On June 9, America lost a legend. Paramount Network, responding to activist pressure sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, announced that it was canceling the reality show Cops after 33 seasons.
Cops has been around for so long and has become such a ubiquitous presence in pop culture — who doesn’t recognize Inner Circle’s “Bad Boys” played over a montage of drugged and drunken misbehavior? — that it can be easy to underrate the show’s influence. Cops, which debuted three years before MTV’s The Real World, pioneered what we now know as reality television: Produced with no actors, scripts, or narrators, just a skeleton TV crew recording real-life interactions between police and suspects, the show was able to deliver cheap, new, and popular content every week. Cops has won two Emmys, and in 2011, its creator, the producer and philosophy Ph.D. dropout John Langley (aka the “godfather of reality TV“), received a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.
Yet pressure has been building against Cops for a while. Left-wing critics have long attacked the show for reproducing racial stereotypes, for legitimizing the drug war, for exaggerating the threat of violent crime, for presenting crime solely from the perspective of the police, and for “contribut[ing] to a perception skillfully exploited by someone like Donald Trump,” whatever that means. In 2013, the Democratic activist group Color of Change launched a successful campaign to get Fox to drop the show, after which it was scooped up by Paramount. But once the recent bout of anti-police unrest started, the writing was on the wall.
It’s hard to offer a truly principled defense of Cops, and some critiques of the show are fair enough, as far as they go. The podcast Running From Cops, for instance, tracked down a number of suspects who claimed they never signed release forms but wound up on TV anyway (a charge the show’s producers deny). More generally, Cops relied on access to cops, which meant granting police departments some degree of editorial control over the finished product. Still, one gets the sense, reading anti-Cops polemics, that critics would’ve preferred the show to be a droning lecture on the social construction of criminality, in which scenes of police brutality are interspersed with stories about how John Q. Suspect is only stealing copper wire because his father never said it was OK to cry.
What Cops wasn’t was the sort of propaganda that its opponents have made it out to be. The fact that there’s no narrator telling you that cops are the real criminals doesn’t mean the show was a ringing endorsement of U.S. law enforcement. Watching hours upon hours of Cops has made me more, not less, of a civil libertarian. You see a lot of excessive force. You see police being aggressive, unreasonable, or simply dumb. You see how an officer’s vague suspicion can lead to a stop, a search, and the discovery of some drugs that are certainly less dangerous to the user’s well-being than the fines and jail time that await him or her after the arrest. You see minor domestic disputes in which the state is required to press charges against one or both of the parties, even if neither is hurt and neither wants the other to go to jail. And you see a lot of moralizing lectures delivered by officers to suspects they’ve just busted explaining how the arrest is for their own good. The law is the law, of course, but telling someone who’s going to jail for marijuana possession that he’s going to benefit from doing so is the definition of pissing on his shoes and telling him it’s raining.
The more serious objection to Cops is the same one you could make about a lot of other forms of reality TV, and about a lot of journalism and social media content more broadly. The show creates entertainment out of other people’s distress in a way that feels vaguely exploitative. One looks at the denizens of the Cops universe the way one looks at zoo animals, with a mixture of pity and awe. Suspects’ behavior is frequently insane, scarcely comprehensible to the ordinary viewer. What, aside from truly mind-bending levels of fear, stupidity, or chemical intoxication, would possess a person to act like that? To, for instance, lead the police on a drunken high-speed chase with a blown-out front tire, or attempt to evade arrest by climbing a telephone pole, or charge armed police officers with a rusty box cutter, or swallow a near-fatal dose of methamphetamine? Why do none of these people settle their warrants? Appear in court? Pay their child support? Why do they give the cops permission to search their vehicle when they know there’s crack in the center console? (I know, I know: “poverty.” It’s still nuts.)
But this is also what makes Cops brilliant television. If I were a perfectly moral person, I’d probably never watch it, just as I’d never join a Twitter pile-on, read the New York Post Metro section, or set off fireworks under the influence of alcohol. But I’d be a more boring and blinkered person because of it. Cops was great for many of the same reasons America is great: its energy, its violence, and its sheer craziness, in which the boundaries between reality and spectacular media representations of reality are effaced or dissolve altogether. Is it right? Hard to say. But it’s a lot of fun, and I’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Park MacDougald is the Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
