Imagine a realistic cop show that starts with the protagonist brutalizing a homeless person, showing up to a hit and run and telling the victim there’s nothing they can do, and then pulling into a McDonald’s parking lot and scrolling through TikTok for the rest of their shift
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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There are cop shows that do this sort of thing, the issue is that people are conditioned to see the cops actions as justified - cop pulls up on a homeless man, gun drawn? Completely reasonable - the homeless are dangerous criminals, unpredictable! He sees him twitch a little bit and fires three into the chest? He could have been reaching for a weapon!
The lesson people will take away from this is that good people sometimes make regrettable mistakes, that policing is dangerous and cops are professionals who actually need more funding, not less!
This is how it's always going to be with a show where the main POV is a cop unless the message is so heavy-handed it makes the show unwatchable.
^this
that's what makes the difference between effective copaganda and ineffective
people watch a show where the cops are angelic and it rubs against what they see in reality, even if they are a 100% pig bootlicker
but if people watch a show where the cops do the same fucked up shit that you see on the street or in the news but it's all justified, that is effective, no dissonance, easy to swallow
Then posting a video in hysteria that their mcmuffin was poisoned with fentanyl (they have IBS)
Fiction: “the mayor’s gonna have my ass for you two detectives screwing up that case!”
Reality: “the mayor just gave us another $100 million, let’s go buy a tank”
Truth. An uncle of mine just won a mayors race in small city in the platform of, atleast in part, "increasing public safety". I'm like dude I have never felt unsafe here... Except when the cops come fuck with me when I'm just playing around outside.
You should pester him with car death statistics. It's the most unsafe thing any of us interact with on a daily basis.
This is like 99% of the US. Reactionaries cling to their guns like Ze Germans are just off the coast of Nashville, ready to invade. But first, they dropped a bunch of highwaymen and mafiosi all over the country to rob every bank and car dealership before killing all hostages and running away carrying comically large bags with dollar signs on them filled with cocaine and methamphetamine.
The overwhelming majority of places are safe. Most homicides occur between people who know each other. The actual, most dangerous places are the wilderness with bears and mountain lions, places where no one lives and it's pitch black at night because the nearest building with electricity is 100 miles away. Americans do not go to these places and they sure as shit don't live there.
Of course, that doesn't stop them open firing on one of their kids getting a glass of water from the kitchen in the middle of the night because they think ISIS is trying to steal their fridge specifically.
Or medical dramas where they go out of their way to help the uninsured
netflix should do one of those choose your own adventure things where you pick between the doe-eyed rookie high on copaganda being corrupted by the system or getting murdered by one of those LA sheriff gangs.
If it wasn't for the fact it would most likely be some flavor of cape/copslop, a FMV CYOA show/game that's popular in society would actually be pretty neat. Like Road to Empress.
Cop shows are so aaaaargh
Some studios think they can just slap some violence, cynical idiology and boobs in a show and that automatically makes it mature. No man you have to have good writing too lol
Violence and boobs 
its a cop show 
There's something that fundamentally rubs me wrong about adults who won't engage with fantasy or sci fi.b
Guy next to me on the train had like 100 books all about the pareto principle like surely 1 is enough. The rest was other business and self help books like cmon read something fun just once. Anyway i was reading Gormenghast cos im cool
What is crazy is that the Pareto principle is literally an arbitrary ratio that was made up to justify why 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people. There isn't actually much more to it than that other than that some lean engineering guy from the U.S. got it in his head that it must be a magic ratio for efficiency because some fascist Italian matematician came up with it.
20% of hexbear posters get 80% of the upvotes. Really makes you thonk
Guy next to me on the train had like 100 books all about the pareto principle. like surely 1 is enough.
- Mitch Hebderg
20% of the people own 80% of the pareto principle books
NCIS folks, nothing but the best!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I'm now on season 3 of Justified and loving it.
Very great when viewed as a contemporary western. It is definitely not the generic cop slop always assumed it was.
Also these are somehow never filing reports or doing other paperwork
This is half the screen time of The Wire.
The Wire is a completely different beast than the network cop procedurals.
I can't watch crime shows anymore because of it. The Wire basically covers 2~3 investigations over a 5 year period and they aren't fully resolved by the end of the series. Cop procedurals have them solving multiple homicide cases each week? Lmao no fucking way. Especially since police only have around 50% conviction rates for homicides IRL. And that's convictions, so they send innocent people to prison all the time.
tbh I don't fault them for that since I don't really see how such scenes would advance the story
Papercut on a report form where he claims to not have planted evidence that leads to him getting blood on his hands as a visual metaphor. That leads to him getting stabbed later when he also lies about not planting evidence.
or.
I think i might be the only person who actually liked Bright. It wasn't great but I will gobble Shadowrun slop all day.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
cop1: man i wish i could focus on catching r#pists and abusers instead of doing paperwork
sad melancholic music
cop2: yeaa would be so great. why i have 15 of them lined up just waiting for me to bust em!
scene ends with both staring at the camera
I enjoy a lot of media but realism was never something that I craved in my escapism. Maybe if I was into flightsims I would care about stuff like that.
I care about internal consistency, but that's about it. Like i can get down with a crazy premise but I need the rules of the world to make sense for it to feel real
Oh yeah I get that. But these days you have people argue why Frodo didnt just use the eagles to throw the ring into the mount doom and its a quite foolish thing to see (for me) .
Synthesis: Bright (2017)