5 ms·

Ooh a cop show deconstruction where the protagonist has to confront the fact that 75% of his successes were incorrect would be great

mbg721 5y ago
I saw an anecdote where someone asked the actor who played Perry Mason, "Haven't you ever lost a case?" and his answer was "I don't try the hard ones on Saturday night."
duxup 5y ago
I don’t know if it is still on but I’m the US there was a show where they followed actual detectives. The bad guy gets away because they don’t have enough evidence. People confess when there is hardly any evidence (a lot). The detectives realize they were wrong. Lots of things happen. Detectives being wrong isn’t a very dramatic like you might think. Many operate like scientist, gathering data, testing their theory along the way and adjusting. One of the most interesting episodes was when they investigated a murder of a local girl in a park. Whole department assigned to work it because her ex and the main suspect was a guy who was a local criminal who had done time for murder before and was suspected in other cases. Lots of misc evidence pointed at bad guy, but not enough to prosecute him, just lots of elements that pointed to him. Bad guy was smart enough not to talk to the police when they brought him in. Near the end they got back some cell phone location info ... in the park that night wasn't the bad guy... but her current boyfriend (the local good college boy) phone was there. He claimed he was elsewhere / hadn't seen her that night... Good boy confessed when they confronted him. That episode was wild.
- watwut 5y ago
  > protagonist has to confront the fact that 75% of his successes were incorrect would be great I would assume that "successes" here are people in prison who turned out were innocent.
  - duxup 5y ago
    Tough to do a show on that considering the time span involved but it would be interesting if they ever covered an episode where that happened. Of course the show is not a broad coverage of the detectives process. The detectives featured almost always are the most senior detectives and of course they cover situations on camera where ... maybe somethings won't happen. The cases featured in the show they almost never actually end up prosecuting anyone without quite a bit of evidence. They're not really the kind of cases you hear about where someone is just prosecuted on hearsay and one bit of evidence and so on, that i'm sure is by design (for the tv show). Detectives show a lot of skepticism about what people too, that was interesting. They follow those leads but those featured seem highly flexible. I wonder how much of the bad prosecutions / situations are about the prosecutor rather than detectives.
    - watwut 5y ago
      I am not sure now which series you have in mind here. But in many shows, actual evidence is super flimsy, if you think about it. Obvious issue is that such analysis tend to kill the fun, so we don't do it. This is supposed to be entertainment. The prime example is Sherlock Holmes who points at murder based on bit of dust caught of hat or some such. Any show where capture is based on subtle clues or manipulative trics would likely lead to a lot of false convictions. Or the ones where detectives mistreat suspects until they admit guilt - false guilt of admission from mistreated prisoner is actually a thing (especially when they are also sleep deprived or mentally challenged).
    - notriddle 5y ago
      > Tough to do a show on that considering the time span involved but it would be interesting if they ever covered an episode where that happened. Plenty of cold case shows that start the episode 5 years after the original investigation, when new evidence comes in to clear the convict.
- acc_vector 5y ago
  You are probably thinking of the show First 48. I was thinking of this exact show when reading the comments here about how Columbo plots rely too heavily on the murderer trying to help out Columbo with his investigation in order to seem innocent. It may seem unrealistic or stupid of them to do so, but if you watch shows like First 48 which follow homicide detectives around and show these interrogations, it happens A TON. More than I expected to be sure. I don't think Columbo is unrealistic in that respect.
  - duxup 5y ago
    I think that was the show. VERY surprising how many people talk to the cops and give them all sorts of information that the cops then disprove, stories that make no sense, or even hand them info / leads that leas right back to them so on. I want to say maybe the folks in a Columbo episode wold be more likely to talk to a lawyer first / not talk but ... Martha Stewart talked herself into jail...
    - lazide 5y ago
      I had it happen to me directly - I get accused, have no idea what is going on, accuser get’s in court, makes more accusations that don’t make sense. We follow up to get enough details to try to figure out specifically what is being accused (date and times, for one) - and lo and behold, the evidence (911 call log) when provided + security video on my side (that they knew I had!!!) showed that not only was it completely impossible that it happened, but that the accuser was perjuring themselves and had committed the additional crime of filing a false police report. I had zero idea of the 911 call before this.
      - duxup 5y ago
        I did jury duty and despite all the complexity of the legal system .... the cases were pretty straightforward and I think we're all very lucky criminals are pretty dumb.
        lazide 5y ago
JKCalhoun 5y ago
I've entertained the idea of a series of farcical detective stories featuring a small-minded, bigoted detective who pursues wild, ungrounded-in-fact, grounded-in-stereotype leads only to stumble, by the books end and by a series of happy accidents, into actually solving the case.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  So Inspector Clouseau, Barney Fife, etc etc. As the quote from Charles Babbage goes: > On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Yes, sometimes that's exactly what happens.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    > So Inspector Clouseau, Barney Fife Stupid, I agree, but not nearly as politically incorrect as our "hero". The humor is more of the cringe-variety (if you like that sort of thing) when our detective makes the big reveal only to walk right into it. David Brent (The Office) is more like our detective.
- mbg721 5y ago
  I doubt that "Oh gee, it turns out the murderer was actually the black pedestrian in the suburban neighborhood this time" will get you published, though.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    But that wasn't the idea. (Come on!) Yours might be the starting point for the "case" for our bigoted detective, but these leads invariably run cold but inadvertently reveal a piece of information or suspect that had not yet come to light (solved — maybe even simply by the process of elimination for our sad detective).
- RAWDOGWARGOD 5y ago
simplicio 5y ago
From what I remember, "Elementary" follows the opposite formula from Colombo. The protagonists almost always spend the first half of an episode pursing a red herring.
ElevenLathe 5y ago
/Perry Mason/ always struck me as a rather subversive inversion of the usual police procedural for this reason. Since the protagonist is a defense lawyer, every episode that I know about is one where the cops and DA accuse a totally innocent person of a capital crime. They are then exposed and humiliated when Perry gets the real guilty party to confess in open court, usually under oath on the witness stand.
- mbg721 5y ago
  In my household, we have a running gag that sometime in the 60s, Tragg was forced into retirement for harrassing too many innocent people and embarrassing the department, and they decided "Let's hire this Columbo fellow, he'll blend in and not make waves.". The LAPD had some issues.
not2b 5y ago
"Law and Order" often had the police going after the wrong suspect or even arresting the wrong person and having them figure it out later, sometimes not until after the wrong person was put on trial.

mbg721 5y ago

I saw an anecdote where someone asked the actor who played Perry Mason, "Haven't you ever lost a case?" and his answer was "I don't try the hard ones on Saturday night."

duxup 5y ago

I don’t know if it is still on but I’m the US there was a show where they followed actual detectives. The bad guy gets away because they don’t have enough evidence. People confess when there is hardly any evidence (a lot). The detectives realize they were wrong. Lots of things happen. Detectives being wrong isn’t a very dramatic like you might think. Many operate like scientist, gathering data, testing their theory along the way and adjusting. One of the most interesting episodes was when they investigated a murder of a local girl in a park. Whole department assigned to work it because her ex and the main suspect was a guy who was a local criminal who had done time for murder before and was suspected in other cases. Lots of misc evidence pointed at bad guy, but not enough to prosecute him, just lots of elements that pointed to him. Bad guy was smart enough not to talk to the police when they brought him in. Near the end they got back some cell phone location info ... in the park that night wasn't the bad guy... but her current boyfriend (the local good college boy) phone was there. He claimed he was elsewhere / hadn't seen her that night... Good boy confessed when they confronted him. That episode was wild.

watwut 5y ago
> protagonist has to confront the fact that 75% of his successes were incorrect would be great I would assume that "successes" here are people in prison who turned out were innocent.
- duxup 5y ago
  Tough to do a show on that considering the time span involved but it would be interesting if they ever covered an episode where that happened. Of course the show is not a broad coverage of the detectives process. The detectives featured almost always are the most senior detectives and of course they cover situations on camera where ... maybe somethings won't happen. The cases featured in the show they almost never actually end up prosecuting anyone without quite a bit of evidence. They're not really the kind of cases you hear about where someone is just prosecuted on hearsay and one bit of evidence and so on, that i'm sure is by design (for the tv show). Detectives show a lot of skepticism about what people too, that was interesting. They follow those leads but those featured seem highly flexible. I wonder how much of the bad prosecutions / situations are about the prosecutor rather than detectives.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I am not sure now which series you have in mind here. But in many shows, actual evidence is super flimsy, if you think about it. Obvious issue is that such analysis tend to kill the fun, so we don't do it. This is supposed to be entertainment. The prime example is Sherlock Holmes who points at murder based on bit of dust caught of hat or some such. Any show where capture is based on subtle clues or manipulative trics would likely lead to a lot of false convictions. Or the ones where detectives mistreat suspects until they admit guilt - false guilt of admission from mistreated prisoner is actually a thing (especially when they are also sleep deprived or mentally challenged).
  - notriddle 5y ago
    > Tough to do a show on that considering the time span involved but it would be interesting if they ever covered an episode where that happened. Plenty of cold case shows that start the episode 5 years after the original investigation, when new evidence comes in to clear the convict.
acc_vector 5y ago
You are probably thinking of the show First 48. I was thinking of this exact show when reading the comments here about how Columbo plots rely too heavily on the murderer trying to help out Columbo with his investigation in order to seem innocent. It may seem unrealistic or stupid of them to do so, but if you watch shows like First 48 which follow homicide detectives around and show these interrogations, it happens A TON. More than I expected to be sure. I don't think Columbo is unrealistic in that respect.
- duxup 5y ago
  I think that was the show. VERY surprising how many people talk to the cops and give them all sorts of information that the cops then disprove, stories that make no sense, or even hand them info / leads that leas right back to them so on. I want to say maybe the folks in a Columbo episode wold be more likely to talk to a lawyer first / not talk but ... Martha Stewart talked herself into jail...
  - lazide 5y ago
    I had it happen to me directly - I get accused, have no idea what is going on, accuser get’s in court, makes more accusations that don’t make sense. We follow up to get enough details to try to figure out specifically what is being accused (date and times, for one) - and lo and behold, the evidence (911 call log) when provided + security video on my side (that they knew I had!!!) showed that not only was it completely impossible that it happened, but that the accuser was perjuring themselves and had committed the additional crime of filing a false police report. I had zero idea of the 911 call before this.
    - duxup 5y ago
      I did jury duty and despite all the complexity of the legal system .... the cases were pretty straightforward and I think we're all very lucky criminals are pretty dumb.
      - lazide 5y ago

JKCalhoun 5y ago

I've entertained the idea of a series of farcical detective stories featuring a small-minded, bigoted detective who pursues wild, ungrounded-in-fact, grounded-in-stereotype leads only to stumble, by the books end and by a series of happy accidents, into actually solving the case.

apocalypstyx 5y ago
So Inspector Clouseau, Barney Fife, etc etc. As the quote from Charles Babbage goes: > On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Yes, sometimes that's exactly what happens.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  > So Inspector Clouseau, Barney Fife Stupid, I agree, but not nearly as politically incorrect as our "hero". The humor is more of the cringe-variety (if you like that sort of thing) when our detective makes the big reveal only to walk right into it. David Brent (The Office) is more like our detective.
mbg721 5y ago
I doubt that "Oh gee, it turns out the murderer was actually the black pedestrian in the suburban neighborhood this time" will get you published, though.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  But that wasn't the idea. (Come on!) Yours might be the starting point for the "case" for our bigoted detective, but these leads invariably run cold but inadvertently reveal a piece of information or suspect that had not yet come to light (solved — maybe even simply by the process of elimination for our sad detective).
RAWDOGWARGOD 5y ago

simplicio 5y ago

From what I remember, "Elementary" follows the opposite formula from Colombo. The protagonists almost always spend the first half of an episode pursing a red herring.

ElevenLathe 5y ago

/Perry Mason/ always struck me as a rather subversive inversion of the usual police procedural for this reason. Since the protagonist is a defense lawyer, every episode that I know about is one where the cops and DA accuse a totally innocent person of a capital crime. They are then exposed and humiliated when Perry gets the real guilty party to confess in open court, usually under oath on the witness stand.

mbg721 5y ago
In my household, we have a running gag that sometime in the 60s, Tragg was forced into retirement for harrassing too many innocent people and embarrassing the department, and they decided "Let's hire this Columbo fellow, he'll blend in and not make waves.". The LAPD had some issues.

not2b 5y ago

"Law and Order" often had the police going after the wrong suspect or even arresting the wrong person and having them figure it out later, sometimes not until after the wrong person was put on trial.