We continue our series on how police are depicted on TV with the creators of “COPS,” the longest-running reality show in TV history. Creator John Langley tells us about the show’s genesis and why it continues to be so popular; the Latino Comics Expo is unofficially known as the “Latino Comic-Con"; Comedy Central says Larry Wilmore's show failed to gain traction with viewers.
Cops on TV: Inside the making of 'COPS,' the longest-running reality show in TV history
This segment is part of The Frame's #CopsOnTV series about how police are portrayed in both scripted and unscripted television, and how TV can impact the public’s perception of law enforcement. Listen to our other segments on this topic here.
In the age of the cell phone video and body camera, we’ve seen a lot of footage of police officers at their best and, often, their worst. That has surely affected the public’s image of police and law enforcement.
For decades, our understanding of police was partially shaped by scripted TV shows — many of which were among the most popular and critically-acclaimed shows of their time.
Last week, we spoke with former producers for the series “Law & Order: SVU” and “Southland.” Today we switch gears and speak with the executive producers of "COPS," the father-son team of John and Morgan Langley.
Few shows have influenced the public's perception of police offers more than their reality TV show.
Created in 1989 by John Langley and Malcolm Barbour, "COPS" became highly influential for its unscripted, non-narrated format. The Langleys spoke with The Frame producer Michelle Lanz, and she started by asking them how the show got started, and to explain its continuing success, 29 seasons later.
Interview Highlights:
On the origin of the show
JOHN: Nobody was willing to buy it. I went to every network on the planet trying to sell it. I got the same objections: You can't have a show with no narrator; you can't have a show without re-creations; you can't have a show without music in the body of the show; you can't have a show that isn't scripted or managed reality in some way, shape or form. I kept saying, No, no, no -- meaning Yes, yes, yes — you can! And nobody really wanted to do it until along came Fox.
MORGAN: The writer's strike was the thing.
JOHN: The writer's strike suddenly made a show with no scripts [and] no actors very appealing. And no host, because the Screen Actors Guild was going to go on strike in sympathy with the writers. That's why "COPS" happened, basically. There was a young arrogant pup named Stephen Chao, a young executive at Fox, who finally agreed to take me in to see Barry Diller, who was the head of Fox at the time. When I met with Mr. Diller, he said, Well, you need a narrator. I said, No — that's not the show. [He said], You need some re-creation. I said, No, that's not the show. I was sick and tired of trying to sell the show to everybody and having them all tell me no. So I decided to say no back to them. At the end of this exercise, he said, Okay, we'll do a pilot. I was a little shocked. We left the office and Steve Chao said, It's a good thing you told him no a lot, because otherwise he would have thought you were just prostituting out your talent and you were willing to do anything. It turned out alright because we did a pilot ... and then, yeah, nearly 30 years. So who knew? I was asked many times by crew and family, including Morgan, Is that show gonna be on again, Dad? I said, Heck if I know. I had no idea, honestly.
On how the show has developed
JOHN: I can address the early days of the show: We had three-to-five teams concentrating in one city.
MORGAN: Now it's "COPS" coast-to-coast. It's really become a road show. You get to see different geographic areas of the country, even different law enforcement cultures. That's part of the reason why people watch. Nowadays, we have over 10 crews spread across the country in different locations. Sometimes as many as 13 crews. They're very lean-and-mean production teams. Our shooters are essentially story producers. So they're trying to get the goods and get us those raw seven-minute stories that we cobble together into a half-hour. "COPS" has less cuts than any show in the history of network TV. The ideal "COPS" segment is a continuous handheld take for seven minutes. All of our guys know that very well. So that's really as raw and real as you can get on television. I think that's what still makes it compelling to this day. We want less cuts.
JOHN: Yeah, that's the mantra: The best edit is no edit.
On the format of the show
JOHN: You have an opening act. That's what I call the action act, and that's to grip an audience — to get their attention. Then we go to a slower, more lyrical act, if you will, which involves more emotion. Then, the third act I try to make as something thought-provoking. You wouldn't think about it watching the show. You wouldn't even think in those terms, but that is essentially what I've always tried to do for various obvious reasons — grab the attention of the audience, then slow the pace down, let them become involved in the emotional content of the show, and then the third act is to take them somewhere else and make them consider the laws, actions or human behavior or psychology or the sociological elements of cops.
Look, anybody who watches the show on a very superficial level will think it's entertaining or it's exploitive, or whatever they may think given their political or philosophic stance. I can assure you that we don't tell cops what to do. We don't make the shows in that sense. We record, observe and collect, and hopefully don't interfere too much. The more we can be the fly on the wall and capture pure reality, the happier I am.
What we often capture is not necessarily endorsed by us. That's not our job. Our job is not to try to convince anybody of anything, we're just showing what cops do, hopefully in the most transparent way possible. I'm often asked, Well, surely you cater to the police departments? Well, we cater in the sense that we have them approve of what we air before it airs, because we're guests and sometimes there are very basic issues involved. If it involves undercover police officers, you can't reveal their identity.
Everybody forgets that cops, the police officers, are required to do social services, deal with mental health issues, deal with family squabbles. None of these things have a lot to do with law enforcement. They're called upon to do a lot of services that they're not always equipped to handle. You need psychiatrists out there half the time, not police officers. You want them out there to stop violent criminals and real criminal activity. You don't want them to be your mental healthcare servants. That's not their jobs, but they're forced to do that.
On what it takes to be a "COPS" cameraman
MORGAN: Generally, those guys come out of a news background. A lot of them are used to being responsible for their own material and producing packages on their own, so they can make the transition. If you're a camera operator on "COPS" you don't have a producer telling you, Shoot this, shoot that, do this, do that. It's very different from the way a lot of shows are shot, so it takes a certain kind of person to be able to do that. Our guys are some of the best hand-held camera operators in the business.
Because it's "COPS," we'll have camera guys who come from all areas of the business, from reality TV — even from feature films who just want to do a season of "COPS" so they can say, I did "COPS"— it's on my resume. We've seen situations where guys — really great [directors of photography] or people from other disciplines — who come in and they cannot shoot "COPS." It's a different animal from anything on television. It's a way different animals from feature films. It's really an art that they learn over time. Some of them obviously take to it faster than others.
JOHN: It's also an emotional and psychological grind. You're gonna see the underbelly of society. You're going to see the worst of human behavior. You're gonna see all kinds of things from homicides to ... I mean, horrible things are encountered on a daily basis that you just don't see and don't even hear about because they're not newsworthy or news-making items. But there are a lot of human trails and tribulations and tragedies that happen on a daily basis that the police deal with, but that we don't have to deal with. We meaning the average citizen sitting and watching television.
On the death of "COPS" sound supervisor, Bryce Dion
JOHN: It altered our awareness of something I had never thought would have happened. If I had known it would have happened, I wouldn't have done "COPS." First of all, we're crews not cops. We don't carry guns, we don't get involved in shootouts, we don't do any of that kind of thing, but it shows the danger of the job because one of our crew members, Bryce Dion — who was the greatest kid in the world and the most talented and the most observant and the most diligent — was killed in an armed robbery. It was tragic on multiple levels, but it also brought home the unfortunate truth of the danger of police work.
We went 27 seasons without any major injuries of any kind. Maybe that lured us into a false sense of security, because we've seen everything that most police officers see and probably more that most police officers see in their careers. We've been with multiple departments and been in multiple situations — from armed robberies to homicides to violent domestics to everything you can think of. Again, as the observers, you somehow think that camera protects you from the dangerous reality of where you may find yourself. It clearly doesn't and it's something that, to this day, bothers me personally.
'The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore' canceled despite unique approach to late-night
It wasn’t hard for Larry Wilmore, formerly a colleague of Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show," to get studio audiences to cheer for “The Nightly Show.”
But it was far more difficult to get actual TV viewers to tune in to the Comedy Central program, and after a year-and-a-half on the air, “The Nightly Show” has been canceled by the cable network. Wilmore's final show will be Aug. 18.
Daniel Fienberg is a TV critic at The Hollywood Reporter, and he joined Frame host John Horn to talk about the various aspects of "The Nightly Show" that made it unique in late-night — and which might have also been responsible for its undoing.
Interview Highlights:
Should the decision to cancel "The Nightly Show" come as a surprise to people?
I think the writing had been on the wall to some degree. If "The Nightly Show" had gotten an Emmy nomination or two, that might have helped; if the show had gotten any sort of bump at all from when Larry hosted the White House Correspondents' Dinner, that would have helped; I think if the convention season had given the show any sort of bump at all, that would have helped.
So at a certain point, the ratings were just very low and it was already a very difficult job, following up "The Colbert Report." Unfortunately, the numbers weren't there and the social media buzz wasn't there, and if you don't have those things, what do you have?
I want to talk more about the social media buzz, because "The Nightly Show" was well-regarded by critics, but the show did not do something that other late-night shows have been doing — using little bits of content as short segments on YouTube. It seems like that was something Larry Wilmore wasn't really interested in.
I don't know that he was necessarily ignoring it, but I think that it was a difficult road to travel. He started off at the beginning of the show with a very popular "Keeping it 100" segment, and after a while a lot of those segments started going online-only as exclusives. The hope was that that would be a viral touchstone for the show, and that didn't come together.
I guess it's just that he was covering a lot of stuff that maybe some of the other shows weren't covering, and that maybe people just weren't excited to share. And that's too bad, because more and more and more, late night has become about, Are you going to be passing around the clips the next day? And I felt like there was a lot of really good stuff that Larry and his team were doing on "The Nightly Show" that people just weren't passing around the next morning.
The format of the show was a little more talky, it wasn't skit-heavy — it involved some engagement and some conversation. Is that something that, as a format, might be a problem going forward with other networks, as they contemplate what the lessons might be of "The Nightly Show" not working?
Unfortunately, the show tried to be distinctive with the [final] segment panel discussion, and unfortunately that was never a strong suit for the show. That was what they wanted to do, and they just never figured out how to do it well.
Basically, it was a conversation with correspondents and whatever guest they were able to cobble together on any given night. The two correspondents would sit there and try to be funny, because they wanted to get more screen time in the future, and they'd more often than not take the spotlight away from the guest.
That's not ideally the way a panel segment's supposed to work, so that's the problem with trying to do something a little bit different — if you don't nail it, sometimes that looks bad.
The other thing that Larry Wilmore did is he populated his show with a lot of people who are not typically well-represented on television. In a statement he released today, he said: "I'm also saddened and surprised we won't be covering this crazy election or 'The Unblackening,' as we've coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn't counted on The Unblackening happening to my time slot as well." The Chris Hardwick game show "@Midnight" is taking his slot. Is there a bigger story here about the representation of people of color in late-night?
I think that's a big conversation that needs to continue. It certainly has been when Comedy Central, with Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore, has been the only place for minority representation for late-night television for basically the duration of that block.
But yeah, having Chris Hardwick go into that 11:30 slot to replace Larry Wilmore, it looks bad. There's no way around it, even if it's just entirely temporary. Short-term, going from Larry Wilmore, who has such a distinctive, specific, angry, edgy voice at times, to Chris Hardwick, who is pretty much the epitome of a certain kind of white-bread, frat-boy humor, it's not ideal. I wish that Comedy Central had some alternative for how they were going to make this transition look.
A Comic-Con of sorts for a neglected audience
Comic-book fans recently got a glimpse of the upcoming Netflix series, “Luke Cage." It’s based on the 1972 Marvel comics superhero and show creators describe Cage as a “bulletproof black man.”
There have been other black superheroes on TV. Back in the '70s and '80s there was the Black Vulcan and Cyborg — both from the classic “Superfriends” cartoon series. More recently, you might remember the live action show "Blade," which was based on the comic-book-turned-film-franchise.
But Latinos — the nation's largest ethnic minority — have yet to see Hollywood get behind a prominent brown crime-fighting character.
That void has inspired several Latino artists to create their own hero stories and cultivate a whole new community of content creators. Their annual gathering recently took place in Long Beach at the Museum of Latino American Art. It’s officially called the Latino Comics Expo. This year marks the 5th anniversary of the event, which is very unofficially dubbed the “Latino Comic-Con.”
Walking around the convention hall, it was clear that this gathering matters a lot to the artists and fans. As it stands, it’s very difficult to come up with names of Latino superheroes or comic book characters. Perhaps John Leguizamo’s star-turn in the '90s film, “The Spawn,” might come to mind. But his clown character turned out be more super-villain than a headlining brown superhero.
One could argue that the character Antonio Banderas plays in "Puss & Boots" is a kind of Latino superhero. But perhaps superhero-ish is a better description, given that he plays a cat, not a person.
Back in the day, the "Fat Albert" cartoons regularly featured a superhero named The Brown Hornet. It turns out, however, that The Brown Hornet was actually black and voiced by Bill Cosby.
Are we leaving anybody out? Probably not.
That said, if you were able to read people’s minds inside the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, you’d definitely note this subtext. But that’s why these folks came to the Expo to begin with — to battle what some describe as the injustice of underrepresentation. Hundreds of Latino comic-book creators traveled here to talk shop and sell stories in which brown characters are placed unapologetically front and center.
One such character who fans met at the Expo is named “El Verde.” Outside on a sun-filled outdoor stage, people watched a comic-book style theatre show about this new brown superhero named after the infamous green card sought by immigrant workers. Anthony Aguilar is the writer and star.
AGUILAR: He’s a factory worker. He came from Mexico. Raised in America. He doesn’t have super powers, but that doesn’t stop him from becoming a superhero.
Aguilar based the story on his real family, which crossed the Mexican border years ago.
AGUILAR: My mom’s side actually came through the Bracero program. My other grandparents came here as tortilla factory workers. Which is why El Verde himself is a factory worker. I think with El Verde, I did want to see a Latino superhero, but I think it was more like I just wanted to see a Latino superhero that was more just like me, a representation of who I am — this dorky, nerdish kind of guy. It just happens that he is Latino.
That was a common feeling for many Expo attendees: a sincere longing to discover people who look like you on screen, on stage and in print, and who might even have special powers — like timeless superheroes such as Superman or Wonder Woman. Ramona Pilar is an actress in Aguilar's play.
PILAR: What’s interesting about Wonder Woman, or Lynda Carter [who played her on TV], was that she reminded me of my mom! They had this same really awesome brown hair. So this idea of a female superhero kind of made sense to me. But in terms of a male superhero — that had never occurred to me. Because you think of superheroes as powerful. So if you don’t see a reflection of yourself being powerful anywhere in popular culture, you are not going to conceive of a superhero.
This is where the value of the Latino Comics Expo quickly becomes clear. It gives Latino content creators a place to learn about and share new work. Alejandra Cisneros started coming three years ago to direct her boyfriend’s “El Verde” stage play.
CISNEROS: There isn’t a central place to talk about Latino comics similar to ComicCon in San Diego. So our first year was also this incredible knowledge dump of [discovering], Oh my God, you're from Boyle Heights!, or You're from East L.A. and you’ve been doing this for 20 years or 30 years? It was so exciting for us because it felt like home.
Back inside the Expo convention hall, animator Candy Briones has nearly sold out of her comic books. She created a character called Taco El Gato about a cat with special powers who was raised by a dog — all inspired by a famous Looney Tunes duck and bunny.
BRIONES: I didn’t see myself [represented in TV shows or cartoons], but it made me laugh so much. I loved the characters. Bugs Bunny was really smart. And he was such a butt! (Laughs) And Taco [El Gato] is loosely based on Daffy Duck. I grew up in South Central. There’s not a lot of comic book stores or art stores there so the reason I got into comics was because of TV shows that I would watch.
Most of the artists selling their work at the Expo said they discovered their love of comic book characters early on. First they watched and then they’d sketch.
BRIONES: I started drawing inside my sister’s school books. I didn’t mean to [get her in trouble] but I enjoyed it! I would draw mermaids, so many good memories! There’s this one drawing I still have. It was me getting married to E.T. And in Spanish it said, Te Amo E-T. (Laughs)
Now, fueled by a combination of childhood memories matched with artistic abilities, new stories are surfacing. Several artists, like comic-book veteran Richard Dominguez, have already developed a solid fan base. Dominguez created the popular El Gato Negro series. He says it’s a tip of the hat, of sorts, to the cartoon heroes he loved as a boy.
DOMINGUEZ: Francisco Guerrero — social worker by day, crime fighter by night. He’s the Latino superhero who fights crime in South Texas. And since Superman has Lois Lane and Spiderman has Mary Jane, El Gato Negro has Narcy Montoya. She’s a former Miss Colombia, Harvard grad lawyer, and she has her own law firm in South Texas and works with Francisco from time to time. Now, whenever they try to get together after hours, his nighttime activities always seem to get in the way.
These are the kind of Latino superhero stories we may not see on TV or the big screen anytime soon. But Latino Expo co-founder and artist Javier Hernandez said this convention celebrates all the beautiful brown superpower possibilities.
HERNANDEZ: The mainstream companies haven’t been providing them, really. Just look at the roster of characters. Marvel and DC — there’s a couple of characters. Okay, forget them. Whatever! We’ll just do it ourselves. Right?
Right. Or perhaps a more appropriate response for this crowd is: Write.