US cop shows - right-wing, smart, funny and stuffed with foreigners

Anna Torv, "Fringe"

When people wax nostalgic about 1970s US crime series like Kojak and Starsky and Hutch, I’m perplexed. They were awful – cheesy, badly-acted, badly scripted, badly directed and, at a time when America was being engulfed by crime,  unremittingly liberal in all the worst possible ways. Yes, we watched them, but we watched pretty much anything in that two-channel era.

The rest were even worse: Banacek, Barreta, Cannon, Harry O, Quincy,etc. (The ones that didn’t make it across The Great Herring-Pond must have been beyond belief.) 

The theme running through these luridly-lit clunkers is that the detectives, medical examiners or Private Eyes aren’t that bright – astute in some cases, but not intellectually exceptional. This tendency became even more marked in the 1980s, with the appearance of shows like Hill Street Bluesand NYPD Blue, where the cops were Average Joes with Average Joe lives - and IQs to match.

2000 saw the replacement of your standard issue flatfoot by smart detectives. CSI kicked it all off with William Petersen’s borderline-Asperger’s Syndrome Gill Grissom, a bug expert who reckons Science is what catches criminals, not emotional involvement. Contrast Grissom with Jack Klugman’s emotionally incontinent Medical Examiner in the 1970sQuincy, where science is elbowed aside in favour of emotional empathy and “passion” (and abysmal over-acting). 

2002 saw the launch of Monk, played by Tony Shalhoud. Monk, a former policeman whose wife was killed by a car bomb meant for him, suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and it’s his weirdness – in particular, his abnormal attention to tiny details - which allows him to solve cases.

Then, two years later, House aired for the first time. True, he’s a diagnostician rather than a policeman – but this is a pure cop show: there’s a victim (the patient), and a criminal (the disease) and a host of clues (the symptoms) and a long-suffering Hospital Director, who’s really an exasperated Police Chief. The show invariably involves a search for evidence at the victim’s house or apartment, and a number of suspects (diseases and medical conditions) are falsely accused and then released before the true villain is unmasked and punished (i.e. the disease is identified and cured).

House, played by Hugh Laurie, is based on Sherlock Holmes (his friend and colleague Dr Wilson is, of course, Dr Watson). House is a bold, misanthropic genius who eschews emotion and empathy in favour of scientific facts (if at all possible, he tries not to meet his patients).

Weird geniuses have been sprouting up all over US TV schedules ever since. There’s Bones, where cold, otherworldly, slightly Asperger’s genius, Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, works with the FBI. 

Fringe features Dr. Walter Bishop, an enthusiastic self-medicator who was incarcerated for years in a mental institution, and who, following his release, now works with a special FBI unit dealing with science-fictiony anomalies. A sort of Jack-of-all-trades scientist, he was so brilliant that he managed to punch a hole through to a parallel universe, and is now helping to clear up the resultant mess. 

Another regular FBI-helper is Dr. Cal Lightman, head of the The Lightman Group, which specialises in interpreting “microexpressions” to determine whether someone is telling the truth in Lie to Me. The lead character is played by Tim Roth as a sort of super-intelligent cockney geezer. (One assumes he hasn’t told the Fox Network what  “bollocks”, “wanker” and “tosser” actually mean.)

Then there’s the current top-rated US show, The Mentalist, in which Patrick Jane, a former Derren Brown-style entertainer, whose wife and son were killed by a serial killer (there’s a lot of it about), has forsaken stage and TV to work as a consultant solving crimes for the (non-existent) California Bureau of Investigation. Jane has no psychic powers (he doesn’t believe in them): it’s his extraordinary ability to read people and situations – and to trick them into revealing themselves with Stage Psychic trickery – that makes him so effective. 

All of these “smart” shows share certain other characteristics. For a start, they’re all basically comedies, and the writing is invariably funnier than 95% of all sit-coms. There’s plenty of sexual tension: the regular cast always includes at least one eminently fanciable woman (usually two) and at least one hunky guy. The plots have absolutely nothing to do with real life – this is pure, unadulterated escapism.  

The genius is always balanced by a gun-toting tough guy or (more frequently) gal. The attitudes are socially liberal (although “loose” behaviour is often punished), but judicially right-wing – as Captain Brass says approvingly to a whining paedophile in one episode of CSI, “Bad things happen to bad people.” (In a recent Gallup Poll, 48% of Americans described themselves as “Conservative”, compared to 20% calling themselves “Liberal”, so the producers are only giving the people what they want - unlike governments). There’s usually one Brass-like character to deliver deapan “zingers” which deflate comments of a liberal, over-emotional or pretentious nature – in The Mentalist, it’s the excellent Tim Kang, playing one of the CBI team. 

Possibly the oddest trait shared by all these series is one that I’ve had occasion to remark on previously: the genius figure is almost invariably played by a non-American – even when they’re playing American characters! Simon Baker in The Mentalist is an Aussie playing an American: so is John Noble, who plays the “Mad American Scientist” inFringe (even Anna Torv, the FBI agent, is from Oz). As we all know, House’s Hugh Laurie is an Eton-educated Englishman (Stephen Fry makes regular appearances as a psychiatrist-turned-chef in Bones, but plays an Englishman). Tim Roth didn’t, I suspect, attend Eton, and, like Fry, portrays an Englishman in Lie To Me.

I’m not sure what – if anything – all this means, but at least it guarantees a regular escape (for this viewer, at least) from UK talent shows, soaps TV and costume dramas.

To show you just how astute I am at gauging public taste, I have a brief synopsis for a book on my hard drive. It concerns a Derren Brown-style stage psychic who abandons his profession to help solve crime. I came up with it five years’ ago and one of the five possible titles I had for it was The Mentalist.

I abandoned it because I knew it was a lousy idea.