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The Wire showed a lot of police brutality, but police misconduct is usually portrayed in one-off episodes in other shows


https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/critics-conversation-has-tv-been-afraid-tackle-police-brutality-just-unable-do-it-well-1297134

"In the first season of The Wire, just about every on-the-ground cop participates in police brutality — often as a kind of professional prerogative," says Inkoo Kang. But as Daniel Fienberg points out, "what's more disturbing to me about how police violence is depicted on The Wire is how often it's treated as a piece of the character arc for the officers involved and not anything related to the victims, the community or the profession." Fienberg adds that "all too frequently police brutality is a thing TV deals with best (and by 'best' I mean 'most comfortably') in one-off episodic storylines. Those episodes let our main characters confront brutality and protest in ways that allow them to appear noble, dedicated and able to move along to something completely different the following week. The Good Wife (and The Good Fight) are as good as it gets when it comes to topicality, but in a season six episode written by creators Robert King and Michelle King, a threat of a police-violence protest mostly becomes something for our heroes — Alicia (Julianna Margulies), Peter (Chris Noth) and Eli (Alan Cumming) — to white knight in a tertiary story. Scandal did much better with its Ferguson-adjacent one-off 'The Lawn Chair,' but even in that context, with a black female protagonist leading the way, police violence becomes just another thing for Olivia Pope to fix — like if one Olivia could get sent to every city in America, our curfew problem would be over and Olivia could move on to a novel coronavirus vaccine next."

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