My husband watches a lot of TV procedurals, and so I end up watching a fair number with him and I spend a lot of time thinking about the cultural meaning of them and the popularity they enjoy.
Some of them are naive fantasies, for sure, and the appeal of neatly-tied-up the-system-works bad-guy-is-put-away is well known and talked about, but I think there’s something more subtle going on in a lot of them.
In a bunch of ways they live at the center of the Overton window politically: they’re inherently very centrist shows, by virtue of seeking a wide audience, and they lean to a certain kind of conservatism in their structure – the predictable, good guys win nature of them, but fascinatingly they tend to tackle a fair number of somewhat progressive subjects and work them into these stories. SVU tackled themes around sexuality; FBI is extremely self-conscious about federal vs state power; The Wire is of course lauded for its nuanced and detailed takes around the war on drugs.
Writ large, they are a process of sense-making, integrating the very real problems and inequalities in the world into storylines and trying to make them make sense against a backdrop of ‘the system’. Legal and cop shows will sometimes (not often enough) delve into how unfair the public defender system is, how rigged against various groups the system is. Cop procedurals will often dig into the injustices of the system – not enough to show the system as being in the wrong very often, but it’s trying to reconcile the various conflicting truths present in our culture. Even more so, accepting that TV shows will not themselves be perfectly consistant as different writers handle different episodes, we see a variety of takes on related subjects all pressed together.
Like cop procedurals, medical dramas spend even more time integrating social issues into the fabric of their shows – ER’s poor treatment of a transgender patient was flipped in a Grey’s Anatomy episode with a similar structure. The progress and reconciliation of the place of transgender people in society is at least reflected in these shows. Similarly we similar changes in sense made for gay rights, for sex worker stigma, for teen pregnancy stigma over the course of medical shows. And most of them at some point deal with the complexity and brokenness of American insurance and health care systems.
Not to say all frames are progressive at all: “24” spent a great deal of time normalizing war crimes and heinous abuses in the name of expedience; FBI normalizes ubiquitous surveillance; SVU often repeated and reinforced a stereotype of women as uncomplicatedly vulnerable. These shows are all some variety of problematic in many ways, but the formula works for many reasons, and the popularity is undeniable.
In the 2020s, terrorists are back to being portrayed as brown, middle-eastern, but not always: there’s a growing trend of showing white, traditionalist, racist and religious cults as the breeding ground of terrorism. Not enough to reject the dominant narrative, but at least willing to complicate it a bit. It’s still going to show us the National Enemy Du Jour: This week it’s Venezuelans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Yemenis and Afghans getting the short end, where it was Iraquis and Lebanese and Libyans and Cubans before, and China the amorphous and distant Bad Place, displacing Russia and the Soviet Union for that spot. The National Allies are usually conspicuously absent. Saudis will rarely if ever be mentioned, Israelis are too hot a topic for most shows to touch, and these shows have a strong tendency to avoid looking at anything we’re too mired in complexity about. Conflict makes good TV, but complex feelings less so. Characters like Omar Zidan in “FBI”, are themselves representatives of the marginalized groups, and this is always played for the tension, and any given show can only bear a few characters dealing with this complexity, while other issues have to be wrapped up in the one or two episode units before moving on.
I do wonder how much these shows entrench views of the status quo or normalize things that really should not be – certainly they fetishize universal surveillance, and they do reify a lot of tropes and stereotypes – but at the same time, they seem to be doing the work of processing the changes in our culture in ways that actually are tolerable to a conservative audience.