When I was a kid I grew up watching the TV show cops on Fox. My brother and I would stay up late watching multiple episodes of the show cops and talk about how we’d stop people doing evil. It taught us to not do stupid things like sell drugs, cause trouble and stay on the mostly straight and narrow path. The show aired for 32 seasons and had one of the best theme songs of any reality shows on television. It was cancelled because it put police into positions of lawsuits simply for doing their jobs as tension between police and the public has increased in recent years.
Remember the song? Bad Boys, bad boys, what ya gonna do? What ya gonna do when they come for you? bad boys bad boys. Here’s the song to jog your memory if you don’t remember. It’s the song ‘bad boys’ from a reggae band called inner circle. Take a listen here:
The story was created by a man named John Langley. Born in Oklahoma City, Langley served in the intelligence unit of the U.S. Army in the early 1960s before graduating Cal State Dominguez Hills and attending U.C. Irvine for grad school.
Langley told the TV Academy in 2009, “I’m a kid of the 60’s. I’m sort of anti-authoritarian by nature. If you told me I was going to do a show about cops, I would have said, ‘What am I going to call it, Pigs?
In a 2010 interview with Forbes, Langley was asked what the most surprising thing making Cops has taught him about human behavior. “That more people are good than bad, and that criminal behavior is aberrant behavior—it isn’t the norm,” he said. “I think I give humanity far more credit, having witnessed it at its worst. Rather than make me a cynic, it’s made me realize what a small percentage of the population actually commits crimes.”
The TV Show Cops Pioneered Reality Television
Cops was really one of if not the first reality television shows on tv and it led to so much more. Langley likes to think of cops as a documentary tv series as opposed to a reality series. If it is seen as a reality series. He has his own opinions on that..
If I am the father—or godfather—of reality TV, I don’t want to take responsibility for all of the bastards that followed,” Langley told Forbes. “I think some shows in the reality genre are great and some frankly deplorable.”
Cops was a tv show that showed the American public what it is like to be a cop. The life of a cop is not easy. It’s a high-risk dangerous job that has the mission ‘to protect and serve’ and like all professions you have good apples and bad apples. Many cops die in the line of duty protecting people, protecting communities. The show was canceled because of growing tensions between the public and police thanks to the media painting all police in a negative light.
Unfortunately this representation of police was truthful and now moving forward future generations don’t get to see what it’s like to live the life of a cop. To take risks on the job, to risk your physical safety to keep the public safe.
The show was cancelled because people don’t want to see the truth of what life is like on the job, they’d rather listen to the media lie about an entire profession of people that for the most part show up and do their best to protect their communities every single day. The best thing we can do is respect the police each time we see them and tell them we appreciate them. Keep peace a priority and don’t let the media lie to you and put a whole group of people in a box. Unity comes through acceptance and leading with love, compassion and empathy. The opposite of what the tell-lie-vision promotes.