WASHINGTON POST: Let’s cancel all the cop shows on TV.

Writing at the Washington Post, author Alyssa Rosenberg has a unique solution for the problems with our policing: Cancel all the cop shows on television. She argues we need to do that because there’s a “reactionary streak” behind the “surface liberalism” in these shows.

● October, 2018: Steve Carell: The Office Would Be Too Offensive Today. If So, What’s Left?

● January, 2018: The post-Pervnado era has made a lot of classic TV cringeworthy.

I’m not expecting sitcoms and cop shows to vanish from TV anytime soon, as those are the genres that have defined American network television since its inception in the late 1940s. Regarding the latter format, as lefty academic Todd Gitlin wrote in his 1983 look at the American TV industry, Inside Prime Time (which served as a textbook at my college, and presumably, loads of others), in the early 1970s, David Gerber, the producer of the NBC series Police Story and Police Woman, “took to cop shows not only because the police were society’s blue line but because they could be the networks’. In the industry jargon, they afforded a franchise — a hero’s right to interfere every week in the lives of others. ‘In television there are a certain amount of franchises,’ Gerber points out. ‘What do you got? You got doctor, lawyer, and chief. Throw in some Indians, for westerns. So doctor, lawyer, and police; the westerns are gone. You try to do something offbeat — White Shadow, Paper Chase, American Dream — and you get shot down. So you stay with the franchise or you take a chance. In June the networks have patience with anything. The flowers are blooming, hooray, hooray. Come September, they lose patience, because they’re in a competitive race.’”

But the left’s desire, whatever the struggle session du jour, whether it’s #metoo or #blacklivesmatter, to airbrush out offending swatches of pop culture is telling, and will slowly take its toll. (See also: Messrs. Woody Allen and Bill Cosby, who were omnipresent in American culture until becoming unpersons.)

As I wrote in May of 2018, the Great Purge of 20th Century Mass Culture will be astonishing to watch, a much more insidious version of the way the arrival of the Beatles to America completely pushed swing music, America’s pop music from the 1920s through the early 1960s, into the dustbin of history