If They Don't Solve A Murder, I Don't Want to Watch It
An essay about crime shows with something to say.
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Okay, let’s start here. For a person who is skeptical of the overall project of the police, and is outright opposed to how much funding they get, I watch a lot of crime shows. In fact, my running joke is that if they don’t solve a murder I’m not interested in watching it. And it’s honestly less of a joke than either I or the people who recommend tv shows to me would like. But I can’t help it - I like that there’s a problem at the beginning of the episode that gets solved by the end of the episode. I like that most of the social interactions come with rules. And I like that it has nothing to do with my everyday life. Being a person in the world is hard enough, I don’t need to watch it be hard on tv too.
I also, let’s be honest, like that there are clear cut good guys and bad guys in crime shows. This is part of the fantasy - in reality around half of all murders go unsolved, police are responsible for shooting and killing almost 1100 people a year, and Black people at a disproportionately high rate. Racism, sexism, violence and poverty exist in my crime shows, and are even connected to the crimes being committed, but only every so often and they are often presented as solvable issues that those with power and authority are interested in and capable of addressing, but are extremely unlikely to perpetrate. These shows reflect the society that made them, but like a lot of television, including reality TV and sitcoms and mainstream dramas, seem primarily concerned with telling interesting stories that keep you tuning in week after week.
Enter Dick Wolfe.1
I grew up watching the original Law & Order (of which he is the executive producer). Whether the plot lines were ripped directly from the headlines or were just addressing prevalent conversations in media and politics, relevance to contemporary social issues was a significant driver of the show’s appeal. My poor mother spent a lot of time held hostage to arguing politics with a fourteen year old at 10pm because of this very dynamic. So when I started watching F.B.I., which is part of the contemporary Dick Wolf oeuvre, I was not surprised to find episodes that lined up with conversations I was having both in organizer/activist circles and even just in day-to-day life - conversations around right wing extremism, racism and the police, gun control, and even cryptocurrency.
But something felt different this time around. A lot of this is because I was a kid when I watched Law & Order. Everything seems simpler when you were a kid. I am stealing this from Jane Coaston, who is a veteran of Vox and the New York Times and now hosts a daily news podcast with Crooked Media, but a not insignificant part of longing for a past version of politics can be attributed to nostalgia for childhood, when there are lots of cultural and social apparatuses dedicated to making sure you’re having a good time. I don’t want to dismiss that. I am sure that there are many people who watched Law & Order in the early 2000s and had many, many problems with it. But I do also think there’s something else going on here, something that makes F.B.I. different from the crime shows of my youth.
Today Americans across the political spectrum are living in two different realities. A study by the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas found that people are more likely to believe a claim is true if it is supported by their political party. Conspiracy theories around COVID-19, QAnon, and who won the 2020 election run rampant online. Algorithmic social media and online platforms mean that while it looks like we’re all visiting the same platform, the information that we’re getting is very different and designed to tip us deeper and deeper into the most extreme version of our beliefs. We go online and it looks like the whole world is talking to us, but it is actually just a very small portion of the world, a portion specifically chosen to antagonize you enough to keep you on arguing on the platform, or even just quote-tweeting “YEAH THIS” over and over and over again. As long as you’re scrolling past ads, they don’t really care how true the things you’re posting are or how likely they are to make you commit violence.
But these two realities are not symmetrical. Political violence is on the rise, yes. But as the Journal of Democracy notes, “What is occurring today does not resemble this recent past. Although incidents from the left are on the rise, political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts.” There are certainly conspiracy theories on the left, including a particularly noteworthy one about Kamala Harris actually winning the 2024 election. But largely speaking, there is a leftwing commitment to science and reason that belies any assertion of so-called “both sides” extremism. There are mass movements on the left, and even protest movements that elicit violence, but if you look at the uprisings around police violence and racism in 2020, or the pro-Palestine movement on college campuses last summer, what you see is primarily property damage. There are people in all movements who use extremist language or call for violence, but only on one side does that violence pan out.
And this is where Dick Wolf runs into a problem. F.B.I is one of the most watched shows on television these days. In the 2023/2024 season it was the seventh most watched show on traditional television, and the fourth most watched show if you don’t count football. And while the numbers aren’t as huge as the shows of the past (the finale of Cheers had ten times the viewership of the most recent season of F.B.I.) It's still culturally significant mainstream programming. CBS, the network where F.B.I airs had 30% more viewership minutes than Netflix in that same season.
So, the problem is that Dick Wolf is trying to do something. F.B.I. desperately wants to be politically and culturally relevant. They want to address the modern issues of the day. But they also have viewers across the political spectrum. There’s no such thing as a monoculture anymore, no one is watching the same things on T.V. But network and cable television creators really want you to. They want you to uncut your cord, they want you to come back, they want you to all get together and watch the same shows. They want to merge these realities, because when these realities were merged, viewership was higher, people trusted each other more, advertising worked better.
This means that F.B.I does have right-wing extremist plotlines, where white supremacists are making bombs and incels are attacking women. But they also have gun control activists engaging in false flag operations by bombing their own offices to generate sympathy, and immigrants whose parents were deported and murdered in the country they were returned to, who then go on their own killing spree attacking ICE agents and immigration court judges. One of these things happens in real life. And one of these things does not. But F.B.I. equates them, puts them one after the other week to week, and posits them both as a reflection of our reality. And this gives viewers license to dismiss both sides of the equation, to tune out because both sides are equally bad, both sides are equally violent. You should be as scared of gun control activists and immigrants as you should be of white supremecists and right-wing anti-government conspiracists.
F.B.I doesn’t want to be a fantasy. It wants to be part of the conversation - if it didn’t, it would do what most crime shows do most of the time, and ignore the broader conversations happening in politics. All crime shows have implausible terrorist plots and unhinged and overly complicated murders and deeply disturbing crimes against humanity. But I can’t help ranting at everyone I talk to these days about F.B.I because I can tell it’s trying to say something about extremism and violence, and about the way we handle crime in this country - something profound, something unifying, something nuanced. But much like the rest of the mainstream media these days it’s mistaking balance for truth.
I’ll be honest in that I think the world might be a better place if none of these crime shows got made. All of them suggest that you should be afraid all of the time, that you can always trust the police, that honor and justice are the only driving forces in our criminal-legal system. After the uprisings in the summer of 2020, all of them thought they had to address racism in the police system, and all of them did a terrible job because at the end of the day they aren’t able to walk away from the central premise that the best, and often only, way to help people is to lock some other people up. And whether or not you believe in the overall project of policing, I think we can all agree that this is definitely not the only way to improve society.
Here’s the other problem, though - I’m still going to watch them. I don’t really have a good reason, except that sometimes you want stuff that’s bad for you. Sorry to all of you who interact with me on a regular basis, the F.B.I rants will continue until morale improves - and to the rest of you, imagine if you had to deal with this every day instead of just every once in a while! I hope you enjoyed the “and other stories” portion of this newsletter. See you next week!
Actions to Take This Week
Repeating last week’s except to be more specific: Call your Senators and tell them not to confirm RFK Jr. for Health and Human Services. He is currently working with a lawyer who wants to pause the POLIO VACCINE to vet staff. I know if you are represented by a Republican it feels useless, but a) we have beaten nominees and saved legislation before; b) we never know if we don’t try; and c) even if it doesn’t work we will have annoyed some really annoying people.
After you call, ask some friends and family to do so too. Post it on your Instagram, send it in the family group chat, forward this newsletter to some folks. If you need a script, let me know in the comments and I will help you out! And if you’re not sure how to call, here’s a guide, feel free to share!
Things Giving Me Hope/Strength This Week
From Chop Wood, Carry Water: Transgender activists staged a sit-in inside the women’s bathroom closest to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office on Capitol Hill, to protest Republican-led efforts to keep transgender people from using restrooms that match their gender identity.
Because of close margins in the House of Representatives, it’s going to be very hard for the House to pass their most extreme agenda. Per Hakeem Jeffries “It’s clear that the incoming House Republican Majority will not be able to do much without us.”
For “Dick Wolf” please read writing, production, producing, and showrunning teams for the collection of Dick Wolf executively produced properties - the Law & Order franchise, the Chicago franchise, and the F.B.I franchise.