Invasion of the Cop Shows: Looking Back at the 2010 Procedural Wave
The 2010–11 network season brought a crowd of new police dramas, and with hindsight it is easy to see why most of them dissolved into one long squad-room scene.
Every few years American broadcast television rediscovers the cop show as if it had just been invented. The autumn of 2010 was one of those moments. CBS launched a reboot of Hawaii Five-0 and the family police drama Blue Bloods. NBC tried the fugitive-hunting Chase and a West Coast branch of its signature franchise, Law & Order: Los Angeles. ABC sent a documentary-styled homicide unit into Detroit 1-8-7, and midseason Fox added The Chicago Code. Cable was busy too, with TNT’s Rizzoli & Isles arriving that summer.
The business logic was sound. A case-of-the-week drama can be watched in any order, reruns well, sells abroad and never asks a casual viewer to remember last month’s episode. The creative logic was thinner, and it showed.
Why they all looked alike
Put an episode of almost any of these shows next to another and the skeleton is the same: a body in the cold open, banter at the crime scene, a parade of suspects, a false lead before the last commercial break, a confession, a closing quip. The characters came from the same kit as well:
- the instinct-driven detective paired with a by-the-book partner;
- the superior who shouts in the first act and quietly approves in the last;
- the technician who finds the decisive clue on a screen in seconds;
- a personal wound, mentioned in the pilot, revisited during sweeps.
None of these elements is bad on its own. The problem was density. When five networks pitch the same structure in the same season, the viewer stops seeing the show and starts seeing the formula. Even the shows that tried to make their city a character, as Detroit 1-8-7 and The Chicago Code clearly did, struggled to stand apart once the weekly case took over.
What the survivors had
The sorting happened quickly. Chase, Law & Order: Los Angeles, Detroit 1-8-7 and The Chicago Code each ended after a single season. Blue Bloods, on the other hand, ran for more than a decade, and Hawaii Five-0 for ten seasons.
It would be flattering to say the long-runners were simply better police dramas, but that is not quite it. What they had was a hook beyond the case. Blue Bloods built its identity around a family of officers and the arguments at its Sunday dinner table; the crime was almost the excuse. Hawaii Five-0 had a familiar name, bright scenery and the energy of an action show. Audiences could describe either series in a sentence without mentioning a single murder.
That is the real lesson of the 2010 wave. The procedural engine is durable, but it is not a personality. The cop shows people remember from that era are the ones that gave viewers a reason to come back other than finding out who did it. For a police drama that took the opposite route and chose grit over formula, see our pieces on Southland, a series that spent the same years fighting for a home.
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