‘The uprisings opened up the door’: the TV cop shows confronting a harmful legacy
There’s a moment of police harassment in the pilot of ABC’s cop drama The Rookie, which premiered in fall 2018, that’s so tangential to the plot you could easily miss it.
Three Mexican gardeners honk at the cruiser of an abrasive training officer, who then berates the gardeners as a “test” of his rookie trainee on her first day. The three mostly mute Mexican men are accessories to this characterization of the tough-guy officer and his flustered trainee, as the effect of the harassment on their lives goes unexplored – until a third season episode from earlier this year, in which the trainee asks the officer to imagine how the gardeners felt about the “terrorizing” encounter that, for them, was not a test. His admission that he “used” the gardeners is a startling example of on-air revision: a main character acknowledging a personal failure that is also the show’s failure to consider that the minority characters – in real life, the policed – were used to positively characterize its police officers.
It’s also the work of cultural consultants, experts on diversity and inclusion who advise TV producers and writers’ rooms on how to more responsibly and accurately portray law enforcement on television. Following last summer’s nationwide protests against anti-black police brutality, broadcast networks have increasingly turned to consultants to address the disconnect between the reality of racist policing and the lionized, mostly race-blind law enforcement seen on such popular shows as Law & Order, NCIS, Blue Bloods and Chicago PD. Before the protests, “the barrier was just getting people to recognize the urgency of changing these narratives,” said Kristen Marston, culture and entertainment advocacy director for Color of Change, who helped advise The Rookie’s third season. “The uprisings opened up the door.”
Outside help in TV writers’ rooms is not new: crime shows have, since the beginning of serialized TV, collaborated with ex-law enforcement advisers or police departments to depict seemingly realistic, unfailingly heroic policing; post-#MeToo movement, film to safely choreograph sex scenes. Cultural consultants such as Marston could become a new standard on crime shows – one tool to address how some of the most popular shows on television work as PR for a criminal justice system that is not the generally color-blind, fair, dramatic and effective one seen on screen.
