The thing I hate the most about cop shows now, even more than I do the fact that they all have to conclude with some mope rock dirge and everybody walking in slow motion, is how often they say "juvie." Talk about fingers on a blackboard... it sends me up the wall. Tonight on WITHOUT A TRACE ("... of humor," a friend of mine cracks), they must have said "juvie" a dozen times. I mean, I know it's shorthand for Juvenile Detention and it's probably what real cops really say, but it (like a lot of police jargon) just sounds awful and unpersuasive coming out of the mouths of these fresh-faced actors with their perfectly white and straight teeth and Biore skin. "Yeah, way to talk street, Julliard... I so believe your cred."

Okay, I'm done. Thanks for listening.

I don't like the way they throw around "perp." How much time would be wasted if they just said "perpetrator"?

Seriously. :D

Yeah, "perp" and "vic." I so believe they're cops.

I'll add my 2 cents in with my 3 most-hated cop cliches:
1.) Not just perp, juvie and vic, but any time they throw meaningless (to 99.5% of the viewership) numbers around. "Take him down to holding and book him as a 347-J." At least Dragnet used to explain what those numbers meant.
2.) The troubled relationship with the wife, who just can't understand what he's going through. It's not you, baby, it's this job. The Chief is riding my ass. Thank God I'm retiring in a week and just have to catch this one criminal mastermind before I do.
3. "We got video surveillance footage of the perp killing the vic from a camera on the roof of the warehouse." "What's that on his jacket? Can you zoom on that spot?" "No problem…it looks like a small metal button the size of a quarter." "Can you zoom in some more? Great. Now 'clean it up'" "Sure…it says Federal Steeworkers Union, Local 43." "That's our man. We got him."

I think just about every procedural trots this one out on a weekly basis, and it has gotten really old. It's the 21st century equivalent of the stoolie who used to pop up late in the third act to provide Banyon/Banacek/Baretta with the address of the heavy-of-the-week's hideout. Incredibly lazy writing and--surprisingly--less believable than Huggy Bear.

All these reasons are why the only cop show I watch is COPS. I can't recall a single instance of "juvie" being used there ("perp" does rear its head every now and then). Plus, the actors on COPS are much better. :)

Nobody in my experience ever used the word "juvie." The first time I heard that term was on NEWSRADIO, and I had spent most of my teen years in Juvenile Detention. (On the inside, we callsed it JayDee.)

Here's another problem I have with these shows...





Left to right, the fresh faces of criminal investigation: CRIMINAL MINDS, COLD CASE, WITHOUT A TRACE, CLOSE TO HOME.

They're all trying to be NYPD BLUE - but even that show became a parody of its own first season when all this stuff was relatively fresh...

And the only cops I've ever seen realistically portrayed (besides on COPS) was in THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW - I never once heard Barney use the terms juvie, perp, skell (isn't that one that's thrown around a lot?) - Barney's lingo was a lot more real:

"You and me and baby makes three."

Well, everybody uses pointless lingo, including sites like this, bit if one of those fresh faces pictured above showed up at my door with a badge I'd assume some funny friends had hired a stripper. I enjoy the 3 L&Os but even they are hiring more hotties in an effort to keep up. The Shield is still the best non HBO drama and the original CSI is fun if I think of it as a mystery and not a cop show. But writing and music aside, the older we get the more difficult it will be to watch kidlets in positions of authority. Many of us are Jim Rockford's age while these shows are cast with what look like the the people he was trying to help.

I’ve always disliked the increasingly clean-cut look of most TV actors in these shows. By way of comparison I’ll quote the premise of the Australian D-Generation revoiced (ala WHAT’S UP TIGER-LILY) 70’s local cop show BARGEARSE, featuring stalwart Oz talent Lucky Grills:

“The whole series, which was orignally a detective show called 'Bluey', revolved around a 'fat bastard called Bargearse’, who would either be drinking beer, eating or bending over for one of his legendary backdoor blasts. The first four shows, titled "Where's me bloody pizza?", "Where's me bloody donuts?", "Where's me bloody dim sims?" and "Where's me bloody chips?", included some scenes which had Bargearse eating a horse, ordering a s**tload of dim sims, chasing Christopher Skase for his pizza, p***ing his name on a door and using his trouser trumpet to provide extra power in pursuing his chips, although it wasn't until later in the series that Bargearse was told to drink his own urine sample, only to decline and offer the nurse a dutch oven. The other characters in the series were Ann Bourke (who caught Bargearse wearing a 'Barjee' shirt while playing the old Billy Ray Cyrus number 'Bargey Wargey Arse'), Detective Glen Twenty (who stayed in suite number 7 which was also known as 'The Headache Suite') and Natalie Thigh-Blaster (who had to hold back a hungry Bargearse).”

Full of brutal fashion crimes from the 70’s and a cast where even the good-looking leads look like local convicts off the boat, I’d be happy to see the spirit of Bargearse invade the current crop of manicured cop shows from all over. BARGEARSE scripters Tony Martin and Mick Molloy later made the local parodic cop feature BAD EGGS.

Post 1980, I enjoyed the British cop shows more than the American. PRIME SUSPECT, INSPECTOR MORSE, A TOUCH OF FROST, SILENT WITNESS, CRACKER, MIDSOMER MURDERS and DALZIEL & PASCOE were mature, sober, wryly humorous and filmic. A good deal of these series have ended their runs but they were great television enacted by seasoned players who never made me roll me eyes in disgoost.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon, however. As far back as, say, THE DETECTIVES, Robert Taylor was teamed up with a bunch of young guys (including Mark Goddard and Adam West). BURKE'S LAW had Gary Conway. NAKED CITY had Paul Burke. 87TH PRECINCT had Ron Harper. The concept of casting young hunks as second-banana policemen is a tried-and-true TV tradition. I imagine if message boards like these were around in 1975, we might be complaining about David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser. Granted, those two guys displayed personalities and the vast majority of today's hunky second bananas do not.

I'm sick of cop shows that:

1: Don't have car chases.

2: Don't have explosions.

3: Don't have William Shatner.

Sorry to go against the flow - OK, I'm not.

While I'm always grateful (particularly when I'm talking to American women) for the assumption that being British makes you inherently cultured, British cop shows are usually either laughably unlikely or grimly downbeat.

CRACKER is a poor man's Thomas Harris rip-off, with added heavy-handed political subtexts for the simple-minded. INSPECTOR MORSE is set in the most boring city in the world and yet he finds a new murder every week. (The opening credits are stylish but are nicked from PRINCE OF DARKNESS). Still, the scenery is nice and there's an orchestral soundtrack so it must be sophisticated - see also BERGERAC and MIDSOMER MURDERS. DALZIEL AND PASCOE is always watchable for the great Warren Clarke, and at least it isn't a personal vanity project liike MORSE or FROST.

Have you seen ROSEMARY AND THYME? Two nice middle-class ladies run a gardening business, and solve related murders. How about PIE IN THE SKY? A restaurant owner solves related murders. It makes you long for snappy editing, a deafening soundtrack and a spray of Luminol.

Amusingly, we've made the occasional attempt to recreate CSI on British soil. M.I.T.: MURDER INVESTIGATION TEAM anyone? The only one to remotely succeed is WAKING THE DEAD, but even that sacrificed credibility years ago.

I'm being deliberately harsh here, but trust me, these programmes aren't any more realistic than CSI. And while American shows might fill their supporting casts with ridiculously attractive mannequins, the lead actors are at least as good as those in the UK shows (excluding Caruso's increasingly self-parodic turn, which is at least funny).

As an aside, we've just got a new terrestrial station here in the UK, Five US, dedicated entirely to CSI and the like.

I have a theory: if Alfred Hitchcock were alive today and someone asked him what's wrong with American television and movies, he would respond with a heavy sigh:

"They've taken the fun out of murder".

As an aside, Waking the Dead's pilot episode actually aired several months before CSI, so, while I agree that in recent years it has become very CSI-like (right down to Trevor Eve growing a beard Petersen-style), it certainly didn't start out as a conscious attempt to imitate its US relation.

The only TV cop I like is Helen Mirren in PRIME SUSPECT, and we only get her once every two years or so. Her final series is due soon.

Okay, the gauntlet has been thrown - nay, flung - and cannot be ignored.

I've no particular disagreement with you on the subject of CRACKER, which I've never much cared for beyond the first series, but I really have to take issue with some of your rather misinformed views regarding these other UK 'tec dramas... To begin at the end, how on earth you can suggest with a straight face that MORSE and/or A TOUCH OF FROST are vanity projects while DALZIEL & PASCOE - a show which, lest we forget, began as a sharply-written [Alan Plater penned a few of the early ones, IIRC], wryly comic and hugely welcome addition to the long list of TV cop shows and slowly, depressingly and inevitably transformed itself into a childishly-plotted, absurdly overproduced and slavishly Americanised CSI clone under the aegis of star and executive producer Warren Clarke - is quite beyond my ability to comprehend. Did Dalziel's sudden makeover between series - new spiky haircut avec blond highlights, flashy suits to replace the shabby plod chic, even [I suspect, but cannot confirm] a spot of plastic surgery to the bulldog-like Clarke fizzog - somehow pass you by? Surely not the spastic, flailing camerwork guaranteed to induce motion sickness even in a NASA astronaut? The New And Improved D&P is an utter travesty of the original, a betrayal which I have to lay fairly and squarely at the door of Mr Clarke - who is, agreed, a wonderful performer and a great antidote to the insipid prettyboys who usually infest our screens, but has allowed the tyranny of cosmetic ephemera to dictate the show's present (mis)direction. IMHO, of course.

As for MORSE, your assertion that Oxford is more boring than, say, Slough or Denver or anywhere in the Loire Valley is clearly a personal prejudice and can only be greeted with an incredulous raise of an eyebrow, but to complain about the weekly format of the show seems a little...disingenuous, let's say. You may as well object that all the crimes on MORSE are committed on a Sunday evening at 9pm. Just because that's when the show is aired, doesn't necessarily imply a reciprocality in the timescale pursued within the show's own fictional universe. (I know you know that, but if pedantry is the order of the day, so be it...)

You've moaned about the high quality of the production, and about the classical music - why not also drag into the dirt the witty and allusive scripts, while you're about it? The exceptionally fine characterisations? Nuanced performances? Let nothing escape the machine-gun of your criticism! Kill 'em all!! (Or is it just that you find the pacing of MORSE too slow, and prefer the in-yer-face crudity of the new DALZIEL & PASCOE?)

And any criticism of the sublime MIDSOMER MURDERS - a show I originally dismissed, I admit, as bland picture-postcard fluff constructed for Anglophile US audiences - on the grounds of "classical sophistication" only reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the genocidal genius of that programme. Fusing the gleeful body-count and sexual deviancy of the best 70's Gialli with a deceptively twee Olde English setting, MIDMURD (as it has come to be abbreviated chez nous) is probably the most shamelessly enjoyable nonsense ever contrived for British television. The ludicrous improbability of each weekly murder spree is the show's badge of honour, stoking the furnaces with plenty of fuel for wickedly black comedy in the best British tradition. The newer episodes, replacing the gauche Sgt Troy with a succession of less memorable sidekicks for Det Inspector Barnaby to shake his head over, aren't a patch on the first few series but still offer tremendous opportunity for character actors like Thelma Barlow to perfect their Great British Eccentric turns.

Dialogue, too, is highly quotable. When Troy's replacement - a newcomer to the bloodsoaked turf of Midsomer - expresses surprise to his guv'nor at the unexpectedly high local death rate, Barnaby deadpans "It has been remarked upon..." But one of my faves was Troy's straight-faced quip, when faced with the most Heath Robinson-esque murder scene possibly of all time - Lord of the Manor staked out on his lawn with croquet hoops, then bombarded with the contents of his own wine cellar propelled from a medieval catapult: "Impulse crime, sir?" :lol:

My problem with the US cop shows is that they are all so glumly self-important. I can't imagine ever wanting to quote a tasty Shavian morsel from LAW AND ORDER or CSI:MIAMI, can you?

Still one of the best, I catch the reruns on the Sleuth Channel, along with some other great old shows!

Agreed that D&P has taken some very odd turns recently - I can't see Dalziel getting away with the haircut change in Yorkshire without any comments, then again I can't see Clarke getting away with a Lancashire accent in Leeds either - but at least it was believable in the beginning. Whereas INSPECTOR MORSE always struck me as Thaw trying to shake off Jack Regan by sounding as posh as possible. And FROST is merely a comic actor playing serious, and ITV having to cater to his whim.

And yes, Alan Plater did write some early episodes of D&P. I've got a friend who refuses to watch ANY of the episodes because they are too far from Reginald Hill's novels, but I don't take them that seriously. It's just fun to watch Clarke act despite all the unwelcome changes you mention. (I'm still trying to erase the memory of the Hale and Pace D&P series ..)

'Boring' was admittedly the wrong word. 'Placid' may have been better. Either way it strains credibility to have so many murders in such a genteel place. Oxford may well be a great place. I will say that Slough was very dull last time I was there. ;)

OK, you've convinced me to give this another look. I made the same initial assumption, and I will now look on it as a rural Argento and see if it works that way. Although I think THE BEIDERBECKE AFFAIR will take some beating for enjoyable nonsense.

I'm with you on the self-importance of the US cop shows, but there is the occasional one-liner in CSI. Usually followed by Petersen raising an eyebrow or Caruso putting his sunglasses on.
B)

Roger that. Shows like CSI and LAW & ORDER are clearly the work of Democrats (a party which gets my vote 9 times out of 10 but damned if I'll let you call me one), who think a conclusive rejoinder is the best response to bad behavior, as if it's ultimately best to be correct.

Inspector Morse was so much more than posh or a response to John Thaw's THE SWEENEY character. I can identify with a character who, in effect, throws his education into the dustbin to follow a career that engages him. That tension always made MORSE compelling television and worth all the bellyshirts in Hollywood copland.

"LEW-is!"

Do they show the skinny-Webb 50's b&w episodes or the fatty-Webb 60's color episodes? Only about 20% of the first series' roughly 250 episodes have ever turned up on any home video format.

If we can agree on the genius of Plater's BEIDERBECKE AFFAIR, all other points of divergence fall away. :P

Re: MIDMURD, however, I recommend that you begin with the early series featuring the unbeatable Troy/Barnaby duo. And checking the IMDB, I can confirm my earlier suspicions - Mr Plater also penned an episode of MIDSOMER, too! You may want to start with that one ("A Tale of Two Hamlets")...

So far, just the sixties. Hopefully some of the older shows will make it on as well.

I'd concur, but add that -- in my opinion -- the first series of episodes, which were based directly upon the novels of Caroline Graham (and in one case, directly adapted by her), are the oddly weak spot in the Barnaby/Troy run. Troy's character is far too stereotypically laddish and brash (examples: his homophobia is seemingly always worn on his sleeve and his attraction to Cully -- Barnaby's daughter -- is much more leering and off-putting), and as a result, almost completely unlikable. The Series 2 revamp of his character allows for more chemistry between him and Barnaby, and also makes the integration of the always-present "Barnaby home life" subplots with the overriding police procedural aspect a bit more seamless. For my money, the program's at its best in series 4-6. The previous series' eps aren't bad at all -- just that when the show hits its fourth series, it's really firing on all pistons, and it keeps up until the awkward replacement of Troy in S7.

I haven't kept abreast with MIDMURD... did something awful happen to Troy?

Yes. He was replaced by Sergeant Dan Scott.

But other than that, he's fine.

FYI: MIDSOMER MURDERS can be seen every Sunday in the US on the Biography Channel, sometimes three episodes in one day. They usually repeat the older episodes at 11:00am and 1:00pm [PT] and play a more recent episode at 6:00pm [and repeat it at 10:00pm.] IIRC, they are doing some sort of viewers' favorites marathon in the near future.

This coming Sunday's episodes, according to PTVB:

11:00am Death of a Stranger
1:00pm Blue Herrings
6:00pm Midsomer Rhapsody

If memory serves, the first two are Troys, the third is a Scott. There was a third sidekick following Scott who was smarter than the other two [and curiously, only a constable while his dumber brethren were sergeants]. By now, Barnaby may have moved on to a fourth sidekick. I believe new episodes are imminent in the UK.

Forgot to add: Troy was promoted and transferred. Scott was out with a cold when Jones [the constable] filled in for him and he was never mentioned again. Or I missed the one where they wrote him out.

No, Jones is still on board - at least for the moment. (Am I misremembering, or was Jones once a Sergeant who was then busted down to constable for some sort of insubordination?)

We've just had the new eps over here - they've been experimenting with the format somewhat, which is rarely a good idea. Still good fun, with Barnaby's hilarious domestic life (one of quiet desperation, with "resting"/failed actress daughter Cully hanging permanently round the place doing wishy-washy unpaid charity work and borderline harridan wife [the ghastly Jane Wymark from Nigel Kneale's "Baby" episode of BEASTS] unexpectedly revealing herself open to unusual bedroom antics) providing much excruciating entertainment value - but one episode in particular diverges so far from the Midsomer Massacre formula that I almost suspected it to have originated as a script for FROST, with characters rewritten. I mean, only a single murder - and that having taken place a year before the story opens? And the courtroom should never be seen in a MIDMURD - the prosaic reality of criminal investigation should be kept at an invisible distance in this sort of thing. Still, this seems to have been a singular aberration and we were back to Hamlet-level bodycount by the next week. What a relief. :)

Great. Now I'm gonna have nightmares for a week. Thanks, Steve.

I live to serve. :P

I don't find Jane Wymark ghastly. I mean, she's not Patrick Wymark.

I think I might find Patrick preferable, sad as it is to say. Just about every time she shows up, the wife 'n' I sit around saying things like "at least change that haircut, for crying out loud" (because, seriously, that bangs-and-harsh-lines/"Buster Brown" combo ain't doing anyone any favors) and gabbing about how she's slowly turning into Nicko McBrain (the drummer for Iron Maiden). But then, we tend toward the catty.

I've heard of DALZIEL & PASCOE, but have never quite managed to catch it over the years on T.V., but I did get to see A TOUCH OF FROST for the first time when CBC Channel 9 in Windsor started running it on Friday nights only at 11:30, and got hooked on it from the 1st episode I saw. I've always liked cop/detective shows, but I have to admit lately, I've been wondering how many more spinoffs can the LAW & ORDER/CSI franchises take before they both get run into the ground--I have to admit that I love LAW & ORDER:CRIMINAL INTENT, mainly because of the weird idiosycrasies of the main character, played by Phillip D"Onofrio. Why isn't he and his partner on the show any longer? Two other British shows titled AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN and INSPECTOR LYNLEY ( I really enjoyed the 2 episodes of the former that I managed to catch on PBS one Sunday and Saturday night).


I'm surprised that no one's mentioned the late' 80's hit, CAGNEY & LACEY,which was a fave of mine in high school. What I loved about the character of Lacey(played excellently by Sharon Gless) was that she didn't take a lot of BS, and she didn't feel that she had to apologize to anybody for who/what she was, plus I enjoyed watching her go off on people whenever she got pissed off. Plus it was just nice to see a show about female cops for once and I really liked it! :D

While it's not a cop show the British spy thriller SPOOKS - broadcast in North America as MI-5 by A & E - is one of the most exciting shows on television. A & E seems to have given it no love this season. They began airing Season 4 last month on Friday evenings, but after the first two episodes dropped the broadcasts in favor of marathon CSI:MIAMI repeats! This past Saturday they decided to bring back MI-5, airing the remaining eight episodes of the season back to back. If fans of the program didn't happen to catch that programming slate they are bound to be left scratching their heads as to what happened.

I don't know if the network plans to rebroadcast in a more consistent time slot but the show definitely deserves better handling than this

A&E has dropped all pretense of of supporting British drama. I worry about the future of SPOOKS/MI-5 because A&E is a co-producer. They co-produced the HORATIO HORNBLOWER series as well and when they pulled their funding, the series ended.

The only drama they show with any consistency on A&E these days are repeats of American cop shows, mainly the LAW & ORDER and CSI franchises. Beyond that, it's all reality tv and true crime shows like AMERICAN JUSTICE and COLD CASE FILES.

UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN was based on the first novel in P.D. James less well known series about a female private detective named Cordelia Gray. I'm not sure whether she ever wrote more than two Cordelia Gray novels, but I've read those two [the other one is THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN]. I was really disappointed in the tv series, mainly because of the lead actress, Helen Baxendale. She's got zero charisma. Cordelia Gray inhabits the same universe as James's other better known detective, Adam Dalgleish. I think he appeared briefly in UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN [the book anyway].

On the other hand, the tv adaptation of the Inspector Lynley series is a huge improvement on the books, IMO. I struggled through the first novel, A GREAT DELIVERANCE, and swore off the series after that.

He suffered a breakdown due to exhaustion and is only doing about half the shows now. This is the only Law and Order I watch anymore, and only when Vincent is on.

That's the first I've heard of A&E being a co-producer for Spooks. I wouldn't worry about its immediate future, in any event - a sixth season has already been confirmed.