There was a time when television crime shows fell into two categories: detective shows and private detective shows. Examples of the former are Dragnet, Naked City, and Adam 12. Examples of the latter included such shows as Peter Gunn (the show with the greatest theme song in television), Seventy-Seven Sunstrip Strip and the Rockford Files. These shows, for all their age, were great television crime programs. What made them great was that they were modern morality tales. There was good and there was bad. Bad guys were bad and good guys were good and good always prevailed.
Of course, in real life good doesn't always prevail. In fact, considering the current lot of political characters with which we have to put up with, good rarely prevails. But we, as a society, like to believe that good prevails despite the fact that it often doesn't.
And perhaps part of the reason that good doesn't prevail has to do with the shape of crime shows on television since the seventies. At that time such people such as Steven Bochco (sp?) decided to complicate matters by portraying the corrupt cop, detective or whatever and the misunderstood criminal who is more a victim of society than just a rotten bastard without the wherewithal to get a decent job and live a law abiding life.
The result was television programs such as Hill Street Blues, NYPD and Law and Order. These, in turn gave birth to such silliness as The Practice (lawyers as heroes) and Profiler (purported to be a program about FBI criminal profilers but in actuality a show about some sort of psychic with eyes like those of a Japanese manga character) which try to look "beneath the surface" to find the truth of criminal behavior. The result is crime series that deal more with the personal problems of the investigators than the resolution of the investigation.
Crime series on television have turned into soap operas instead of morality tales. We are supposed to be more concerned about a policeman's personal life than we are about than the raping and murder of a mother of four. The crime drama has become an extended exercise in angst instead of the determination of right and wrong. And, perhaps, coincidentally, society has become obsessed with "why" instead of "what." And while we wonder why the what is given sympathy for being a poor mistreated child. It's all nonsense. A bad person is a bad person no matter his or her history. There is no person in the US who does not know that it is a bad thing to rob, rape, steal or kill.
But to get to the point, the ouvre' of the traditional crime/morality program has been pretty much abandoned by Hollywood in favor of idiotic comedies, "reality" programs, forensic soap operas (police grunt work) and "feeling" lawyer shows. It has been left to the minor Hollywood producers to make real crime shows. And those shows, up until the last five years when infomercial took over, have been shown during the late night hours between 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM.
Three example suffice:
Sweatin' Bullets was a Canadian production filmed variously in Mexico, Israel and South Africa. The program was basically of the John D. MacDonald/Mickey Spillaine type featuring a private investigator (Rob Stewart playing Nick Slaughter) based in the Florida Keys and his secretary Sylvie (Carolyne Dunn). Each week at 1:00 in the morning Nick and Sylvie walked the mean beaches of Florida to search out baddies in the name of good and for $200.00 a day. Screwed up criminals were considered criminals first and screwed up second. And at the end of the hour we saw good prevail and evil punished.
Highlander, while not technically a crime show, dealt with crime on a metaphysical level. It was one of the few television shows based on a movie that was much better than the movie. Duncan McLeod (played by Adrian Paul) was a fifteenth century Scot who finds himself immortal for some reason. He then discovers that there are other immortals and that, because of the immortal code, there will at some time in the future be only one immortal who bears all the experiences and memories of other immortals who have been killed by decapitation (immortals can only be killed by decapitation) by the last immortal. The gag of the show is that in a period of close to five hundred years McLeod runs across other immortals, some good who want nothing more than to get on with their lives, and bad, who want to take heads and gain power. McLeod becomes a sort of immortal sheriff who wants the peaceful immortals left alone and to do so, while living his life, is forced, in a way, to kill the baddies. McLeod is a man who is in search of a type of redemption. He doesn't completely understand his condition, but he feels an obligation to deal with it in a responsible manner. McLeod is the wandering hero that has been long forgotten by Hollywood.
SheSpies was a silly show, but was better than most network fare. Consider a version of Charlie's Angels with humor and smarts. The three women involved, Cassie (Natasha Hendridge), Deirdre (Kirsten Miller) and Shane (Natasha Williams) are three ex-convicts who have been, because of their various talents, been recruited by a secret government agency to battle baddies. The concept is unbelievable, but it's entertaining and, despite the T and A, has a moral grounding that the network crime programs don't have. And, at least during the first two seasons, the program was funny. I've yet to see another television program, let alone crime show, that used Gilbert and Sullivan or clever puns as part of the plot. The show fell apart entertainment-wise fell apart when it became more serious, but even then bad was bad and good was good. The only soap opera involved was who was going to get a date.
All three of the above mentioned television series were shown after midnight. They were all clever, well written and had the message that there are bad guys out there and they are bad because they want to be bad. The stuff shown before the eleven o'clock news seems to be a big Kumbaya fest. I don't know about you, but if a guy pulls a knife on me or sticks a gun in my face I think he's bad. I don't care if his mom was a rotten mom or if he lived in the projects. All I know is that he wants something that I've got and has no right to. But maybe it doesn't work that way in Hollywood.
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