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Blue Bloods: Harmful to Law Enforcement
I’m a Tom Selleck fan and have been since Magnum PI. Though I haven’t watched everything he’s done, I’ve generally been entertained when I’ve watched him. It was later that I learned that his political views run right of center, which is a plus for me.
The television show Blue Bloods has a right-of-center bent. It’s not a show about politics per se, but about law enforcement, specifically the NYPD. Selleck plays the police commissioner, and his family primarily works for or is retired from law enforcement. It’s not a realistic show with regard to how the NYPD works, there are some major gaps there, but the inaccuracies go in support of the ensemble of actors they have in the show. I suspect that the set of Blue Bloods is a good place to work, and the cast is a tight one. It’s probably why it’s lasted 12 seasons.
Still, if you want a more accurate portrayal of policing, NYPD Blue is probably better fare, though that series is hardly perfect. Still, they tried harder.
One thing refreshing about Blue Bloods is its traditional family values, and one of the highlights of each episode is their family dinners, and many of those dinners include a prayer, where the words “Jesus Christ” are uttered. It’s probably the only current mainstream television show where a positive portrayal of mainstream religion is included.
Here’s my problem. It’s the character, Detective Danny Reagan. He’s portrayed as a loving husband and father, and loyal son. And he’s violent on the job. He will break every rule he can to get the criminal. He’ll physically intimidate, and in not so rare cases assault a suspect to get a confession. In one scene, he tells a suspect he’s attempting to intimidate that if he needs a lawyer, he must be guilty. The response resonated with me. “With cops like you, you’d be a fool not to have a lawyer.”
And the shootings. It seems like he’s always pulling his gun out, and the number of people he kills in a season is just out of hand. There are even episodes where it’s mentioned that only two percent of officers in the NYPD are involved in shootings. In real police work, shootings are rare. In real life, a Danny Reagan would have either been kicked out of the department, or quietly placed on desk duty for the rest of his career. Someone who has even three shootings in a year would be taken off the street, whether by job termination or reassignment.
And really, in real life, someone who kills that many people, especially someone who is as emotional as Danny Reagan would be a wreck. Most soldiers who have killed a lot of people have done so as young adults, and they’ve paid a price for it. Most are able to overcome the guilt, and live a normal life. But they aren’t continuing to kill well into middle age. In real life, the only way to be unaffected by that many killings is to be a psychopath (a person without emotion). Conceivably, psychopaths can live a moral life. But they can’t be a loving father and husband. At best they could fake it, but can you really fake something like that over most of a lifetime? I think not.
Blue Bloods is not a major influence on the culture. That it’s allowed to continue on the CBS network is an exception that proves the rule, and it targets a certain kind of audience that does not include the Woke. Frankly, though, I’m surprised it’s lasted as long as it did.
But the problem I have is it gives the impression, that the defund the police crowd also encourage, that the police do commonly break the rules, and that they kill much more than they do. And that’s why it’s more harmful than not to the image of law enforcement especially in these days.
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I agree , I like the show but there’s a lot of cringing, he also gets to investigate crimes against his own family. Any evidence he discovered would never hold up in court.
More ridiculous are the new Magnum and the since departed new Hawaii 5-0 , both have fallen in love with SWAT shootouts. The North Hollywood bank shootout in California was 25 years ago and it’s famous, on those two shows it happens every single week, hundreds of rounds flying around, cars overturned ,10- 20 dead —-every week. I keep thinking these people would all have severe PTSD
American TV is almost unwatchable, I’ve been watching mostly British, Australian, Kiwi and Irish. Although Midsomer Murders has a sort of inside joke to the fans that these little British Villages have 2-3 murders a week for 22 years but it’s detective work that solve them , not shootouts.
Thanks for the heads-up!!
I also liked JAG and I’m still hanging in with NCIS , curious thing to me is that I spent three years in the Navy when I was young and never heard of either of them. I guess I never got in trouble.
Even the shows like JAG and NCIS have large offices with a lot of people working in them who never have anything to do with the big-deal cases handled by the top stars.
And worse; commercials.
Ouch!!
Us, too!
If only he had had a lawyer (or solicitor, in British jargon).
Not all. The original Dragnet run was realistic, Adam 12 was too. But it’s not limited to Jack Webb’s productions, there was also Police Story. The first, say, 4-5 seasons of Law & Order was pretty good too.
These shows had fairly long runs.
You can learn a lot about a profession by not watching fictional shows that use said profession as a backdrop.
A couple of posts here make favorable mention of UK police procedurals. I used to like them, too.
But since I found out that the main function of UK cops today is reading social media posts and harassing people with non-woke opinions, I just can’t take the genre seriously any more.
Not to mention the possibly ethnic serial sexual abuse UK cops ignored FOR YEARS to prevent the native locals from having bad thoughts about the ethnicity of the abusers.
Kind of hard to watch an episode of Midsomer when that’s in your head.
I think everything revolved around Sipowicz because Dennis Franz in that role was so magnetic. Maybe that’s why Caruso left after one season. He realized he’d be overmatched. And did Charlotte Ross win an Emmy for that scene? If not, she should have.
I watched a season or so of Chicago P.D. None of the characters resonated, and I didn’t find the overall plot lines very believable.
In some shows it seems like every week an Oxford or Cambridge professor is either kills someone or gets killed. Perhaps they earn combat pay.
Like you, I’ve grown bored/tired of most of the American police shows, particularly those on broadcast television. I too prefer those made in other countries. Bailey & Scott and Endeavour are a couple of my favorites.
I agree Dragnet and Adam 12 were closer to the mark in the reality of policing. Adam 12 was a great recruiting tool for the LAPD. Police Story involved Joseph Wambaugh. His first book The Onion Field was a good look at a true incident and how it affected LAPD officers. He had enough of the Hollywood insiders and eventually wrote The Glitter Dome. It was a biting, sarcastic look at the world of Hollywood producers and their studios.
Violent encounters between citizens and police officers are rare when you look at the 24/7 365 days a year that officers interact with citizens.
The North Hollywood shootout was an anomaly, but it had a profound effect on those officers and citizens that were directly involved.
I always preferred “Emergency” over “Adam-12,” perhaps in part because hour-long episodes gave more time to develop stories.
I created a conversation a while back about how badly emergency services are represented in movies and television. https://ricochet.com/1001689/tv-and-movies-vs-reality/
If you search for “Fire Department Chronicles” on YouTube or Facebook the host does hilarious takedowns of TV shows where he inserts himself by green screen.
Agree. No way they would be rolling the SWAT teams every other day. I can see why every big town/small city in the US wants it own team. Cool uniforms, lots of snazzy equipment. Unfortunately, the Uvalde situation is probably more realistic and/or SWAT is used for overdue library books.
I, too, generally watch British or foreign police shows. Maybe the American shows are too close? I did like Major Crimes which was probably the last ‘regular’ American series I watched. Ended up liking it better than The Closer.
Lots of good points in this post. In fact those, and more, are why I can’t abide these shows.
It’s as much fantasy as any Spider-Man or Batman franchise, but worse since they don’t pretend to be real.
I think the last show I watched about cops was Hill Street Blues, which was close to being real and presenting interesting dilemmas. I hear The Wire is good too.
Overall, the falsehoods are even more meta than Al Sparks’ quibbles. Police are now uninterested in solving crimes, or even preventing them, and simply go through the mundane motions on their shifts. If they happen to do any good at all, they consider themselves heroes.
While there are many “good” individual police officers, in any big city (and many small ones) it is impossible for them to do much good, and in fact they are tasked with policing those who are essentially law-abiding and ignoring the criminals running rampant.
I’m currently re-watching Hill Street Blues. It’s more about characters than investigations, but it’s not too crazy with the outlandish story lines.
Some of the old shows had other aspects of realism too. For example, on “Adam-12” the police dispatcher voice was an actual police dispatcher, who they got to do the show for the accuracy of her speaking etc. Same with the show “Emergency,” the guy who always made the firehouse calls was an actual Los Angeles County Fire Department dispatcher. And, series regulars Mike Stoker and Marco Lopez were actual Los Angeles County Fire Department members Mike Stoker and Marco Lopez. The actual chief of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Richard Houts, also appeared as himself in one episode.
And when ADAM-12 star Martin Milner died in 2015, the LAPD conducted an “End Of Watch” ceremony in honor of him and the show, which was done by the actual dispatcher and show dispatcher voice, Shaaron Claridge (aka Shaaron Snead).