Cops

Cops is porn.

The setup never matters. Cops: Lappland and Cops: Great Barrier Reef, when FOX inevitably gets to them, will be indistinguishable from any of the other regional versions of Cops. Sometimes we’re doing bleak footwork in Montana, sometimes in Los Angeles, sometimes in Mississippi. The point is, there are suspicious people everywhere and they’re always criminals, and it’s the job of cops to knock them down and ask them the same question three or four times until guilt is proven. Like porn, the setup never matters and the pay-off is always the same: in this case, the whole ritual of foot chase, wrestling on cement, then handcuffs and patronizing questions.

Actually, there’s a reason the cops always act so damn patronizing: like you’ll find with a lot of fetish material, Cops thrills in the frisson between abjection and moral totalism. In this context, asking the handcuffed perp “Is these your drugs? Is these your drugs?” again and again, even after he answers, is a nice thing to do. In the Old Testament version of this show, they just shoot the guy, shit on the corpse and find something to fuck. The implication that the cops ought to curbstomp these people, but leave aside overt cruelty out of the decency of a moral society, is part of what makes Cops such a warm and humane show to its audience.

I say “overt” because there’s plenty of covert cruelty in Cops. In particular, once it’s proven (not in court, of course) that the perp is guilty, defending oneself is only an invitation to be mocked, and any struggle or attempt to escape is pure gravy for the violent retribution it invites. Occasionally, the cops talk to the viewer or make jokes with the perp, terrible jokes that say “I chose the correct path in life and kicking you in the ribs on TV is when I find that most rewarding.”

From our couches, we can agree. After all, we’re a moral society and we have needs. If there must always be those that can’t live the accepted way, at the very least they can do something to pay us back for the horror of having to look at them.

Episodism

Most amnesiacs suffer from impairment to the “episodic” or context-bound memory, the power to recall distinct events. It’s possible, after a lot of lopsided walking, to gather that you have only one shoe – but if there is no memory of losing the other at the K-Mart in Birmingham, the semantic knowledge alone isn’t enough, and floats context-less and unexplained except retroactively.

Fortunately, you can lose all capacity for context and still understand most sitcoms. A sitcom by its very nature must present the appearance of action and activity, but without any of its consequence in the real world: change.

Most of us can accept the convention of episodism without needing to be fully aware when it’s being used. Many sitcoms end their episodes with twists that could well wreck a person’s life if events followed at all. An episode of Seinfeld could plausibly end with Kramer being eaten alive by Giuliani; ultimately, we know it can’t kill him, because the idiot next door is part of the show’s format. Between episodes, the narrative universe is reset so that next time, we can start again from the Situation, not from where we last left off.

There are strong fictional arguments in favor of episodism. Real people are enigmas; they attend-to and turn-away-from possible identities constantly, they perform socially contingent roles, they compartmentalize. Self-revelation is itself as likely as not to be performance. The “true” reveal is often a one-off followed by shame and concealment, and deliberate muddying of intentions. A comedy about real people would be an artistic headache and well beyond the ambitions of most producers.

Nor should we necessarily assume that a comedy about real people would be more desirable than comedies about the denatured, the platonic, and the absurd. It’s possible that comic characters must be unrealistic for comic sympathy plays to work. It’s also possible that this style represents a compromise between the needs of millions of viewers who aren’t necessarily much alike.

The explanation I favor concerns time and memory. King of the Hill consists almost entirely of flat, two-dimensional characters with single tics. If you walked in on this milieu, it would seem populated with monomaniacs. But far from being disorienting, King of the Hill feels unusually naturalistic. Here, episodism’s true operation is revealed as multiple-exposure storytelling: because certain plot consequences are nullified between episodes, we are tricked into the assumption that these events occur quasi-simultaneously, or subjunctively, to one another. We see Peggy Hill from a metaphysically privileged vantage, and are witness to more “reveals” than any real observer would be. For this reason, the characters in King of the Hill appear to possess something like the nuance and self-difference of real people.

Actually, it may just be the coffee roiling around in my stomach, but something about this strikes me as revelatory of the way we store up “semantic” impressions of one another, reconciling the contradictions of real behavior into comfortably self-similar identities that fulfill only nebulously-related social functions. Perhaps episodism isn’t so much an anodyzing force as an unintended mirror to the inadequacies in memory that make the notion of “character” itself so seductive.