So lets talk about police procedurals.Sure, shows like C.S.I. are about as realistic as the rest of Jerry Bruckheimer's work. But I'm talking about the more down-to-earth stuff. The shows that get down to the nitty gritty of what a cop really does. That's why Dragnet is easily the Godfather of the genre. The show wasn't afraid to make the job look un-sexy. In fact, Jack Webb went out of the way to make the show as realistic as possible. And it was still a hoot to watch. Thanks, especially, to Webb's dry-as-dirt delivery. One of my college profs (who worked on the show) told me that Webb would come to work so lit that they'd tilt the set onto the floor and let him deliver his monologues lying down.
Today's best cop drama is The Wire. It takes a novelistic approach to storytelling, looking at the lives of everyone from drug dealing peons to high-ranking city officials. The entire first season follows a single case with the Baltimore police first learning to apply modern surveillance techniques to nab a drug kingpin. If you like HBO-flavored television you're doing yourself a great disservice by skipping out on this one.
Lately movies tend to lean towards less-realistic action when dealing with police stories. But there are exceptions. This year's Zodiac, was a low-key, slow-burning thriller that followed three men (a cop, a journalist and a newspaper cartoonist) who became obsessed with discovering the identity of the serial killer.
My favorite old-school, cinematic police procedural is High and Low by Akira Kurasawa. A businessman (Toshiro Mifune) is nailed by a kidnap plot, but they nab the child of his chauffeur rather than his son. The second half of the film, which details the locating and capture of the kidnappers offers an intriguing glimpse into the doings of the Japanese police force in the '60s.I could really go on forever. The first ten seasons of Law & Order was dynamite. The show's "ripped from the headlines" plots were still very obscure then. And the show went months without revealing a single tidbit about the cops' personal lives. Skip the spin offs and pretty much any episode with a blonde D.A. My wife is the expert on the U.K. stuff, but I'd probably peg Prime Suspect as the best example of the detailed cops shows over there.
7 comments:
For the record, Prime Suspect is leaps and bounds ahead and above the 'bloody Amercian' cop dramas you mentioned.
~Please don't group her with them again.
Um, are you using the female pronoun to refer to "Prime Suspect" in the naval tradition of ships being she?
Because if we're looking at the performers, I'd put Jerry Orbach on par with Helen Mirren without a second thought.
Or did you just let your mom-crush slip?
Tim, watch the The Wire and get back to me.
~Why, is she in The Wire as well?
Yes, in the uncredited roll of Crack Whore #3
Yaphet Kotto, Andre Braugher, Kyle Secor, and Richard Belzer from Homicide: Life on the Street were all great actors, plus the show, set in baltimore, was actually shot in baltimore.
I have never seen the wire, but I have heard the writer(director? exec producer?) interviewed on npr, and he cited Homicide as having a huge influence on how he handles the show
I have only seen one episode of Homicide, which was fantastic. It centered on the oft-told story of the citizen run over by the subway train. Dislodging him will most certainly cause death, so the police usually try to track down the loved one before doing the deed. The guy was played by Vincent D'Onofrio. I think the episode won an Emmy.
Post a Comment