On Sun, Jul 2, 2017 at 8:57 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > I went back and re-watched all of the first season of the original leading > up to the premier of the reboot. Cold War paranoia was built into the DNA > of the original, so some kind of conspiracy in the reboot was not > unwarranted, but they made it too personal. I bailed half way through > season 2. >
No, I mean something else by the conspiracy element. While detective novels could shade the morality of police or detectives, code-era movies, radio, and TV police and detectives had to be good guys. In this structure moral authority resided in the state and the heroes enforced it. The original Hawaii Five-0 was a solid part of this. For a villain there could be a crooked cop or a psycho serviceman, but the institution's goodness went unquestioned. A change came gradually into the narrative. Cracks appeared all through the seventies: M*A*S*H (TV) made the army into a comic foil with dissenting nonconformists holding the high moral ground. All the President's Men (Watergate in real life isn't a narrative) covered the moral rot that occupied the White House, Three Days of the Condor was about CIA agents killing their own to preserve a cover up, etc. I don't know when the tipping point came, so I will say it was with the X-Files. Two FBI agents do special agent work and also get involved with a massive government conspiracy. Over time it becomes unclear just who the good guys are. That's the kind of conspiracy framing I meant happening with the new Five-0. My two favorite cop shows, early NYPD Blue and Homicide, had lots of plots about moral gray areas. At the core of each were competent detectives who were doing the best they can to enforce the law. That is the standard I hold Five-0 to and they failed me. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
