Cop show genre should be reinvented, perhaps using the film noir model

Vox

"Hollywood is not going to give up on the cop show," says Emily VanDerWerff of TV's reckoning in wake of George Floyd's killing. "Stories about police are an instant, ready-made drama generator. Crimes are often committed, investigated, and solved in the space of a single hour, in ways that distort our views of how police departments actually work and how effective they are, but otherwise offer a reliable, time-tested narrative structure. Hollywood loathes giving up something that works, and lots of people love watching police procedurals and other cop shows." VanDerWerff suggests that TV shows can change by applying the film noir model, which is used on Netflix German period drama Babylon Berlin. "Film noir’s inherent structure exists to expose institutional rot," she says. "In almost every film noir, the hero is a good cop or a good detective, but the story makes clear that every other law enforcement officer is either hopelessly corrupt, hopelessly evil, or completely inept (sometimes, they’re all three). Most film noir argues, in essence, that most cops are bad, and the handful of good ones are completely unprepared to take down the true villains, who sit at the top of a system built primarily to benefit them. You can see where this might be the best way to combine the visceral thrills of a cop show with the weightier consideration of the police’s position in society, as our modern era demands."