The Daily Show has been temporarily transformed into The Yesterdaily Show. The Tonight Show is The Last Month Show. But while America's TV writers sometimes find it necessary to step away from their keyboards for a few weeks in their attempts to wrestle better deals from their tight-fisted bosses, America's criminals never go on strike. COPS, rest assured, will be airing a new episode on Saturday night.
Officially, Fox is declaring it the 700th one since the series began. (Unofficially, the world's greatest COPS fan says there's actually 722.) Either way, it would now require more than two solid weeks of round-the-clock viewing to watch every episode, but imagine how much you would learn about America and human nature if you did that!
Or maybe just tune in on Saturday night -- have the nation's shirtless crackheads really changed much over the last two decades? Despite remarkable advances in running-shoe technology, the skinny, coke-fueled outlaws still get caught by tubby officers almost every time as they sprint the alleys and abandoned lots of America's most sluggish real estate markets.
But while the long arm (and beefy midsection) of the law prevails more often than not on COPS, the show never reduces to a simple battle of good versus evil. Often, the efforts of individual police officers are depicted in ways that aren't particularly heroic; similarly, the villains typically seem more like victims than criminals -- bedraggled, befuddled, and generally assaulted by life.
Meanwhile, however valiant the efforts of the men and women of law enforcement, the crime just keeps on coming. As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, a wife will bite off her no-good husband's ear. As sure as the tide will wash away, a wheelchair-bound shoplifter will punch a female convenience store clerk in the face. And always, forever and forever, crackheads loaded down with enough rocks in their pockets to pave the streets of London will insist they have no idea how that stuff got into their pants.
In the show's saddest scenes -- when drunken dads and wailing moms are shoehorned into the back of police cars as their half-clad offspring watch from the porch -- you can see the seeds of the next generation of car thiefs, pickpockets, and prostitutes taking root. At this point, no doubt, there are COPS legacy perps, men and women who first appeared on the show as those doomed three-year-olds in 1989, now getting shoehorned into police cars of their own.
And yet where might we be without Cops and the army of knock-offs it has inspired? Pop culture's custodians insist that violent media leads to real-world violence, but if that's true, shouldn't it work in reverse too? For every 50 Cent CD, there's a dozen episodes of Beach Patrol. For every Grand Theft Auto II, there's a Real Stories of the Highway Patrol ... not to mention a Lockup, an Inside American Jail, an Arrest & Trial. Things are bad, sure, but thanks to that familiar reggae beat of the COPS theme song and the sobering cautionary tales that follow, America has yet to slip into complete lawlessness. Tune in Saturday night and give thanks.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]