Sometimes I find myself saying something like "I'm too old for this shit." And then it leads to a chain of inquiry about are the Lethal Weapon films copaganda? #acab
Like, where do you draw the line on copaganda? Are the Keystone Cops... copaganda? They were at the time. Andy Grifith is blatant #copaganda it just served a very different purpose from SVU. Back then the goal was to normalize the police state, its ok, the tv said, those guys are harmless.
@Montaagge honestly at this point I think anything that portrays cops as good or reformable is copaganda
I do still critically rewatch some things like Die Hard because it's so over-the-top ridiculous but things like Brooklyn 99 I struggled to get through the first time and rewatched only because my then partner wanted to see it.
Even The Wire is copaganda and that show broadly paints cops as being corrupt, unlikable, selfish shits until a 'good cop" becomes chief iirc
Hell, I'd call the X Files, a show I like and have rewatched a few times, copaganda because it depicts two federal agents as being relatively good people trying to expose the lies and harms of the government--- which admittedly tries half-heartedly to kill them a number of times-- while they also are confronting insular small town police on their Weird cases.
Really, any scene of any show that shows cops as anything but the absolute enemy is copaganda. It's more a question for me of to what extent it can be enjoyed critically, or if the audience even is critical of police. A lot of shows, perhaps even most, have copaganda threaded through them.
Bob's Burgers has copaganda, depicting local cops as broadly nice if bland and generally helpful to the mostly white middle class characters.
@Mordantivore i appreciate the idea of "to what extent can this be enjoyed critically" and I agree that Brooklyn 99 is impossible to enjoy critically but Die Hard on the other hand is pretty easy to enjoy critically. But following that logic, like, where is that line exactly. I was critically enjoying Con Air when I posted this, but I started it with Lethal Weapon because probably I would put that Mel Gibson movie on the far side of thatline. I still enjoy Blue Streak though, even like, SWAT, now the problem with SWAT is that I think Colin Ferrel is cute and it has Michelle Rodriguez in it and LL Cool J and the cast is incredible even though its extremely and explicitly propagandistic.
@Montaagge I think it comes down to "does this make me set aside critical thinking or otherwise encourage uncritical support of the police characters depicted through various mechanisms"
SWAT is a great example of that. It uses big, attractive stars to pull people in and disarm them while being heavily subsidized by LAPD (the show--and many cop shows-- would be impossible to film without the millions in free use of cops in uniform in overtime, police vehicles, locations, street filming coordination etc).
I watched the first season in the before times cause I do love guns & shemar moore is a handsome man and could barely get through it.
The pilot literally is about how a character takes over the SWAT team because a cop was fired (already almost impossible) for shooting an unarmed Black kid (extremely doubtful it's an accident given the real life context of how often Black children are murdered by police).
The latter half of the wiki pilot description: "Hondo must quickly establish his right to be leader, and their issues escalate when another shooting occurs at a protest to the previous shooting. Hondo learns that Buck saw potential in Street and vows to make the best of his inclusion as advised. The police gradually realise that the entire spat is not about simple racial issues, but a political one. Uncovering more clues of their previous suspects involvement in manipulating the police, Hondo and his team race to rescue Mumford and his team in an ambush and take out the remaining suspects."
"simple race issues" lol as if centuries of violent oppression by whites and the assimilation of people of color into subservient roles for whiteness and white supremacy were nbd. Meanwhile, the cops are more concerned with how shooting protesters protesting police shootings make them look and how the cops are the true victims.
Literally every episode is a copaganda theme but the only thing I found surprising was that some of the episodes did actually include white terrorists for a change, as nearly all acts of terrorism in the US are perpetrated by white Christian men but this is rarely even touched upon in cop shows.
Fast and the Furious is just literally Christofascist propaganda. So long as you have a car, are a white man, and believe in Jesus like a good patriarch, you can achieve anything.
There's no fixed line, everything has to be assessed within its context and on its own merits and according to your own principles.
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