In 1981, Steven Bochco introduced a police drama to the country and I was one of millions who adopted it. Bochco trained as a playwright at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, and it has been said that he got the idea for “Hill Street Blues” from observing the Hill District in that city. I grew up on the Hill, another incentive for me to watch the show. I’ve since graduated to other police dramas, with “Law and Order” leading the way.
“Law and Order” debuted in 1990, three years after “Hill Street Blues” ended. It has spawned several spinoffs, with the current being the immensely successful “Law and Order, SVU,” starring Jayne Mansfield’s daughter, Mariska Hargitay. But I have added to my crime drama watching routine: “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and all of its children in New York, Las Vegas and New Orleans; and “Criminal Minds,” a show that one of my nieces first injected into my TV veins. I started watching “Blue Bloods,” with Tom Selleck and Donnie Wahlberg mainly because I used to work in New York with another of the stars: Bridgette Moynihan. But my Internet service provider has opened worldwide crime-drama portals for me.
“Line of Duty” originates in and is filmed in Ireland. The series is about a police anti-corruption unit whose sole concern, according to one of the main characters, is “bent coppers.” An offering from Australia, “City Homicide,” highlights the divide between the public’s right to know (which is apparently as important in Australia as in the U.S.) and the police department’s desire to operate unimpeded. “Journos” (journalists) demand to know the details of a “bashing.” Leaping presidential candidate Scott Walker’s fence, I journeyed into Canada, where I found “Cold Squad.” A team of police officers delves into cases — mostly homicides — that have gone into an unsolved file for lack of promising leads or suspects.
There are themes and behaviors that are common to police work in the U.S., Ireland, Australia and Canada. In June, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Miranda vs Arizona, established that people arrested must be read their rights before being questioned. “You have a right to remain silent…” can be intoned by almost everyone who watches crime dramas, but similar rights are being observed in the countries whose crime shows I have been watching. And if life, as Oscar Wilde lamented, imitates art more often than the inverse, then police departments are all trying to get around the constrictions that are designed to insure civil liberties. In all three of the international shows I cited, there are varying degrees of police shenanigans, ostensibly for the public good. And the art of the shows, just as in life, is to highlight the efforts by the police officers to ameliorate human suffering by catching those who would contribute to it.
If the portrayals of the laws of the countries from which the shows originate are accurate, then there is another interesting dynamic that I have observed. The use of firearms varies, but in no case approaches the arms and gunfire of U.S. shows. In the Irish offering, the constables and detectives are not armed; in the Australian show, detectives are armed, but the arms are rarely shown. In the Canadian show, arms are seldom deployed, and the police are not armed as a general rule.
I don’t know why I have become so addicted to televised police dramas (and author Michael Connelly’s detective Hieronymus Bosch), but viewing international shows has exposed me to the commonality of a civilized society’s struggles to establish and maintain law and order.