kontextmaschine:

So sometimes you see people talk about the number of shows about police on TV as sign of some particularly pro-cop identification, either in the audience, or the capitalist system that brings the shows to air, or something

I want to point out one thing from a structural screenwriting perspective though, cops just have good story engines, it’s very easy to explain how the cast becomes aware of the week’s plot and why they engage with it. Someone reports a crime, because that happens, the police follow up, because that happens. Because Cops.

Like, consider, really consider, that stereotypical opening scene of Law & Order where people doing some authentic New Yawker working class shit discover a body.

For one, finding the body establishes the plot on its own. The show just doesn’t have to mechanically show how the cast comes in, or work up a motivation *why* they’re now going to meet a lot of colorful characters on the way to gradually revealing a story

For two, this setup works for EVERY episode only for the cops. A show that followed the random yobs who found the bodies could maybe work up A reason in ONE story why some loading dock guys investigate a murder on their own, but for a whole series you’d have to work up a new reason for every episode (or lean into the absurdity a la Murder, She Wrote), with cops you never run dry for motivation

Official hierarchies work well for series where similarly structured stories are told each week, because “you were assigned a duty” is a reasonable cause for a plot. And that doesn’t have to mean routine or authoritarian shit - the X-Files was framed around cases assigned by The Man; the original Star Trek premise was “they ordered us to have adventures for five years”

Really a lot of dumb premises work really well as story engines. Buffy’s premise was “there is a Hellmouth, bad guys show up, she fights them”, which is dumb as hell but set up a lot of good stuff. Meanwhile Firefly’s beloved in part for its coherent world concept, but if you’ve ever tried to pick it apart or spec write it you realize how hard it is to set up a plot-of-the-week, the original writing staff had to really grind to line their ducks up and even they couldn’t work up a motivation for Inara to join in half the time