The Unreality of <em>Cops</em>
Of all the charges you could level at Cops, it’s hard to accuse it of stinting on action. Until its cancellation this week, the 31-year-old reality series endured for so long because, despite the unvarnished nature of its presentation and concept (just regular cops filmed doing real police work!), it stuck rigidly to a fast-paced format. Each episode runs about 22 minutes long and has three acts, within which a suspect is located, investigated, and—mostly—arrested. The arrestees are often referred to as “bad guys,” and they get no backstory, no biography beyond what they volunteer to the officers in front of them. They’re human beings reduced to the sum of their rap sheets, or to their mental and emotional state on the particular day that the cameras are rolling.
The cops don’t get much more by way of characterization,, and had absorbed the show’s motifs as emblems of police work. In world, the police are by default the good guys, because theirs is the only point of view the camera follows. Fleeing suspects must be captured because—on —they’re always guilty of something. And the structure of the show’s acts, punctuated by ad breaks, means that the good guys unfailingly capture and overpower the bad guys in a matter of minutes.
