Catastrophizing crime dramas skewing our view of real-world corruption

Somewhere in his 2017 potboiler Play All, in which he muses on the appeal of box-set television, Clive James notes that he finds it more and more difficult to understand what is going on in contemporary – mainly American – crime dramas. The plots are so complex, involving a myriad of characters, all of whom could be guilty, not least the investigating officer, that by the time episode three comes along it is hard to recall what the original crime was, let alone who might have committed it, or why.

You might think that this would be a failing for shows built around clues and evidence, but it turns out that chaos, rather than resolution, is the key to believability. By the time the credits roll, we no longer expect all to be revealed, as in Colombo or Morse. Rather, we are asked to accept that, in essence, we are all guilty, all corrupt and all out for the main chance.

What we are watching is not so much a whodunnit as a panorama of the pathology of modern life, in which no one is to be trusted – starting with the police – and everyone in authority, from the mayor and the police commissioner, by way of the lawyers on both sides, belongs in the slammer alongside the triggerman – except that the prison governor is likely to be on the take and his staff, when they are not busy beating up inmates, are mostly engaged in prostitution or drug-trafficking. Narcissism, greed, jealousy, disregard for human life and an all-consuming ambition are the characteristic and seemingly immovable personality traits of just about the entire cast.

Consider Bosch, a Los Angeles-based cop show, now in its fifth season on Amazon, so contrived that I rarely have any idea what is going on, but keep watching anyway in the hope that someone will emerge as the principle villain before I either fall asleep or die of old age.

Harry Bosch – actually Hieronymous Bosch – played by Titus Welliver (you see, I’m confused already), is an L.A. detective who turned to policing after a career in Special Forces. So far, so routine. The only oddity is that he doesn’t have a drink problem – possibly because he isn’t Scottish or Scandinavian. But then the darkness deepens. His mother was a prostitute murdered by one of her clients. His ex-wife (whose more recent partner turns out to have been a member of the Hong Kong Triads) is a professional poker player in Vegas, but in season four is recruited back into the FBI, from which she had previously been forced to resign, just in time to be murdered in a restaurant car park.

Bosch is a “maverick,” with no time for the pen-pushers of City Hall. He knows how to rough up a suspect and put the fear of God into them. His own collar has been felt on several occasions. But it turns out that he is almost the only character in the show, including his close colleagues, various attorneys, businessmen and elected officials, who isn’t up to his, or her, neck in embezzlement, bribery, witness-tampering, evidence-planting, narcotics or murder. The season four finale takes place in a hitherto unknown maze of tunnels beneath the city, where we discover that the Police Commissioner (who it emerges has presided with the mayor over a long-running criminal conspiracy) not only shot dead the district attorney seeking to expose his activities but that, thirty years before, he had also murdered Bosch’s mother.

And I haven’t even mentioned the detective’s serially disloyal partners, a chief of police clearly turning to the dark side or the homicide detective who, in retirement, directs a team of lawless officers, including the chief’s son, while working as a security guard at the estate of a former porn star.

Is this what real life is like – even in Hollywood? Probably not. No one, so far as I know, imagines that Sadiq Khan and Cressida Dick run a crime syndicate or that the real reason the police in London have no time to investigate domestic burglaries is that they themselves are the burglars. But it is the world that is being put in front of us on a daily basis by new and traditional media, employing high production values in pursuit of high ratings. We ought not to be surprised. The distrust of politicians, the police, bankers and the leaders of large corporations is fast reaching the point where just about anyone in possession of money or power is assumed to be motivated by nothing other than personal gain.

So is fiction echoing life or is life influencing fiction?

Take another example, in which perfidy goes all the way to the top. Scandal, a highly successful White House saga shown on America’s ABC network, tells the story, over seven seasons, of an Administration in which just about everyone, up to and including the President, is a murderer, protected by an ultra-secret service, known as B613, run by a psychotic palaeontologist, that makes sure anyone who threatens the authority of the Deep State is rubbed out at the earliest opportunity. The President, whose deranged wife, we learn, was raped on the eve of her wedding by her father-in-law, a ruthless and predatory Senator, smothers a justice of the Supreme Court to prevent her from revealing his previous crimes. His lover, Olivia, who as the head of an investigative agency struggles to keep everything under wraps, is obliged to kill the Vice President for much the same reason and ends season six by taking over from her villainous, half-mad father as the head of B613. There is hardly a leading member of the cast who is not a murderer. House of Cards is like Yes Minister by comparison.

In recent years, there has been a spate of television series in which the plot is driven by the iniquities of the police, the mayor’s office, the boardroom, Congress or the White House. In Britain, McMafia, Bodyguard, Killing Eve and Line of Duty, among others, are predicated on the belief that crime is at the heart of statecraft, as well as business, and that the forces of law and order are as often as not key links in a chain of criminality in which the idea of public service is a joke and almost no one can be shown to have clean hands.

The West Wing, presided over by the saintly Josiah Bartlet, has become almost as much of a moral museum piece as Dixon of Dock Green. Even The Thick of It now seems dated, its bad behaviour perpetrated more by mischievous schoolboys than gangsters. In the age of Trump and Brexit, as relayed by Facebook and Twitter, programme-makers start with the premise that politics, big business, the police and the security services should be viewed as deeply suspect. We should trust no one and nothing, least of all the social media through which we now derive our information and, increasingly, our opinions.

I can’t pretend that the underlying assumption, however cynical. is not at least partially correct. There is so much evidence of wrong-doing and malfeasance in high places that very often our first instinct when we hear a politician, or banker, or corporate boss, or lawyer or police officer defending a position is to ask ourselves where do the lies start and who stands most to gain.

What we need to bear in mind is that the mirror to nature supposedly being held up by television drama is distorted and cracked. If reality was truly as grim as the fictional world we see on our screens every night, most of those in public service, as well as just about the entirety of the 1 per cent, would end up in prison – which up to now has not been the case. Even then, the problem would persist, for quis custodiet ipsos custodes? But if culture, in however exaggerated a fashion, reflects developments in the real world, then we should be afraid, very afraid. The ceremony of innocence may not yet be drowned, but it is struggling to keep its head above water.