Hacker Cinema
NYPD Blue
1993 · TV series · 60 min episodes · 12 seasons
Created by David Milch, Steven Bochco
Police drama set in New York City, exploring the internal and external struggles of the fictional 15th precinct of Manhattan. Each episode typically intertwined several plots involving an ensemble cast.
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7 comments on Hacker News
It's definitely. Notice how after the 1994 Crime Bill was put into effect you had a large wave of shows and movies that increasingly depicted police as tools of the state rather than as protectors of the public. The fact that police-centered media exploded in ever larger shockwaves after that, the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Park Bombing, 9/11, and the deaths of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd was no coincidence. Law & Order, NYPD Blue, NCIS, Chicago PD, and Blue Bloods each correspond to each of those periods. The shows and movies are designed to make the abusive and destructive actions of the police look gallant. The police themselves actually advocate on many of them in order to sensationalize depictions or manipulate points of view so that they can then take them and use them as emotional appeals when the public criticizes policing.
The name "Law & Order" is a blatant example of this, as it's a phrase used by Richard Nixon during his campaign in 1968, and was widely repeated when he created justifications for starting the War On Drugs in 1970. This same phrase was later used by Reagan and H.W. Bush when they planted their positions of wanting to wield state violence against countercultures that arose. The '90s was full of change as Gen-X started to become adults and formed their own powerful countercultures, and the title of the show was an emotional appeal to conservative older people who hated that change and wanted the state to shape society instead of the other way around.
There was a TV show I watched 30 years ago already, NYPD Blue. When a criminal clearly abused children, Detective Andy Sipowicz, "a drunken, angry, racist goon with a heart of gold", would smack the perp around a bit, while his partners looked the other way. Somebody committed suicide because of this hack and extortion. That is a tragedy. How the tens of thousands of persons who were attempted to be extorted felt, how can you even measure that? Don't you think that there is a bit of grey area in a case like this?
>> It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia which actively lampshades all of the themes being censored now has so many episodes missing from streaming services it’s almost one per season. And they’re some of the best episodes!
I thought this was untrue so I checked. On UK Netflix there are at least 5 missing episodes and there's no indication they're missing. They're unavailable to purchase on iTunes too (although unlike Netflix, it numbers the episodes correctly so it's clear there are missing episodes). Appalling. I didn't think I would ever return to physical media for video content but...this is making me seriously consider it.
Edit: As an example of why this stuff shouldn't be censored, I'll explain my recent experience with NYPD Blue. The full thing (uncensored, I think) is available on Disney+. In the first few seasons, I was horrified at the racism. But, it served as an illustration of something that was shown on primetime TV in a specific time period. Personally I wouldn't have thought this type of content would have been broadcast in the early 90's and it was a good reminder of how far we've come. It's the same when watching old British comedies. There are lots of jokes that serve as a good reminder that things have changed for the better, even if it doesn't always feel like that. We shouldn't be erasing history.
You can actually pinpoint the moment in 1994 when the derivative changed. David Schwimmer goes from side character in season 1 of NYPD Blue who ends up dead trying to save an old lady from a mugger to...Ross.
CSI: $LOCALE, NYPD Blue, Brooklin 99, Law & Order, Homicide: Life in the Streets, COPS, etc are basically "copaganda". This shit goes all the way back to Dragnet and FBI-glorifying movies like The Untouchables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda
> Copaganda, a portmanteau of cop and propaganda, is a phenomenon described by critics of law enforcement in which news media and other social institutions promote celebratory portrayals of police officers with the intent of swaying public opinion for the benefit of police departments and law enforcement...
Movies like Top Gun: Maverick that are made with the cooperation of the DOD should be called what they are: propaganda. When Hollywood makes movies that glorify the military, they are part of the military-industrial complex. When they make movies critical of the military, they are part of capitalism commodifying resistance and selling it to people.
WW was still quite formulaic. ER, NYPD Blue, etc were all shows that maybe pushed for more consistent storylines but they were still boxed in by old school network expectations, and they got their starts in the mid-90s.
Sopranos was a very clear break in writing style. People like to slot in The Wire next to it, but The Wire was more episodic/restricted and honestly felt like an R-rated network tv show to me.
An example of how rampant "political correctness" in media has become: closed-captioning sanitation.
For example, any word in which any segment of characters could be interpreted as a slur in any context has that segment obliterated by X's. Take an example from the film "True Grit" where Cogburn refers to a "coon (racoon) hunt", it gets converted to "XXXX hunt". Or when "suspicion" is spoken in NYPD Blue, it becomes "suXXXXion". "Nippy" (cold) becomes "XXXpy". Even the obviously benign "Cocktail" becomes "XXXXtail".
Such substitution seems to occur across the board: MeTV, Movies!, H&I, Decades, Cozi. I suspect they all subscribe to transcription services following similar rules.
That said, given that "coon" in isolation has an ugly history as a slur (I personally had never heard it in that vein before its use as such in the film "M.A.S.H."), it's best avoided.