“Bad boys, awful boys / Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do / When they come for you?” If that tune is immediately recognizable in your head, you’re some distance from me. Since Cops hit broadcast television 30 years ago this month, the television show has become an unusual bit of Americana that has lingered on the airwaves. The 1/2-hour program, which first aired on Fox and now lives on the Paramount Network,
is a component-truth television and element-documentary, providing visitors with a verité-style check out the doldrums of ordinary policing. (Supposedly, as a minimum, to the quantity that this kind of mainstream software can.) The show’s thousand-episode-long toughness is a testament to its role as a pop-way-of-life phenomenon. It has stimulated endless references, parodies, or even a bizarre, memorable crossover with The X-Files. And like any pop-culture phenomenon, its standing is worth close examination.
Headlong, the anthology documentary podcast series with the aid of Dan Taberski, returns the subsequent month with a third season that has Cops squarely in its points of interest. Titled Running From Cops, the season endeavors to dig deep into the display’s lengthy, quiet effect on the American lifestyle — how it touches cutting-edge politics, criminal justice, and public belief of law enforcement. It’s a dense nexus of crucial topics that sense all the more touchy in recent times because the extra complicated and troubling aspects of American policing have become clearer in public view. From the sound of it,
Running From Cops will probably be a heftier situation outnumber for Taberski, who recently accompanied up the quirky and arguable Missing Richard Simmons with the gorgeously private Surviving Y2K overdue closing year. (The documentarian labored on this state-of-the-art season simultaneously with Surviving Y2K, explaining the short turnaround on the new installment.) How he brings his combo of the heavy, the non-public, and the complicated to something as loaded as policing might be the factor to watch.
