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    The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

    From the days before crimes in the US were all solved by perfect people in blue-lit laboratories using microscopes and dialogue by committee:

    The Streets of San Francisco

    Ironside

    Kojak

    Cannon

    Cannon was my favourite - despite the obvious he often kept up with the perps.

    #2
    The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

    The area which they filmed Hill Street Blues around looked like a militarised warzone in parts. This was a good thing.

    You can shove yer fucking Miami condos Horatio.

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      #3
      The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

      I think the location shots were done in Chicago.

      Of more recent stuff, The Shield was really gritty - after the first series the LAPD apparently insisted that all reference to itself be deleted from subsequent programmes, and I don't blame them. The first series borrowed heavily from Ellroy's White Jazz as a plot driver and resolver.

      The SFX on the CSI franchises - showing how wounds were inflicted, etc - was copied from the film Three Kings.

      Edit

      Of course, the contemporary drama I forgot in the original post was Justified.

      I'm a big fan of this - it seems to catch Elmore Leonard better than anything else I've ever seen. Laconic, funny, violent, well-acted, and it all seems to develop naturally from the characters, as a Leonard development should (the great man is executive producer, which helps).

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        #4
        The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

        I disagree with the premise, I think: the old US cop shows strike me as pretty gimmicky too, albeit in a different way from CSI. But The Wire blew all that shit sky-high.

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          #5
          The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

          WaL - take your point re. The Wire and oldjack's re. The Shield. I suppose it's just CSI/NCIS/Law&Order fatigue, and a good dose of nostalgia.

          Although there were gimmicks at least they seemed different enough at the time:

          Kojak - he's Greek and bald
          Ironside - he's in a wheelchair
          Cannon - he's fat
          Streets of San Francisco - errrrm, it's in San Francisco, and Karl Walden had a face which looked like it had lived three lives

          Theo Kojak was the first person I ever saw holding a pistol with a two-handed grip.

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            #6
            The Golden Age of US Cop Shows



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              #7
              The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

              I have a huge soft spot - and it might be my head - for The Rockford Files.

              It's funny, I heard some guy on the radio a while back and he was on about how we've learned to become better non-linear thinkers due to modern cop shows. You know, multiple story lines, flashbacks, large casts, etc. He contrasted that with '70s cop shows where you got one story line and it was pretty much A to Z, with a handful of people.

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                #8
                The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                How is it I've never heard of Cannon?

                Of the current shows, Justified is outstanding. Very different from the usual. Is it on in Britain?

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                  #9
                  The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                  Rockford Files ruled - Angel, Rocky, Dennis, and the Ponitac Firebird. Great opening theme as well. I ran into James Garner in an elevator in Norman, Oklahoma and was amazed that he was only about 5' 9" as he seemed to be well over 6 feet on TV.

                  I've netflixed a number of them in order to show them to my son and see if he gets a hankering for any of them. So far, Rockford Files and Kojak are the only ones he's shown an interest of watching more than five minutes. Columbo, Ironside, McCloud, Mannix, Streets of SF, and even Starsky & Hutch = dud. Looking back at them honestly they are pretty damned linear and not too hot. Everything Bad Is Good for You summed it up that any 70's/80's show is ridiculously linear and simple compared to the most apparently basic drama/cop show today.

                  I dug Columbo and McCloud as we got those on the one channel (NRK) growing up in Norway. They were longer than the typical cop shows and very patient.

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                    #10
                    The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                    Reed John wrote:
                    How is it I've never heard of Cannon?
                    How old were you from say, 1972-1975? If you missed it during the original airing, I don't think it did much in syndication. I loved it when it first came out because there was something cool about an overweight PI easily taking on the toughest thugs w/ a pathetic karate chop. My favorite line from the show was when he introduced himself to a little kid, "My name is Frank Cannon." The little kid replied, "You look like a cannon."

                    Re: UK cop shows, Luther is a bit over the top, but we were drawn into it. Rebus was also a quality show in my opinion.

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                      #11
                      The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                      I think Hill Street Blues was the first non-linear show; I seem to have a recollection of it being discussed in these terms at the time.

                      The contemporary British show to the above-mentioned US 70s dramas was surely The Sweeney, which made everything else look staid.

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                        #12
                        The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                        I was born in 1972. I assumed everything of worth was syndicated.

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                          #13
                          The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                          In terms of "modern" crime shows I think spinning it round to the criminals' perspective refreshed the whole thing, even if it had been done before.

                          For me The Sopranos is the best TV I've ever seen, including The Wire. The moment I found myself saying to Mrs. Stone "Well, they've got to whack Adriana now, she's betrayed the family" I realised the impact had been fairly significant. The gift of some of the better HBO offerings is that your morality shifts - another example was Big Love, before it lost its way.

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                            #14
                            The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                            My mother swooned over Tom Sellick in Magnum PI, but I am still reminded of a Johnny Carson gag: that the title of the show is actually the answer to the question "How do you say May I go to the bathroom? in Latin?"

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                              #15
                              The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                              Never heard of Cannon, but it was a Quinn Martin Production!

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                                #16
                                The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                There is much to be said on why, when and how the cop show replaced the western as the dominant form of US TV drama. It represented a significant cultural shift of some kind in the late 60s but I've never really put my finger on what it is. Independent agency versus established values? Free will versus determinism? Fucked if I know but it happened relatively quickly and without the transition and overlap the two genres had in movies of the same period.

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                                  #17
                                  The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                  Don't forget Little House On The Prairie, a late-ish TV soap in a Western setting, that ran from '74 to early 80s.. That mauldin' driible often bought a tear to my eye as the family encountered one of its many setbacks.

                                  But back to 70s cops and PIs: Harry O was a favourite of mine. Probably more for the Pacific Coast beach house the titular hero somehow managed to afford than the storylines.

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                                    #18
                                    The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                    No love for Law & Order? It's ridiculously formulaic, but as with Perry Mason, the formula always sucks me in. I love the Lenny Briscoe character. DUN DUN!

                                    I'll second the love for the Rockford Files, too. Any cop/P.I. show that had Isaac Hayes playing a character named Gandolph is OK in my book. (And the Angel character was hilarious, as were the opening answering machine gags.)

                                    The theme music for The Rockford Files and Streets of San Francisco was great, too.

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                                      #19
                                      The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                      Amor's question is interesting.

                                      There was a bit of overlap. Gunsmoke ran until 1975 and Bonanza until 1973, McCloud (the one with Dennis Weaver as a cowboy) tried to mix the two genres, as did Walker, Texas Ranger.

                                      I think that the transition reflected a number of trends in American society of the period, including:

                                      An increasing willingness on the part of the general public to reject the white hat/black hat paradigm and accept that the forces of public order are not always paragon of virtue (you can see the same trend playing out in Spaghetti Westerns).

                                      The increasing urbanisation of US society, both in terms of people moving to cities and in "white flight" away from them, which created an immediate market for shows that reinforced their belief that the cities they left were dangerous, non-homogenous places, and yet still full of "characters".

                                      The fact that the cop show was a more flexible format that allowed for easy ripoffs at a time when the networks were desperate for programming. By changing the location of a cop show or the persona of its protagonist, you got a completely new show in a way that wasn't true of the Western. So, you put Rockford in Boston and get Banacek, you put Ironside on a horse and get McCloud, etc. SF and NY are immediately identifiable and distinguishable in a way that Virginia City and Dodge City, say, are not.

                                      NYPD Blue isn't getting enough (any) credit in this thread. In many ways, it is the link between Hill Street Blues (which was remarkably innovative for its time) and the David Simon shows on HBO.

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                                        #20
                                        The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                        It's also interesting that Jim Garner managed the jump from cowboy to P.I. over this transition period (Maverick to Rockford Files.) I suppose Clint Eastwood did the same thing in movies.

                                        David Simon's Homicide: Life on the Street was another good cop show I forgot.

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                                          #21
                                          The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                          An increasing willingness on the part of the general public to reject the white hat/black hat paradigm and accept that the forces of public order are not always paragon of virtue (you can see the same trend playing out in Spaghetti Westerns)

                                          That's interesting. If anything I'd tended to read it as everyman forced to make independent ethical decisions as against becoming part of the hive-mind of imposed social authority. In either case that the transition happened during the Nixonian/Watergate period (your dates are more accurate than mine) is not coincidental I feel.

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                                            #22
                                            The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                            Well, there's also an interesting subtext of lone wolf capitalism in the whole American tradition of private detectives, and it's worth noting that many of the shows cited so far feature "private dicks", who tended to look down upon the "cops" they had to interact with.

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                                              #23
                                              The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                              Worn Old Motorbike wrote:
                                              I have a huge soft spot - and it might be my head - for The Rockford Files.
                                              Ah, yes, likewise. The Rockford Files was great. Wittier than the others, I think that's what it was.

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                                                #24
                                                The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                                ursus arctos wrote:
                                                Well, there's also an interesting subtext of lone wolf capitalism in the whole American tradition of private detectives, and it's worth noting that many of the shows cited so far feature "private dicks", who tended to look down upon the "cops" they had to interact with.
                                                That's true. The private dick is the natural inheritor of the cowboy tradition — and part of the reason they look down on cops. But I think the PI — whether hard or soft boiled — is a different genre to the cop show, at least as it's evolved over the past couple of decades.

                                                The latter has become a study in process as it's overlapped into legal procedure and forensics. Less about doing the right thing, more about doing the requisite thing.

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                                                  #25
                                                  The Golden Age of US Cop Shows

                                                  I'd happily give Kojak another look, I think, though I wasn't a huge fan at the time. It was kinda gimmicky, with the lollipops and that, but no more so than Tom Baker and his jelly-babies. It had something to it, certainly.

                                                  I think part of my lukewarmness was, indeed, that we had The Sweeney, which I felt then, and feel now, knocked most networked US cop shows of the time into a cocked hat. The US series were shot through with niceness. Everything was All Right Really. Kojak may have been hard-boiled, but Regan would fuck you up and you knew it. And the violence felt like violence, rather than choreography.

                                                  It's been such a long time since one could claim with a straight face that British telly was better than American, that it's easy to forget that this was once a very defensible point of view.

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