This latest piece of written onslaught against the English language on this occasion, has to start with asking one question to you, the humble reader / drunk;

Have you ever seen what is shown on the UK satellite TV station known as alibi?

So……many……my eyes are melting….

It exists it seems for one reason alone; the sheer volume of cop shows now prevalent have reached epidemic levels and if we don’t start shoving them somewhere else soon, they will just overrun and destroy everything we hold dear before wrapping the scene with that yellow police line tape and saying some bad pun about the crime before cutting to the introduction titles.

I suppose when you see so many being produced in the same genre, much like comic book movies in recent years, it becomes all too easy to see patterns of behaviour in what makes a cop show live and breathe, unlike Mrs Higgins from No. 42 who was killed just now. Where were you just now? It was you, you b******d, YOU DID IT!!!! The downside of this is once you’ve seen one, you suspect you’ve seen them all.

For example, they all have a erringly familiar theme tune to each, with fast drums, some piano and some flashy bits with showing us the glorious cast of characters doing cool shit in about 12 seconds. Only the lamentable CSI serieseseses (however many there now are) has truly bucked the trend by passing around to each other the same CD of the Who’s Greatest Hits.

The more horrible the crime, the more it seems to be covered.

Yes, we are this sexy at catching naughty people…

The makers of Law and Order when further and produced a show called Special Victims Unit, in which for your entertainment, we would see the stereotypical “special” detectives and whoever else turned up when they were bored as everyone had jolly good fun investigating and prosecuting pretty much anyone who only committed sexually based offences.Apparently the police was to take care of the boring stuff like murder, but if someone did naughty, these bastards were there!

Heaven forbid if there was a jurisdiction issue, because everyone seems to get off in a “special victims” way about hating the other people, who may have actually just been doing their job, or better yet, magically screw things up for our darling heroes to save the day.

It doesn’t even stop there really as the genre covers all sorts of people dealing out justice such as beyond Mensa level private detectives a la Sherlock, The FBI (that’s a real favourite actually, seriously the FBI gets a lot of the fun these days), lawyers and even Judges! Yep, Judges often can solve cases too, just ask Judge John Deed who was a world class lover as world class judge.

We seem to also have almost a carbon copy of the same people within each show too. A few of them have to be workaholics who also have family issues. You’ve got to have a tough couple of cops who sometimes show their feelings but not too often. One who does all the dead body carving up, and then of course the leader, who has always wise words about the current case to give.

The side plots to the cases all seem hell bent on involving getting annoyed at a rookie who did nothing wrong, to getting thrown off the case before then solving it, oh and noticing the tiniest detail in a crime scene while failing to notice the obvious sexual tension between them and the police dogs.

It’s also strange how they all seem to have taken large amounts of speed, as it appears that everything happens in about three seconds per scene where we have a conversation which seems rushed, and fast camera work, like time is of the essence or perhaps they knew another commercial break was coming so they needed to squeeze it all in beforehand.

Captain, I’m detecting some fingerprints in this blood pattern!

A worse crime is perpetrated in that apparently the various agencies have more state of the art equipment to deal with the law than NASA. The bridge of the Starship Enterprise looks dated next to the command centre we see on a regular basis in NCIS: Miami Crime Scene Uncovered thing and frankly it’s borderline embarrassing. Apparently because computers are made from unicorn’s dreams and magic, they can do anything which the writers need.

What is evident is that they cannot escape ridicule, so much so that recently Charlie Brooker has even seen fit to take the p*ss out of them with the inspired parody series A Touch of Cloth, and South Park even has called  such shows “murder porn”.

So why then, are there so many of them, with also the subject matter being quite awful in its nature, being shown throughout the day and also and various channels at the same time? What’s more how do you therefore stand out against the onslaught to be something you would want to watch more than once?

For my money, it seems to be those who try to deviate from the usual model slightly by introducing a new element, be it a compelling character, an unusual situation or mixing of the genres, some of which will be mentioned here, and at some point we will go into more detail on;

Sherlock, mentioned earlier, only really works with the clever writing and superb acting of the case involved, plus the limited number of episodes has help to concentrate the quality, thus it never feels too much.

The Blacklist only works, thanks to the efforts of James Spader who frankly doesn’t need the FBI and the show could in theory just focus entirely on himself, dealing with the criminal underworld, as he sees fit.

Grimm, starts off as a run of the mill cop show, but quickly goes down the far better route of throwing into the mix of murders and weird sex stuff, various creatures from fairy tales from the ages along with various monsters for which the German language was created purely for naming them.

The proper way to wear a tie.

Finally, one recent binge later, I couldn’t recommend the antics of the Brooklyn Nine Nine crew, who deal with the bad guys successfully but do with such a sheer amount of insanity and laughs, it’s amazing how the time flies once you get into it.

Just the opportunity to see Terry Crews (whose body mass in just pure muscle alone ensures he has his own gravitational field) in tears at being unable to build a doll house and question why it has wheels, it was just priceless.

The usual tropes are played for laughs with this cast, and fantastically one of the best performances has to be from Captain Holt, played so well by Andre Braugher. The constant struggle by everyone to see if he is happy or sad at anything is just gold, and the banter between himself and the annoying Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) just keeps it going at a pace which means you wouldn’t get bored. Comedy with cops, it saves the day.

The one thing to take away from this long diatribe is that when it comes to the cop show genre, it’s so oversubscribed, it’s dull. But sift through the rubble, and there will be the odd gem which will serve you well.