears in the first-season finale, the audience is conditioned to know that his client, the accused, is innocent. My intent was that viewers would then start thinking about what they'd seen in the first half of the episode; since we know the accused didn't do it, that means that somewhere along the line, either the police or the DA's office took the wrong fork in the road. What was it? Where did they go wrong? And not only did I want viewers to start thinking this way, I wanted those in charge to have those same thoughts. We must have made a mistake. Where did we go wrong? I've written plenty about how much I dislike many of today's procedurals; what I wanted to accomplish with Scales of Justice, more than anything else, was to knock the ego-driven, cocksure investigators—think Stabler or Gibbs or whatever your favorite procedural might be—off their perch. 

I also wanted these mistakes to have consequences; perhaps one of the detectives is suspended for a few episodes because he's violated the accused's constitutional rights one time too many. Maybe one of the assistant DAs gets sacked because of poor case preparation. But that's not to say that they won't get their rewards for doing a good job; we might see a detective get a promotion, or one of the DAs start appearing more often. At any rate, it's a great threat to hold over the head of cast members: you can be replaced at any time!

Some of you will see the obvious parallels to the 1963 drama Arrest and Trial, in which Ben Gazzara played the college-educated detective who makes the arrest, while Chuck Connors is the defense attorney who tries to get the accused acquitted. We're watching the show right now, and it's pretty good, with fine performances and some very thought-provoking situations. The problem with the concept, however, was that by definition it meant that each week, one of the two protagonists would be proved wrong. 

The producers, I thought, tried some clever ideas to get around this; for instance, Gazzara, being college-educated, is far more inclined than most detectives of the time to consider the environment from which the perp came, as well as other mitigating circumstances. Sometimes, although the evidence forces him to make the arrest, he simply doesn't believe that the suspect is guilty—he has to follow the evidence (as you would on CSI), but his gut tells him that there's more to the story than what the evidence says. 

Likewise, Connors sometimes finds out that his client is actually guilty, and manages to convince them to change their plea. More often, though, we'll see that his ultimate goal is to take advantage of those mitigating circumstances to save his client from a harsher punishment—life in prison, for example, rather than the death penalty. He's constantly working the jury (it's a pleasure to watch him do so), trying to get them to understand that, even though his client may have killed someone, he's not a "murderer." Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Despite this, it doesn't quite work, and this is something I wanted to avoid with Scales of Justice. That's why it's important that viewers didn't always like the usual "good guys," or why getting someone off on a technicality might actually be a good thing (if you're ever accused of a crime, you can bet you'd want an attorney committed to giving you the best defense possible). That can be a hard sell, although I think it's more plausible now that antiheroes are more acceptable on television. (Same with The Killer; I wonder if this says something about me?) But if you're worried that audiences want to identify with a protagonist each week, then make it an anthology. I know, I know, anthologies don't work anymore, unless you're doing a six- or eight-episode season, after which you introduce a new cast. But this way each week would truly leave you wondering which way the case would go. I don't like that idea as well as the original, but at least it shows that I'm willing to deal in good faith.

At any rate, it would never be very likely that a series like Scales of Justice would find a place on a fall schedule. As I said, people want to root for the regulars every week. They wouldn't like seeing their favorites from Dick Wolf's stable of shows get spanked for screwing up, or just being a bad human being. Most of all, I don't think they'd like the ambiguity of the whole concept, the idea that policemen can make mistakes (even though they can), that innocent people get put on trial (even though they do), that sometimes we might not even know if the jury came in with the right verdict (even though we can't always be positive). Hence, the title Scales of Justice: sometimes the blindfolded lady's scales tip one way, sometimes the other. In other words, it would look too much like real life to have a chance on television.

I could be wrong, though. People have always liked series featuring defense attorneys: think Perry Mason or Matlock. And we know people like police procedurals. Suppose we combined the two, like peanut butter and chocolate? It could work. Couldn't it? TV  

The New Top Ten, #2: Maigret

The first time I saw Maigret on television, I was young and impressionable and didn't know the ways of the world. It was 1993, and Maigret was running on Mystery!, the anthology series on PBS. Michael Gambon was playing Maigret, and I suppose I was attracted to the series because I'd seen and liked Gambon in The Singing Detective a few years before; I'd never heard of the character Jules Maigret, the famous French detective created by Georges Simenon. (I'd never heard of Simenon either, for that matter.) 

The first thing that puzzled me was that Maigret and all the actors were speaking British English, with no French accent, and I found this tremendously disorienting. As I say, I was a naif when it came to things like this; I was used to American television, and wasn't familiar with the British practice of having actors speak naturally, without trying to put on phony accents, French or not. I kept checking to make sure this was set in France, and that they hadn't moved the action to England or something like that, and frankly it distracted me from following the stories. I can't even remember if I saw all of the episodes. Did I mention that I was also stupid back then?

The years passed, and while I didn't pursue Maigret any further—either the series or the books on which it was based—I didn't forget about it, either. When Rowan Atkinson took his turn as Maigret in 2016, I was intrigued—The Black Adder, you know; it seems as if I was always coming to Maigret through some other series the lead actor had appeared in—and recorded it with the intention of watching it later. Well, you know what they say about intentions; by the time we could have gotten to it, we'd moved, and I lost all the episodes that were on the DVR because we changed cable companies. Oh well; c'est la vie, as Maigret would have said.

But for some reason unknown to me, either then or now, I started looking into Maigret more seriously. I even caught an adaptation of a Maigret story that was produced on Studio One back in the early 1950s; "Stan, the Killer," it was. The actor playing Maigret (Romney Brent) didn't leave that much of an impression on me, which was understandable, I suppose, since Eli Wallach was the star. But—and here's what remains a mystery to me—I started researching various versions of Maigret, trying to find which version critics considered the definitive one, if such a thing existed. 

And that's how I stumbled onto Rupert Davies. Maigret had been played by many actors both in the movies and on television; even Charles Laughton took his turn, as the first English-language Maigret. Bruno Cremer played him in the 1990s into the early 2000s and those were well-reviewed, but the versions online didn't have subtitles, and since they were all in French, they were useless to me. But the Davies version—almost everyone with an opinion thought his was the best, or one of the best. Georges Simenon himself said, "At last, I have found the perfect Maigret!" Well, that was good enough for me. Davies had played Maigret on the BBC for four seasons, from 1960 to 1963, and, remarkably for the Beeb, all 52 episodes still existed.  And eventually, as so often happens if you're willing to be patient and keep your eyes open, the series popped up on YouTube and the Internet Archives. (It's also on DVD, but it ain't cheap.)

By this time I'd gotten to know the character a little better. I still hadn't read any of Simenon's books—that would come later—but I was familiar enough with him to know that Maigret was no knuckle-dragging savage, of which no better example exists than Law & Order: SVU's Elliot Stabler; or a smart-ass know-it-all, as in every investigator who's ever appeared on NCIS. He's a shrewd judge of character, puffing on his ever-present pipe with a world-weariness offset by wry good humor, and a blunt, direct style of questioning; he's able to sense when things don't add up, skeptical when the pieces fall into place too easily, and not easily fooled. He's also experienced in the human condition, with an ability to look beyond the surface, and an unwillingness to condemn people based on imperfections in their past lives. 

Indeed, the impression that Davies-as-Maigret gives off is an overwhelming sense of humanity; he displays a particular ability to put himself in place of the victim and see where it leads him, which imbues in him an extraordinary sensitivity toward those he investigates. Even the satisfaction of solving a case comes with a particular cloud, for he knows that when he wins, someone loses his liberty, or his life. People complain that I'm too soft on criminals, he notes in one episode, but unlike the magistrates and prosecutors—bureaucrats, Maigret dismissively views them—he lives in the world of crime, and understands the human drama that plays out within. 

In her essay, "Maigret's Law," sociologist Susan S. Silbey notes that "Maigret is a believer in sociological justice [who] works to repair the torn fabric of social relations to recompose the troubled lives that end in murder." Oftentimes, "he arranges outcomes in which the guilty person feels the need to confess, or to execute their own punishment." While the bureaucrats are eager to categorize and name everything as soon as they come across it, Maigret "simply lets it register; the sorting, the understanding comes later." But then, to the bureaucrats, crime is a form waiting to be filled out, "'satisfied that [they] had done [their] duty' if they named the rules and issued notices, willing to let others do the work." For Maigret, the human element is never far from the surface; perhaps it remains there all the time, in plain sight for those like Maigret who understand it. Is this what is so often missing from American police stories? Perhaps. . .

If all this sounds terribly dense, as if one needs an advanced degree of some kind to enjoy it, forget it. The 52 episodes, all taken from the Simenon's fantastic oeuvre—he wrote 75 Maigret novels, and 28 short stories—do an impressive job of condensing the often-complex narratives into 50-minute timeslots. The cases are always interesting and the outcomes not always predictable, but the pleasure is in watching Maigret solve them—and it is a real pleasure.

What else? The location shots, all done in France, the music, and the use of colloquial French terms throughout—Maigret is always referred to by his subordinates as patron, or chief—establish the setting admirably; no concerns here that the actors don't speak with French accents! The supporting cast is led by Ewen Solon as Maigret's loyal number two, Lucas, a man with the unique ability to combine cynicism and good humor; Neville Jason as young Lapointe and Victor Lucas as muscular Torrence round out Maigret's closest associates. Helen Shingler plays Maigret's devoted wife Louise, who understands him all-too-well; as a couple, they compliment each other perfectly, and Maigret himself knows he would be an incomplete man without her.

In the end, it was very easy to come to the conclusion that Maigret should be part of the new Top Ten. I was sold on it from the first episode. There was a warmth I felt toward him—toward both the character and the actor, really; that warmth being a reciprocation of the warmth which emanates from Rupert Davies himself as he projects Maigret's inner humanity and desire for justice. Indeed, as I look through this, I find that I might have used the word "justice" many more times than I have, since justice is the unifying aspect that joins Maigret to so many of my favorite characters on television: the justice that Judd seeks for his clients, the justice that Dr. Baxter searches for in the diagnoses of his patients, the justice that is (seemingly) unattainable for Dr. Richard Kimble, the justice that is an overriding concern for the Doctor as he travels in his Tardis. And why not; the dictionary tells us that "justice" comes from the Old French justitia, which in its Latin root meant "righteousness and equity." It's a companion to the Latin justus, meaning "upright and just." The well-drawn character can demonstrate such justice, but it requires the actor to bring it out, to project it on the screen.

There had to be a reason, after all, why Simenon considered Rupert Davies the "perfect" Maigret. And while there are other Maigret stories to be told, other actors to play him and other series to watch, he'll always be Maigret to me. TV  

Revisiting the police procedural

Someone once asked me how it was that I was able to think up topics to write about every week. This was back in the early days of the blog, when I was, I felt, much younger than I am today. At any rate, my reply was that I didn’t think about it too much—it just seemed as if something always came up at the right time: something I saw or read or thought about, something that provided a spark that, a few hundred or thousand words later, wound up on the website you’re reading at this moment. 

That’s still the way it is today, although I have to work a little harder to come up with the ideas, and the words don’t flow perhaps quite as easily or as quickly as they used to. But when it happens, it can be a delight, because I don’t have to email people or watch videos or look things up to get my thoughts down. I just have to type. And that brings us to today.

Actually, I did have to do a little reading on this one, because it has to do with an essay in The Georgia Review called "Policing the Procedural (on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit)", by Sarah Rebecca Kessler. As you might guess, it’s all about the police procedural on television, in particular SVU, and because it’s written within the mythology of George Floyd and discrimination and attacks on minorities and the abolition of prisons and the idea that there’s no such thing as a good cop, it’s full of the kind of liberal claptrap you’d expect. (Sorry if that offends you, but it’s true.) Notwithstanding all that, though, Kessler make some excellent points on SVU in particular, and the procedural genre in general, and that's what I want to concentrate at today.

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There are those who will say that this kind of discussion is incidental to television, that the connection is too tenuous. I disagree. I give television more credit than that for the influence it has over viewers; how many people “swear” that something is true, that it actually happened, when in fact it turns out to have been something they saw on a fictional television show.* Therefore, it’s not at all implausible that people would take as fact something they’d seen on a procedural, and that it could influence law enforcement policy.

*Case in point: Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia from her house; it was Tina Fey.

We see them routinely treat suspects with contempt, use surveillance techniques with little regard for civil liberties, and regard the public in general as an inconvenience at best, a constant threat at worst. Not just to the lives*, but to an existential existence, a series of restraints increasingly handed down by a ruling elite dedicated to limiting free expression as much as possible. We’ve seen how the modern police force has evolved into a paramilitary unit, wearing black body armor, enforcing laws that, more and more, come to resemble an ideological tract rather than anything necessary for civil order. They even view video footage taken by eyewitness as somehow a threat to them doing their jobs. They are, of course, “just following orders,” a defense that didn’t work all that well at Nuremberg. 

*Kessler describes SVU’s Olivia Benson as “a cop who, as cops do, often uses the phrase ‘good shooting’ to describe the killing of a civilian for the alleged crime of making a cop feel scared.”

Kessler is a fan of SVU (a paradox she freely admits), which gives her a certain credibility when it comes to critiquing the show and what it stands for. I, on the other hand, pretty much hate the program, and I’ve been a harsh critic of it in previous posts here. And, as I mentioned at the outset, Kessler and I come to the discussion from opposite poles: she from the left, me from the right. Still, there are areas where our interests overlap, and we share some of the same concerns about the way in which the police deal with the public and the way they see their jobs. 

Kessler wonders, rhetorically, “what it is that makes the cop show, and SVU in particular, so resistant to reproach and immune to reform,” and supplies a ready answer: cop shows tell the story from the cop’s point of view. The Wizard of ID once said that the real Golden Rule was, “whoever has the gold, rules,” and the same goes for the television series: notwithstanding a series featuring antiheroes, for the most part the stars of your show are going to be the good guys, everyone else is the bad guys, and the stories are going to be told from the hero’s vantage point. 

Indeed, one of the sure ways to tell whether or not a cop faces a harsh disciplinary action for stepping over the line is whether or not that cop is a regular. Unless the star is involved in some kind of contract dispute with the show, you’re never going to see their character face a lengthy suspension, or even jail time, In fact, featuring the bad cops as guest stars simply serves to reinforce the essential goodness of the system. (Imagine Mariska Hargitay missing for half the season.) Regarding the trial of Derek Chauvin, the officer most publicly held responsible for the death of George Floyd, Kessler asserts that, "It was as if the proceedings had realized SVU’s central fantasy that 'a few bad apples' does not a broken system make." 

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In the wake of the Floyd death and Chauvin trial, writes Kessler, what was at issue "was not only the usual positive media coverage of the police, the 'thanks to our brave men in blue' that reliably precedes the names of the victims of a wholly preventable tragedy, but the scores of other televisual fare from reality formats like Cops to scripted dramas like Chicago P.D. that serve as pro–law enforcement propaganda." This is exactly what I've been saying for years, in the form of the argument that these shows wind up desensitizing the viewer to the real threat of authoritarianism, not just from law enforcement in general, but from the government in particular. Or, as Kessler suggests, maybe it's not "desensitizing"—perhaps what it really means is our contentment with the methodology. 

How many times have we heard some variant of the line that an innocent person has nothing to fear from the police, that only the guilty insist on their rights, that the most advanced surveillance techniques will only be used against the guilty? This completely overlooks the fact that, 1) it's not the job of the police to determine guilt or innocence, and 2) even if it were, the term "guilt" is likely to be applied retroactively to the suspect at the conclusion of the investigation, given that such techniques were necessary to make such a judgment in the first place.

The police procedural, says Kessler, "normalizes the cop-as-protagonist and the criminal as bit player. There one episode and gone the next, the perpetrator vanishes into incarceration while the victim, the witness, the wrongly accused, the journalist covering the case, and everyone else simply vanishes, leaving the show’s lead cop/s alone to ponder the right, wrong, or, most likely, ambiguity of what has occurred." It's always easy when the perp is painted with a broad brush, practically twirling a Snidley Whiplash handlebar mustache, and it reinforces the viewer's sense that they "had it coming." But if you're looking for a genre to broach the question of actual, real, reform, forget about it: "the police procedural structurally forecloses the question, much less the very real possibility, of abolition, since at the end of the day, the cops cannot be called upon to abolish themselves."

For years I posited the idea that shows like SVU and Chicago P.D. should, as a semi-regular, feature a defense attorney who was tough, competent, and honest—in other words, someone in the mold of Perry Mason or Clinton Judd. (George Grizzard filled the role for awhile, but it was never made a part of the series as it could have been.) There would be no suggestion that the attorney was trying to get his client off on a technicality, or through some other legal subterfuge, only a dedication to the idea that everyone is entitled to a fair trial, and a determination to see to it that justice would be done. In order to maintain the dramatic tension necessary for a television series, the defense attorney would have to lose some of the time, but then there would be times when he won, and then the question would be open and available for everyone to see: What went wrong? Why did we arrest the wrong person?

It would be a breathtaking moment, as far as series television goes, because it would force those characters we've come to know and love to confront the fact that they'd made a mistake, that they'd arrested and tried the wrong person. Since we can't depend on the police to investigate themselves, the defense attorney becomes the medium through which this can be examined. In the serialized environment which television has become, it can’t help but give a series texture when its stars evolve through the course of the series—even grow. Where did we screw up?

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There was a series, once, that tried to bridge the gap, as you probably know. The 1963-64 ABC series Arrest and Trial starred Ben Gazzara as the lead detective, John Larch as the deputy D.A., and Chuck Connors as the defense attorney. It was a unique format, a 90-minute drama divided into two parts: the investigation, resulting in the arrest, and the trial. The crime and the punishment. Said Gazzara of his role, "I'm supposed to be a thinking man's cop. I'm a serious student of human behavior, more concerned with what creates the criminal than how to punish him. In other words, I'm not the kind of cop who asks, 'Where were you the night of April 13th?' It's my job to show that there is room for passion and intellectualism and personal display even within a policeman."

And that's good as far as it goes. Gazzara does, at times, come across as a bleeding heart. But, in my limited viewing of the series, it seems as if the writers try too hard to make sure that both he and Connors are right, that while the defendant might be guilty, there are also extenuating circumstances that mitigate his responsibility for the crime. While [creator] Herb Meadow had suggested that Arrest and Trial would be the 'first series where both protagonists will not always be right each week,' it was a promise that was easier said than done. As Stephen Bowie writes, "The corner into which the writers inevitably found themselves painted was the schism between the motives of the two leads. Arrest and Trial put Anderson [Gazzara] and Egan [Connors] on opposite sides of the judicial process: Anderson’s job was to catch the criminals and Egan’s was to turn them loose. Allowing the principals to be wrong 'occasionally' might have seemed like a good idea on paper, but it meant that every week one of them would have to make a fool of himself — either Anderson arrests the correct perpetrator and Egan loses his case, or Egan sets his client free by proving that Anderson busted the wrong guy." If the show wasn't ready to tackle the Big Questions, nor to give us heroes with feet of clay, then such a format could never work. Law & Order succeeded where Arrest and Trial failed, because they chose to put the emphasis on the “law and order” side of the equation.

A digression, perhaps, but this is, after all, a website dealing with TV history. 

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Understand that I don’t intend this as a broadside against all members of the police. Unlike Kessler, I do believe that there are “good cops”; officers and detectives with a desire to protect the public, and dedicated to an even-handed search for truth and justice. (There are also officers, including some of whome I personally know, who are little more than fascist thugs, with an unforgiving view of anyone who opposes him as “the enemy.”) 

The indictment I have here is a collective one, of “the police” rather than the policeman, the paramilitary unit instead of the guardians sworn to protect and to serve. Kate Andrews, writing in Britain's The Spectator, describes the result: "We see America’s police officers treat low-level offenders and even innocent citizens with the same force and aggression you would expect to see used against the most violent criminals." Whereas Americans were once governed by consent, Andrews writes, today "America is policed by force." Police procedurals, in the way they dramatize the stories, justify these actions. In a previous essay I wrote on this subject, I quoted at length Gregg Easterbrook, writing about the series Chicago P.D. in a 2014 article at ESPN.com:  

But what's disturbing about Chicago P.D. is audiences are manipulated to think torture is a regrettable necessity for protecting the public. Three times in the first season, the antihero tortures suspects—a severe beating and threats to cut off an ear and shove a hand down a running garbage disposal. Each time, torture immediately results in information that saves innocent lives. Each time, viewers know, from prior scenes, the antihero caught the right man. That manipulates the viewer into thinking, "He deserves whatever he gets."

In the real world, law enforcement officers rarely are sure whether they caught the right person or what a prisoner might know. Some ethicists say there could be a ticking-bomb exception—if the prisoner could reveal where a ticking bomb is, then torture becomes permissible. But how could a law enforcement officer be sure what a captive knows? And if by this logic torture is permissible, wouldn't that justify torture by, say, the Taliban if they captured a U.S. airman who could know the location of a planned drone strike?

NBC executives don't want to live in a country where police have the green light to torture suspects. So why do they extol on primetime the notion that torture by the police saves lives? Don't say to make the show realistic. Nothing about Chicago P.D. is realistic—except the scenery.

Elsewhere in that essay, I added that, with regard to SVU, “viewers are witnesses to an amazing contempt that authority holds for citizens, which extends to every kind of bullying they can think of, including statements that I'd read as being clearly unconstitutional. (My favorite is when they tell a suspect that if they don't talk now, any chance of a deal is gone. Try telling that to some overworked assistant DA who'll cut any kind of a deal to decrease his workload.) These people aren't interested in justice—they just want to win.*” And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the typical trope that an innocent person doesn’t need a lawyer, and that the defendant who wins acquittal does so because of his lawyer’s slick tricks.

*Even in a series like Perry Mason, Mason often argues that once the police find their suspect, they stop searching for the truth.

The point: the justice system, riddled with corruption and ideological agendas from the Department of Justice on down, is its own worst enemy in the best of times; the last thing they need is to have a television show exaggerate the problem.

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“I don’t believe most or any SVU fans, liberal or otherwise, genuinely want the series to “do better”—whatever that even means,” Kessler writes. “As a fan myself, it behooves me to be honest about this fact. I would rather the show (literally) be canceled than ameliorated into something less fun to watch.” Conceding that this might be seen as a “crass” position, she explains, “if the show was just sincerity with no sensationalism, why would I want to watch it? Better a cop show whose absurdity is akin to self-parody than a cop show that’s trying not to be the cop show it most certainly is.”

Well, that depends. It may be true that in the realm of the procedural, Kessler is right when she says that ‘cop shows will always be cop shows,’ whether or not they remain hardline or feebly gesture toward reform.” But are all cop shows procedurals? Again, it depends. Naked City, to my mind one of the finest TV dramas ever, used the framework of the police drama to tell stories of life in the gritty city, often relegating the precinct detectives to the background as the guest stars took center stage. Sometimes an episode would use the flimsiest of pretexts, the slimmest of connections to police work, to tell a story that just as easily could have been told on Route 66. And I cite that story deliberately, as both Naked City and Route 66 were the products of Sterling Silliphant, a writer who could hardly be considered a right-wing law-and-order extremist. Under Silliphant’s guidance, Naked City wasn’t really a police drama; it was a drama about people, some of whom just happened to be policemen.*

*And not just that: I’ll always remember a Naked City episode in which Detective Lieutenant Mike Parker tells an aggrieved New Yorker that, as a citizen, he has every right to bring his problem to the police and expect some kind of resolution. What Parker realized, and today's cops don't, is that the police are the servants of the public, not the other way around.

Kessler doesn’t have any good ideas to offer here, concluding that “instead of disingenuously demanding that SVU and its ilk ‘do better,’ instead of policing the procedural into some illusion of justice, how about demanding an end to policing and to prisons?” This is, of course, a cop-out—no pun intended—because it relinquishes the moral high ground she sought to attain in linking the content of procedurals to the effect they have on their audience. If we’re that concerned about it, then we can’t just shrug and say that, well, that’s television for you, and entertainment is always going to win out over serious content. If you believe that, then why are we even having this discussion?

Perhaps I can speak more freely because I’m not a fan of SVU, Kessler makes a compelling case in linking the content of procedurals, the idea that these shows “desensitize” the viewer to the abuses committed by police. It’s a damning accusation, because it makes us all complicit in the affair, all sharing in the responsibility. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who would give up their liberty in return for a little temporary entertainment deserve neither. If the analogy of frog and the boiling water holds 

Why, then, does she give up so easily? “What might television be in the absence of the promise of punishment on which so many of its genres, programs, and episodes hinge?” Kessler asks. “Can you dream up a cop show without cops?” The answer to that is yes—if you view them not as cops, but as men and women. 

Procedurals deserve the criticism they’ve received here, because they reflect a particular philosophy that strikes a sympathetic cord with viewer sentiment. (In other words, they manipulate you.) Kessler and I may not share much when it comes to ideology, but in this limited case we can see eye-to-eye, will say that even if it’s through sidelong glances. The harsh truth, and conservatives are coming to recognize this even as liberals have, is this: When your police force becomes politicized, when it functions not as a law enforcement agency but as an enforcement arm of the ruling class, then the police are not your friends. The sooner you ignore what you see on the tube and believe what you can see with your own eyes, the better for America, and her people. All of them. TV  

Around the dial

At Vulture, there's a very interesting article from last year by Kathryn VanArendonk on how the average police procedural forces you to see things from the police point of view, with everyone else retreating into the background. I'm linking to it now for a couple of reasons: first, because there's what might be called a follow-up article that she wrote last week; and second, because I've written a couple of articles of a similar bent myself (here, for example). It's a delicate topic, because it can easily devolve into political polemics, but the procedural by definition tends to idealize the authority held by the police, and in such a way that makes it very easy to side with them—you know, the "If you're innocent, you've got nothing to worry about" cop, or as VanArendonk writes, the "plays-outside-the-rules kind of cop, often making unilateral decisions about when to ignore the law in favor of what he sees as justice." That bothers me,a not because I'm anti-police, but because it avoids asking the serious questions that not only make for good television, but for a healthy society as well. I'm not sold on everything she says; far from it, which is why I may well return to this topic in the next few weeks (without delving into full-blown wokeness), but it makes for a good read for you right now.

Here's something a little less controversial: at bare•bones e-zine, Jack says farewell to William Fay's Hitchcock contributions with the ninth-season episode "Good Bye, George," a nasty little story starring Robert Culp, Patricia Hardy, and Stubby Kaye. Jack's write-up is every bit as good as the episode itself.

The great Gavin MacLeod died last week, sparking a tremendous outpouring of affection and appreciation from his many, many fans and colleagues. At Comfort TV, David takes stock of his many memorable moments from a slew of shows over the years. The Flaming Nose recalls an interview done with him back in 2009. And at A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence looks all the way back to MacLeod's career on the stage. Quite a life, wouldn't you say? (Terence also has remembrances of two other faces familiar to classic TV viewers: Arlene Golonka and Robert Hogan.)

At Television Obscurities, Robert takes a long look back at the 1974-75 drama Lucas Tanner, which starred the pre-Good Morning America David Hartman as a professional baseball player and sportswriter who turned schoolteacher after the death of his wife and young son. 

Martin Grams has a terrific interview with Garry Berman, author and pop culture expert. It does precisely what a good interview should do: make you wish you knew that person, and make you want to read what he has to say. 

And at The Hits Just Keep on Comin', jb looks at a serious question, one that I've asked myself more than once: "Why do I still think about this stuff? Why don’t I just let it go? Isn’t it a little silly for a guy my age to spend so much time remembering stuff that happened when he was 16 or 18 or 22?" The answer (thanks in part to one of my favorite writers, Nick Hornby): because it's the stuff that defines him. I cannot think of a better way to put it, or to say it. TV  

True-or-false jeopardy

A couple of weeks ago, we were watching an episode of 77 Sunset Strip in which Kookie (Edd Byrnes) was arrested on a trumped-up murder charge and thrown in a small-town jail. Will our hero escape the clutches of the crooked police and live to fight another day? What do you think?

The following week while we were watching an episode of Mannix, Joe (Mike Connors), in a small town investigating a murder, finds himself arrested on trumped-up charges and thrown in jail. Will our hero escape and find the real killer before the crooked cops finish him off? What do you think?

That these two episodes aired, at least in our household, on consecutive weeks, probably exacerbated my already-intense dislike of a hoary television trope that I like to call "false jeopardy." (Actually I only started calling it that a minute ago as I was typing this, but we'll let that go for the present.) 

False jeopardy—and I'm not referring to a game show hosted by someone other than Art Fleming or Alex Trebek—is what I call it when one of the lead characters in a TV series is put into an extreme life-or-death situation that is supposed to keep us in suspense. Now, I don't mean the ordinary kind of risk that private detectives or policemen encounter on a weekly basis, like being shot at, run over, beaten up, caught in a room filling up with water, being trapped between two walls of spikes closely closing in on you—well, you get the point. After all, these shows would be pretty dull without some kind of action.

No, what I'm talking about is the kind of jeopardy that serves as the catalyst for the entire episode. For at least two of the four acts, Kookie and Joe are slapped around by bully boys in blue, menaced by fellow prisoners, or threatened by corrupt officials. Their protestations of innocense are ignored; their basic constitutional rights are trampled. It's all very manipulative, designed to work the viewer into a simmering rage against the injustice of it all. And when the bad guys get their comeuppance, as they invariably do, it's seldom satisfying enough to make up for it all. 

I don't want to say that this kind of thing happens all the time, but any drama that runs for more than a season or two will have at lesat one episode involving false jeopardy, whether through imprisonment, kidnapping, a hostage situation, a life-threatening disease, or something of the sort. And for the better part of an hour, we're supposed to think that the outcome is in doubt. 

What it does is create impatience on the viewer's part; since we already know how things are going to end (at least insofar as the lead character is concerned), we just want to hurry up and get to the end so we can see the happily-ever-after ending. That's about the time when I reach for the fast-forward button on the remote. I think we're supposed to be curious as to just how things wind up the way they do; who the real killer is, how the police find out where the hostages are, what the doctor comes up with at the last minute. Maybe I'm just not that curious; I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy.

Perhaps we're supposeed to put ourselves in the place of the lead, what it would feel like if we were the ones in a seemingly impossible situation. What we would do, how we might escape. If you ask me, the best series at creating that kind of atmosphere was The Fugitive; after all, the prospect of being executed for a crime you didn't commit has got to be horrible. (Think about it; you didn't even get the satisfaction of murdering someone you hated like the guilty parties in Perry Mason.) But in The Fugitive, this wasn't a gimmick; it was the premise of the whole series. There's a big difference. Sure, there were episodes that put Kimble in the same kind of false jeopardy I'm talking about, and those episodes are subject to the same criticism. But you can't use the premise of The Fugitive as an excuse for the other series that put their leads in false jeopardy.

I remember an episode of Hawaii Five-O in which McGarrett (Jack Lord) was temporarily blinded. Maybe I should say apparently temporary, because the doctors weren't sure he'd regain his sight. Now, we all know that he's going to see again, because the name of the series is Hawaii Five-O, not Longstreet. But I'd argue that the threat of permanent blindness was nothing more than a McGuffin. The suspense wasn't in whether or not McGarrett would recover; it was how he'd cope with being blind while the bad guy was out there looking to finish the job. Of course, that outcome wasn't in doubt either. The point is that this was a battle of wits, with the false jeopardy just a backdrop against which the real drama was played out.

Defenders of these plotlines would, I suppose, say that this is the point with all of these false jeopardy stories, that we're supposed to be taken in by the chess match between good and evil. But this isn't The Seventh Seal we're talking about, and it's only a superior storyline that can make the suspension of disbelief work long enough to get to the end of the episode. And the word I keep coming back to is maniuplative. 

We're supposed to hate the dirty cops that keep Kookie im jail, the corruption and the injustice in the system. That's not suspense; that's advocacy. We're supposed to hate the killers that hold Cannon and his client hostage, and thirst for the retribution that awaits when they get what's coming to them. And that's great, until you realize the writers have stacked the deck, that they're counting on you to react that way. Once you figure that out, the anger lessens. So does the suspense, though. It can't make us worry about the lead, because we already know he or she is going to be all right. (Unless we've read in the trades that their contract is up for renewal.) And the premise is too sustained, over the course of an hour, to keep the level of suspense high enough to take us along on the ride.

That leads to another kind of false jeopardy, one that's become much in vogue over the last decade or two: the season-ending cliffhanger. One of the first, and most famous, cliffhangers (I can't remember right now if it was a season-ender or not) was the "Who Shot J.R." episode of Dallas. It was a great gimmick, because it kept people all over the nation talking for months. It was also a shrewd one, one that kept the concept from slipping into the clutches of false jeopardy.

What was shrewd about it was that the purpose of the cliffhanger was not to keep us guessing as to whether or not J.R. was going to pull through; without Larry Hagman, there's no Dallas. No, what the braintrust did was to make us guess who shot him, and this created some real suspense. Nobody could be ruled out; a trial could have sent ratings shooting even higher (no pun intended). A clever team of writers could have figured out how to keep the storyline going without endangering the tenures of any of the regulars. If need be, they could even have played it all off as a dream, right?

I know that all entertainment is manipulative, to some extent. Whether it's music, literature, movies or television—they all play on our emotions, condition us to respond. That's OK; we like being manipulated, just as we like being scared. We don't want it to be too obvious, though; we don't like knowing that it's happening. And that's how I feel when I see the lead in false jeopardy. 

It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and next week we'll look at a series that understood how to play the inevitable outcome for all it's worth, and succeed spectacularly. TV  

Around the dial

Last week, as you may recall, a dearth of new posts from the classic TV blogosphere resulted in an encore presentation of a particularly lame story about the cartoon mascot of a kids' breakfast cereal. I promised, however, to make up for it this week with plenty of interesting reading material including a couple of carryovers from last week, and I'm nothing if not a man of my word. And so, as Jackie Gleason might say, away we go!

One of those carryovers comes from The Horn Section, where Hal's F-Troop Fridays looks at "Wrongo Starr and the Lady in Black," a 1966 episode enlivened by the reappearance of Henry Gibson, funny as always as Private "Wrongo" Starr. And I hope you get the joke about Starr's name—or did you have to be there? 

It's a doubleheader from Comfort TV; last week David shared the subversive plesure of watching Christmas shows after Christmas, which is something I admire but have never been able to do myself; and this week it's an arresting look at TV's top cops. (You like what I did there?) I have to pick Amos Burke over Barney Miller, though.

At bare-bones e-zine, Jack's latest Hitchcock Project continues with "The Avon Emeralds," the sixth contribution of William Fay, featuring Roger Moore as a detective who isn't quite what he seems. The Saint and stolen jewels; who could ask for anything more?

Hugh Downs had to be one of the most versatile performers, if that's the right word for him, in television history: announcer, sidekick, newsman, game show host, narrator, talk show host, and more. It's hard to give him his due, but Jodie does it at Garroway at Large.

You're never going to have to convince me to follow the links to a classic TV Guide, so I'd advise you to do the same as the Broadcast Archives at the University of Maryland steers us to some terrific vintage TV Guide ads from Chicago and beyond.

RealWeegieMidget has been hosting this year's Joan Collins Blogathon, which I wish I could have entered (maybe next year!); while you can read the final three entries here, follow the links and take some time to peruse them all. Meanwhile, at A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence offers his own entry; it's the winsome Joan in the Star Trek classic "The City on the Edge of Forever." Quite a career, and quite an actress.

At Television's New Frontier: the 1960s, it's a review of the year 1962 for one of television's most enduring westerns, Wagon Train. The year includes the evolution of John McIntyre as successor to the late Ward Bond, the departure of longtime co-star Robert Horton, and a raft of big-name guests.

There are few simple pleasures more pleasurable than surfing through YouTube for episodes of old TV shows; I've shared more than a few of those here myself. At Television Obscurities, it's the start of a new monthly feature on YouTube finds, and I can promise you'll go down some rabbit holes with delight.

Finally, the veteran newsman Roger Mudd died this week at the age of 93. Mudd was a newsman's newsman, a journalist who brought dignity and gravitas to whatever story he covered, and a professionalism that's sorely lacking in today's news coverage. Here's a look back at his career from his longtime home at CBS; we could certainly use someone like him today. I fear, though, it's a futile wish.  TV  

Around the dial

D

on't look now, but Thanksgiving is next week, which means those can't-miss Christmas programs aren't far behind. (But I wish they'd at least wait until December.) For the up-to-the-minute details on when you can catch your favorites, or avoid your non-favorites, as the case may be, be sure to check out Joanna's list at Christmas TV History.

Cult TV Blog takes another look at an American series; this time, John's checking out "Dangerous Games," an episode of the series Police Story, with James Farentino. It's John's intro to the series, so you'll want to get his impressions on how the 1970s look from an American perspective.

As a fan of classic sports, one of the things I enjoy is the chance to see an entire game, rather than just the highlights, so I can take those big plays in context. It's somewhat the same when you get to share an entire article rather than just summarize it, as Jodie points out at Garroway at Large with a 1953 article from Esquire which is now out from behind a paywall and available for us all to read.

At bare-bones e-zine, Jack's Hitchcock Project continues with the works of Alfred Hayes; this week, it's the eight-season episode "Paragon," from the Alfred Hitchcock Hour version of the show, based on the story by Dame Rebecca West and well worth reading about. 

Norm Crosby, king of the malaprops, was a staple on television for decades beginning in the 1960s, certainly one of the most popular stand-up comedians of the era. He died last Friday, and at A Shroud of Thoughts Terence has a rundown on his career for those who might have forgotten about him, or younger readers who might not have had the chance to enjoy his comedy. TV  

Around the dial

This week at The Twilight Zone Vortex, Jordan reviews one of the more problematic episodes, "He's Alive," a story that should have been more intriguing than it was, with Dennis Hopper as a neo-Nazi being tutored by the not-so-great man himself. Like most episodes, it has its strong points and weak ones, but in this case the sum was less than what it could have been.

At Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, Ivan is spurred to look at the new DVD release of the 1957 series Blondie, based (of course) on the eternal comic strip of the same name. Though it only ran for 26 episodes, it features guest appearances by many of the recognizable names from classic TV and radio, as well as Arthur Lake, reprising his movie role as Dagwood.

John is back at Cult TV Blog with his summary of "Meet My Son, Harry," a 1963 episode of the ITC series The Sentimental Agent. It's a spin-off from the earlier series Man of the World, and according to John, if you like the ITC oeuvre, you're likely to appreciate The Sentimental Agent despite its flaws—one of which being, in this episode, the virtual absence of the lead character.

If you're confused, as I've been, as to how Trapper John can be played by Wayne Rogers in the TV version of M*A*S*H and Pernell Roberts (the man who once vowed never to work on television again) in the series Trapper John, M.D., then Toby's take on it at Inner Toob will be right up your alley. I particularly like how he resolved the discrepancy at the end of the article!

At Bob Crane: Life & Legacy, my good friend Carol talks about her podcast appearance with Mark Redfield, and relates a thoroughly engaging story about her relationship with Arlene Martel, the actress who appeared frequently on Hogan's Heroes, most memorably as the underground agent Tiger.

Remember Toma, the 1973-74 maverick-detective series starring Tony Musante? Television Obscurities does, and takes a look back as the show turns 45. Musante tired of series work and asked out after that one season; the producers replaced him with Robert Blake and, after briefly considering retaining the title, gave the show a new moniker: Baretta.

This week at bare-bones e-zine, Jack's Hitchcock Project continues its look at Bernard C. Schoenfeld with the second-season episode "Vicious Circle," an adaptation by Schoenfeld of the short story by Evan Hunter, with Dick York (!) good as a mob enforcer. Particularly interesting is Jack's take on how the drama could be interpreted by a contemporary viewer.

A Shroud of Thoughts remembers one of my favorite series, the gritty New York police drama Naked City, on the occasion of its 60th birthday. A trailblazing program in many ways, the show exists in two distinct versions; the original, a half-hour drama that took its name from the movie which spawned it, The Naked City, and after a hiatus, the hour-long series we know and love today. TV  

When the interrogator becomes the interrogated

I want to come back to something I mentioned the other day, that throwaway line in Saturday's TV Guide about the Ironside episode in which Don Galloway's character, policeman Ed Brown, finds himself in jail and realizes that the rough treatment he's receiving from the police mirrors the way he himself has treated suspects in the past. That presented, to me, an irresistible existential dilemma for Brown in the future: whether or not he can continue as he has in the past, using the tactics which are now coming back to haunt him, or if his police methodology, of necessity, will have to change in order for him to look in the mirror each morning; and if, as a result, he can continue to be an effective lawman.

It's an appealing question to ask, particularly when it comes to the detectives populating so many of the police procedurals on TV today - say, for example, Elliot Stabler, the jackbooted, crypto-Fascist thug masquerading as a policeman on the execrable Law & Order: SVU. What if a character like Stabler were to find himself, one dark night, lying prone on the rain-slicked pavement of an alleyway in a city like Chicago, where he's been on vacation. He can't remember exactly what's happened; apparently, judging by the dull ache throbbing at the base of his skull, he's been unconscious, although for how long he can't be sure because his watch appears to be missing. As he slowly pulls himself to his knees, he feels around and discovers his wallet, with all of his identification, is missing as well. He does, however, find a gun in the pocket of his coat - his gun, a gun which, by the smell of it, has recently been fired.

It's at this point that he notices the body of a man lying next to him in the alley, a man with a trickle of blood running down his cheek from a bullet hole in the side of his head. Stabler feels quickly for a pulse and finds none; the man is dead, although not for long, since the body is still warm. It's also at this point that he notices the people up in the windows, looking at him, or standing on the sidewalk, pointing at him; he hears the sirens from the police cars that have pulled up, and sees the blue-clad officers aiming their guns at him, telling him to freeze.

(Cue Serling voiceover.) Despite all appearances, though, Elliot Stabler happens to be an innocent man, the victim of a drug-addicted prostitute who knocked him out and then used his gun to kill the man lying next to him, a man who happened to have been abusing her while keeping her addicted to heroin for his own nefarious purposes. Yes, Elliot Stabler is in for a very long evening - an evening that's set to get even longer when it's discovered that the dead man next to him happens to have been a member of Chicago's finest.

As the scene opens, we find our hero being interrogated by Chicago homicide detectives. They want to know his past contact with Johnson. They want to know how they happened to get together that night. They want to know what they were drinking, how many they had, who paid for them. They want to know what they were talking about. When they ask how the argument started, Smith protests that there was no argument. No argument? they ask incredulously. It was pretty noisy in the bar that night, and they had the games on the tube. Are you telling me you didn’t raise your voices once with all that noise?

That’s different, Stabler says. Different, the two detectives say, looking at each other knowingly and laughing sardonically. You know what I mean, Smith says. Maybe we were talking loud – Talking loud? the second detective repeats skeptically. All right, maybe we were shouting, Stabler concedes. So you’re changing your story now, the first detective points out. What other things do you want to change?

I don’t know what you’re talking about! Stabler repeats. The last thing he remembers was Johnson waiving to a couple of girls who came over to the table, and then he felt something hit the back of his neck, and the next thing he knows he’s lying on the cold wet pavement of the alleyway behind the bar, with Johnson’s body lying next to him. He reached over to check Johnson’s pulse and found none, and that’s when the uniforms showed up.

And you’re sticking with that story? the first detective says. I’m just trying to tell you what happened, Stabler snaps. But how can you tell us what happened? the second detective says. You told us yourself that you didn’t remember anything after you claim you were struck from behind. It seems to me there’s a whole lot you aren’t telling us. Like what the argument was about.

Stabler repeats his innocence and accuses the detectives of trying to frame him, of building up a case against him because Johnson was one of their own. At that, one of the detectives slaps his hand against the table with a crack. Who do you think you’re dealing with? he asks Smith. We may not be fancy cops from New York, but we know how to solve crimes here in Chicago.

When he tells them he wants a lawyer, they look at one another again and repeat his words – he wants a lawyer, he says – and they tell him he can call one, but what does he need a lawyer for if things happened the way he claims they did? He tells them that they won’t let him explain, but the first detective interrupts. You really expect us to buy that?

It’s looking pretty bad for you, the other detective chimes in. You try to deny an argument that people in the bar heard. You tell us about a couple of dames that nobody else saw. You may not believe it, Stabler repeats, but it’s the truth.

That’s not what I think, the other detective says. I don’t think it happened that way at all. I think you and he were involved in some kind of deal, and when it came time for the payoff, Johnson tried to back out, and you leaned on him. Look, we know what Johnson was like after he had a few in him. He gets loud, gets in your face a bit, maybe he even starts pushing you around. It’s instinct – all of a sudden the gun’s in your hand and the hole’s in his chest and he’s lying there with blood pumping out onto the cement.

We understand, his partner tells him, there are more than a few guys in the squad room who’d give you a medal, but you know how it is – we’ve got a job to do. If you just give it to us straight, we can talk to the DA and see what we can get. Man one, maybe, instead of murder two or even murder one. I think he might go for that, the first detective adds, But it’s going to go a lot easier for you if you just play ball. And you know how messy lawyers can make things.

Smith tells them he’s not talking anymore. Oh no, the second detective says. You’re going to have to do a lot more talking before this is all done. You’ll be talking to the DA, and then the grand jury, and then the prosecutor at the trial, and you’d better hope that mouthpiece of yours comes up with a better story than the one you’ve been trying to peddle.

Fifteen years, the first detective says. That’s what you’re looking at. Maybe the last best years of your life. What are you going to do after that, after you get out? What are you going to be in shape to do after that, pretty boy?

It's at this point that Stabler, pushed beyond his breaking point, stands up, takes a cup of cold coffee that's been sitting on the table, and flings it in the first detective's face. The detective blinks away the moisture, moves across the table with lightning speed, pushes Stabler against the wall and slugs him in the stomach. Don't try to get tough with him, pal, the second detective says as Stabler struggles to get his breath back. He's got anger issues, too.

Eventually*, everything is cleared up; the woman is arrested on a separate charge but, thinking the cops are after her for the murder, confesses all. Stabler's identity is confirmed. and he is released from custody. No hard feelings, the first detective says, we were just doing our job, after all. Adds the second detective, Even you have to admit you looked pretty guilty. Stabler glares at them, resists the impulse to start throwing punches, and leaves the precinct house, headed back to New York.

*Don't bother me to provide the details on all this; I'm not writing a spec script, after all.

OK, this might all have been a little melodramatic - and I stress that this is my own creation, not something that you've ever seen or likelhy ever will see on SVU - but the point I'm trying to illustrate, the one that I'm most interested in, is that crisis that's bound to hit Stabler, or someone like him, the next time he interrogates a suspect and resorts to the rough stuff that's apparently his default mode. Will he remember what happened to him in Chicago? Will he have flashbacks whenever he finds himself echoing the words that the detectives threw at him? Will he see the irony of the suspect's protests of innocence, when the Chicago cops laughed at his own claims?

While contemporary television does a very good job of turning drama into soap opera, I think they're much less adept at having characters - especially the leads, the putative heroes of the story, truly look at their own behavior in terms of how it affects not only the people they interact with, but how it affects themselves: their souls, the meaning they attach to their own lives. Stabler has undergone counselling, though which the viewer has been able to learn the demons that plague him*, so we know that the psychological boarder has been breeched. But is there no sense of irony when Stabler then resorts to the very behavior he condemned when it was turned on him? Television does sex and violence well; conscience, not so much.

*How someone with the psychological problems he has ever got on the police force in the first place, let alone a special victims unit, is madness. If this kind of thing actually happens in real life, no wonder we have some of the problems with law enforcement that we have today.

I don't know how Ed Brown wound up dealing with this conundrum. I suspect Ironside probably used it as a learning moment, to teach Brown that suspects are people too, which may have be a bit simplistic if you're talking about a cop like Stabler, one who has no business being in a position of authority in the first place.

In writing about the id, Freud described it as "know[ing] no judgements of value: no good and evil, no morality. ... Instinctual cathexes seeking discharge—that, in our view, is all there is in the id." When the ego "attempts to mediate between id and reality, it is often obliged to cloak the [unconscious] commands of the id with its own [preconscious] rationalizations, to conceal the id's conflicts with reality, to profess ... to be taking notice of reality even when the id has remained rigid and unyielding."

In other words, someone like Stabler will probably wind up on the verge of a nervous breakdown. While he thinks he operates under a moral code that differentiates between good and evil, but in reality these are simply constructs that he has built to enable him to function in his mission, which is essentially to revenge himself against his parents, whose faces he subliminally sees every time he looks across the table at a suspect. (He could have even chosen police work not to even the score, but as a kind of unconscious death wish, a desire to destroy in himself that which he sees in others.) When such a man fails to differentiate between the actions of those he holds in contempt and his own, similar actions - or, even worse, recognizes them but rationalizes their legitimacy - then we see a disconnect that will eventually catch up with him and bring him down. Thrust into this kind of a situation, Stabler will probably find that his ego is unable to mediate the dispute between his id and his long-dormant super-ego (which, after all, Freud felt was formed by the parents), and his world will come crashing down like a house of cards.

As I said, I don't expect anyone to ever produce a script like this for any Law & Order iteration, or any other procedural that mucks up the airwaves nowadays. When you're building up a quasi-police state where anything goes and the only objective is to solve the case regardless of the consequences, all the while holding the public in contempt, you don't stop to consider things like conscience. It just gets in the way, after all. And we can't have that, can we?

The lie's the thing

At long last, our long national nightmare is over! For at least a few minutes, anyway...

I've chosen to celebrate the occasion with another of my dissertations on television and moral consequentialism. If this isn't your cup of tea, no hard feelings - I'll see you on Friday.

I don’t normally watch Law & Order: Criminal Intent – OK, I never watch it – but the other day my wife had it on when I came home from work, and I got caught up in the final few minutes of the drama. As near as I can tell, the cops were after a bad guy who had stolen some gems and murdered someone. They went to work on the bad guy’s woman, who (as is usually the case in these things) was the weak link, trying to get her to rat on her boyfriend. Finally, one of the cops – the guy cop (nowadays they always work in boy-girl tandems, apparently) – managed to convince her that her boyfriend was HIV-positive due to some things he’d been doing in prison, and that because of the – well, various acts in which they had engaged, she was likely HIV-positive as well. He even offered to have her get an AIDS test if she had any doubts. In the end (no pun intended), she did indeed turn on him, letting the cops know where he’d be when the stolen gems deal went down. As they slapped the handcuffs on to take him away, she told him that, yes, she was the one who’d squealed, and that since thanks to him she was going to die, she thought she’d return the favor.

Whereupon our cop hero turns to her and says – Surprise! You’re not going to die after all! I just lied about that AIDS thing to get you to turn your boyfriend in. No hard feelings, right? I mean, it’s good to be alive, isn’t it?

Well, maybe he didn’t say the last part, but he gleefully admitted to having intentionally lied to her about having AIDS, hoping that it would get her to cough up what they needed to make the bust. All’s fair in love and war and law enforcement. It doesn’t matter how you play the game, and it is a game – it’s all whether you win or lose.

Or is it? The episode got me to thinking, which isn’t a surprise since I wouldn’t be writing about it otherwise, and much to the consternation of my wife, who really prefers a restful, relaxing dinner, I started bouncing around several theories on the moral law as it applied to this case.

Legally, were the cop’s actions right? I don’t know. I can see a case where a judge throws the evidence out, but it all likelihood the cop didn’t break the law. As far as I know, unless you’re running for president or testifying under oath (which may be the same thing soon), you’re not breaking the law by telling a lie. So legally he might have been on safe, if somewhat sloppy, ground.

But, I continued, there are two other ways to look at this – ethically, and morally. They sound similar, but they aren’t.

Ethically, did the cop cross the line by lying to extract information? It’s a tricky question. I don’t think anyone would disagree that a public servant, which is what a policeman is, had better have a damn good reason for lying in the performance of his or her job. And in fact, there are probably times when lying is appropriate, based on the magnitude of the lie and the importance of the results produced by the telling of the lie. But I don’t mind saying this kind of lie makes me uncomfortable. First, there’s a blitheness to it, a suggestion on the part of the cop that lying is part of the job, that the end always justifies the means, that it’s the kind of thing that never gives him pause.

Let’s examine this a little closer, because what it does, at least in part, is reduce law to a game, one with a winner and a loser where the competition to win is what it’s all about. In viewing the law this way, you vastly diminish its moral authority, as well as demonstrate a lack of respect for what it represents. Recall, if you know your TV history, that Perry Mason was always very careful when it came to misleading someone on the witness stand. As he would point out to Della and Paul in the episode’s dénouement, he was always careful to use the phrase “Suppose I were to tell you” as a preface to the allegation which he would use to trap the guilty party. It’s an important distinction – after all, most of the time, in the excitement of the courtroom confession, nobody would give a second thought to the question by Perry that triggered it all. But even if nobody asked about it, Perry would still know. And when he stashes his client at a motel in order to keep them out of the clutches of the police while he investigates the case, he always tells them to register in their own name. As an officer of the law, of course, he has to do that – but there’s an ethical component for Perry as well.  He’ll do anything for his client, but he won’t lie, and he won’t suborn perjury – even if he has a good reason for doing so.

Let’s look at another example. Just last week, I saw an episode of Columbo in which the Lieutenant tricks a murderer into confessing by pretending to arrest the killer’s son and charge him with the murder. The episode is unclear as to whether or not Columbo did this with the cooperation of the son; I don’t think he did, and if this is the case, did he, like our friend in L&O, cross the line? Possibly, although I don’t think it’s quite the same magnitude of lie (which I’ll discuss in the next paragraph) – but in any event, Columbo does something interesting after the real killer confesses. He apologizes to him for having arrested his son, and assures him his son will be released shortly. That tells me that while Columbo may have felt he had to stage this charade in order to get the killer to confess, he didn’t feel particularly good about having done it. In other words, he showed not glee, but remorse.

That leads me to the final way in which this is measured: the moral equation. Legally, the L&O cop is probably in the clear, ethically his actions are dubious at best, but what about morally? Is a lie ever justified? Aquinas thought not; in the Summa, he wrote that "Therefore it is not lawful to tell a lie in order to deliver another from any danger whatever. Nevertheless it is lawful to hide the truth prudently, by keeping it back, as [St.] Augustine says"(In other words, as Mr. Spock once said in response to an accusation that he’d told a lie, something Vulcans are supposed to be unable to do, “I did not lie. I merely withheld a portion of the truth.”)

In discussing whether or not one can ever justify the lie, a Catholic theologian said the following:

It would satisfy a well-formed conscience, I think, to permit the speaking of falsehood when it is the only means we can think of to prevent someone from committing an immoral act. But if so, it is hard to reach such a conclusion only by denying the intention to deceive. There must be something more than that, for we could also say that when we lied to our boss last Wednesday, our intention was not to deceive but to save our skin. Clearly this is just one more possibility for exploration, and so far all the possibilities in history have not led to a formal doctrinal development to settle the matter. It remains the case that, despite our instincts, we don’t quite know how to justify deceiving our proverbial thugs, or telling jokes that involve deception, or doing undercover police work, or engaging in military counter-intelligence activities during wartime. [Emphasis added.]

Let’s look also at the first part of that quote, the discussion of permitting a lie in order to prevent someone from committing an immoral act. The classic example of this is the World War II German who lies to the Gestapo, telling them there are no Jews in the house, when in fact there’s an entire family hiding in the attic. It’s a lie, yes, but one can persuasively argue that the Gestapo officers aren’t entitled to the truth, that they have no right to ask the question in the first place since their purpose is to gather information in order to capture Jews and execute them, an objectively evil act.

You could argue, as the cop undoubtedly would, that he did what he had to do in order to make the arrest – that he did it on order to prevent a future immoral act – but that’s just convenient. What if, for instance, she hadn’t turned on her boyfriend and led the cops to him? What if the combination of a criminal career and the despair of finding out she had AIDS had led her to, say, commit suicide? Or if she’d decided to get even with her boyfriend by killing him first, and then committing suicide? Or blowing up the room, which not only would have killed the two of them but also their partners in crime? Would the cop have had any remorse about that, about his lie having been responsible for the deaths of one, two, three people? Based on what we see of him, we have to doubt it.

I think what troubles me so much about this the lie told by the L&O cop is that it’s dealing with something incredibly personal – telling someone they’ve contracted a terminal disease. That kind of lie strikes me as so intimate; regardless of what that person might have been done, the liar is robbing them of their human dignity by treating their health – and soul – in such a cavalier manner. It is, in fact, a subtle form of torture. Psychological rather than physical, but torture nonetheless. Think about it; what's the difference between telling someone they're going to die when they aren't, and faking an execution or waterboarding a suspect? In all three instances you're trying to convince them they're going to die unless they give you the information you want, when in reality you have no intention of killing them. Granted, physical torture can get out of hand, but so can psychological torture, if that person doesn't act the way you think they will.

At the same time, let’s not overlook the danger the cop is posing to his own soul with this kind of lie. Not only has he violated the human dignity to which everyone – even a crook or killer – is entitled, he’s also scarred his own human dignity. It’s the kind of act that causes someone to say, “C’mon, you’re better than this.” And this last point is an important one, because it cuts to the heart of what it's all about - the responsibility that a person assumes because of their actions. It's why Columbo's showing remorse is crucial. There's no evidence that our L&O cop feels any qualms about what he's done, but were he to discuss it with a priest, for instance, there's every chance he'd be told something similar to what we've discussed here, that his actions carry with them profound moral consequences. Perhaps he hadn't considered them when he told the lie, but now that it's been brought to his attention, he's going to have to change the way he thinks in the future. Can he understand this - can he understand that being a detective and trying to track down and punish the guilty does not give him carte blanche to do whatever he feels is necessary. Now, can he continue to do his job under those circumstances? Can he remain an effective detective without manipulating morality in order to do it?

If the answer to that is "no," then he has only one choice: give up his job. Because ultimately the state of his soul, and the souls of those with whom he comes into contact, is more important.

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Now, I realize I've gotten kind of far afield of what this program was all about. We've taken a leap from Dick Wolf to St. Thomas Aquinas, and that isn't an easy thing to do. There's a point I've made over and over again, though, and I'm going to make it again: when we see television programs portray law enforcement officials acting in a particular way, and justify that behavior in the name of fighting crime, or combating terrorism, or defending national interests, then we are being conditioned to accept that behavior as a necessary aspect of modern law enforcement. I'm not saying we consciously mimic the way people on television act, but certainly it can influence our thinking, the way we see things, and ultimately our desire to rationalize it.

It's the old story of the frog and the boiling water, and it will be repeated to us again and again until we've accepted it, until we've bought into the idea that only the guilty have reason to worry, that such tactics will never be used against the innocent. And of course before we know it, we as a people have given up a fundamental piece of our freedom, and those sworn to protect us have given up a fundamental part of their humanity.

By presenting this kind of thinking in an uncritical, unchallenged way, we wind up encouraging it. Before long, we'll accept "lying for justice," and might even find ourselves doing it. And when that happens, then we'll know that the Criminal Intent in Law & Order refers not only to the bad guys, but the good guys as well.