VLVL tv cop shows

[jbor]

> It's in the context of Hector pointing out to her the fact that she is a cop
> just like he is, albeit one who works "underground", that Frenesi is trying to
> reassure herself that TV Guide is a "right-wing weekly", that all cops are
> "agents of government repression", and that tv cop shows always push a
> "propaganda message" which falsely sanctifies police (345). These are obvious
> exaggerations, in the same key as the "all men are bastards" complaint of the
> spurned wife or girlfriend. The criticisms Frenesi makes aren't actually true
> of any of the three programs in question, or the characters specifically
> referred to (and I suspect that Pynchon has chosen these three shows precisely
> *because* they don't fit Frenesi's caricature), and nor are they an accurate
> summation of the genre in toto either. As media criticism it's not astute at
> all: it's not even accurate. In fact, what I think she's actually doing here,
> at least partly, is trying to offset the blame onto the Tube for all the
> choices she made and everything she has done in her life since she sold out.

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/P/htmlP/policeprogra/policeprogra.htm

[...]
The police procedural strain dominated the genre during the 1950s, but its
dry presentational style and endorsement of the status quo and the
powers-that-be came under attack in the 1960s. Webb's programs seemed
anachronistic and out of touch with the reality of many viewers during that
turbulent decade. New issues, imagery, and character types revived the genre
in programs such as Ironside and The Mod Squad.

Ironside, in contrast to the Webb programs, attempted to pour a liberal
politics into the mold of the police drama. Ironside's team of
crime-fighters cobbled together representatives of society's disenfranchised
groups (women, African-Americans, and the young) under the guidance of a
liberal patriarch, the wheelchair-bound Robert Ironside (Raymond Burr).
Ironside was an outsider who understood the workings of police procedure,
but chose not to function within it. Instead, he formed an alliance of
sharply defined individuals outside the bounds of the police organization
proper. Ironside did not challenge the status quo, but neither did it fully
endorse it. 

In The Mod Squad, the policing characters were drawn from Hollywood's vision
of 1960s counterculture: "one white, one black, one blond," the advertising
promised. Although actual members of the counterculture spurned the program
as fake and inaccurate, The Mod Squad illustrated how policing figures can
adopt an anti-social patina, how they can come to resemble the rebellious
and anarchic forces they are supposed to contain.

[...]
By the 1980s, the police drama was a well established genre, possibly in
danger of stagnation from the glut of programs broadcast during the previous
decade. With remarkable resiliency, however, it continued to evolve through
a series of programs that took its basic conventions and thoroughly reworked
them. Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, and Miami Vice were very
different programs, but each of them was seen as an iconoclastic,
rule-breaking police program.

Police programs have always invoked realism and claimed authenticity, as was
apparent in the genre's archetype, Dragnet, but there are different forms of
realism and Hill Street Blues altered the understanding of realism that had
prevailed. Among its innovations were documentary film techniques (such as
the hand-held camera), fragmented and disjointed narrative structure
(actions kept happening without conventional motivation and/or explanation),
and morally ambiguous characterizations (mixing good and evil in a single
individual). Hill Street Blues also altered the usually all-white, usually
all-male composition of the police force by including women and minorities
as central figures--a trend which had begun in the 1970s.

[...]
The clearly demarcated moral universe of Dragnet had become hopelessly
ambiguous.

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