Up Next: White Collar CSI
We have lot of different kinds of crime shows: "Law & Order", "CSI: [insert city here]", "Numb3rs", "Castle", "The Shield"...which each one has a niche that makes it unique, most of these shows tend to follow the same format: episodes open with a crime scene, police officers spend the hour tracking a criminal, and in the end, they put together the puzzle and catch the bad guy. I'm sure detectives sit around in bars with one another discussing how unrealistic these shows are, because nothing is ever that cut-and-dry. Of course, it's not reality, it's entertainment. They not trying to mirror the real worth, they're trying to fill the time between ads.
Of course, the crimes are always very typical of a police officer trying to solve crimes in a large metropolitan area: homicide, rape, assault, child abuse. Not pleasant things, but it makes perfect sense to package that sort of thing as a television show because those kinds of stories have always drawn an audience to the evening news.
With the big break of the Enron scandal eight years ago, followed closely by Worldcom, another series of crimes came into the limelight: corporate fraud, deceptive bookkeeping, embezzlement, collusion with Arthur Andersen, etc, etc. Why not have a show where law enforcement cracks down on people on Wall Street who are committing these kinds of crimes? Perpetrators are fewer in number than street criminals (would be my guess), but the few of them certainly make victims of a greater volume of people.
Does the Pareto principle apply to those who commit crimes and the number of people who are affected by those crimes?
So, since we have so many street crime shows, why not have this kind of show? I think I've heard this idea before, several times, from several other people. The most notable among them is Michael Moore, who had a brief parody of "Cops" in his movie Bowling For Columbine, where FBI agents crack down on Wall Street crooks.
It's a good idea. I think the Hollywood executives didn't try very hard to actually adopt the idea for a couple of reasons. First: it was pitched by Michael Moore, who, even for a moderate, comes across as something of a detestable leftist toady with a reputation for stretching the truth. That's ad hominem, but I'm merely pointing out it's easy for the brain to ignore what it can easily discredit, fair or not.
More importantly, it would be a really difficult thing to pull off. The format of "Cops" doesn't quite work, and it can't be like a traditional cop show from the point of view of the investigators, because the law enforcement officials investigating these kinds of crimes have really boring day jobs. They're accountants, mostly. They went to college to learn how to be uninteresting. It requires real creativity, as a television writer, to package that idea in a way that will sell.
Instead, what about a show that deals with white collar crime, but deals with it from the standpoint of the Wall Street crooks themselves? Instead of the investigators being the regulars, have the perpetrators return week and week, and have the show focus on their exploits. If you do it right, they would be interesting people, and their relationships would be compelling because, under that kind of pressure, they would have been strained.
As much as we would like to write off Jeffrey Skilling as being a mechanical automaton without any soul or conscious, he was human. He spent years rationalizing something that, deep down, he must have known was wrong. I don't know about you, but that's interesting. It's the perfect archetype of the human condition, albeit a very extreme one, and the nature of post-industrialized society.
Even with that in mind, it's still pretty easy to reject the idea outright because, who's going to tune in and watch white collar criminals screw over people? Well, the last decade has given us the answer: with the success of the television show "Madmen", however, the objections have been given their counter-argument. The show focuses on the lives of men in the early 1960s working at a Madison Avenue advertising agency. It's one of the darkest shows on television right now, because the lives of these people, given the time period, is not pretty. It was a time when men drank liquor, smoked cigarettes, and wore their sexist attitudes on their sleeves all day long.
And yet, it works. It's entertaining, and I think the key reason is because it's a window into the past. If I may turn the mic over to my homeboy Oscar Wilde for a second: "The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass." Perhaps we can't stand to watch a show that's loosely based on the Enron scandal because we don't feel we've moved past it as a culture yet. Maybe the idea, while great, is still too close to home. But even that explanation is still incomplete, because people watch "CSI", and those crimes are (supposedly) happening all the time, almost everywhere.
Maybe because we can carry mace and feel like we have more control over "smaller" crimes like that. Maybe because homicides and rapes "bleed" more and they just make good (easy) television. Maybe because with a show that has a new format, the television executives are worried it's too big of a risk to produce it.
I remain confident that it will emerge on a network eventually. Give it twenty years, give or take.
Of course, the crimes are always very typical of a police officer trying to solve crimes in a large metropolitan area: homicide, rape, assault, child abuse. Not pleasant things, but it makes perfect sense to package that sort of thing as a television show because those kinds of stories have always drawn an audience to the evening news.
With the big break of the Enron scandal eight years ago, followed closely by Worldcom, another series of crimes came into the limelight: corporate fraud, deceptive bookkeeping, embezzlement, collusion with Arthur Andersen, etc, etc. Why not have a show where law enforcement cracks down on people on Wall Street who are committing these kinds of crimes? Perpetrators are fewer in number than street criminals (would be my guess), but the few of them certainly make victims of a greater volume of people.
Does the Pareto principle apply to those who commit crimes and the number of people who are affected by those crimes?
So, since we have so many street crime shows, why not have this kind of show? I think I've heard this idea before, several times, from several other people. The most notable among them is Michael Moore, who had a brief parody of "Cops" in his movie Bowling For Columbine, where FBI agents crack down on Wall Street crooks.
It's a good idea. I think the Hollywood executives didn't try very hard to actually adopt the idea for a couple of reasons. First: it was pitched by Michael Moore, who, even for a moderate, comes across as something of a detestable leftist toady with a reputation for stretching the truth. That's ad hominem, but I'm merely pointing out it's easy for the brain to ignore what it can easily discredit, fair or not.
More importantly, it would be a really difficult thing to pull off. The format of "Cops" doesn't quite work, and it can't be like a traditional cop show from the point of view of the investigators, because the law enforcement officials investigating these kinds of crimes have really boring day jobs. They're accountants, mostly. They went to college to learn how to be uninteresting. It requires real creativity, as a television writer, to package that idea in a way that will sell.
Instead, what about a show that deals with white collar crime, but deals with it from the standpoint of the Wall Street crooks themselves? Instead of the investigators being the regulars, have the perpetrators return week and week, and have the show focus on their exploits. If you do it right, they would be interesting people, and their relationships would be compelling because, under that kind of pressure, they would have been strained.
As much as we would like to write off Jeffrey Skilling as being a mechanical automaton without any soul or conscious, he was human. He spent years rationalizing something that, deep down, he must have known was wrong. I don't know about you, but that's interesting. It's the perfect archetype of the human condition, albeit a very extreme one, and the nature of post-industrialized society.
Even with that in mind, it's still pretty easy to reject the idea outright because, who's going to tune in and watch white collar criminals screw over people? Well, the last decade has given us the answer: with the success of the television show "Madmen", however, the objections have been given their counter-argument. The show focuses on the lives of men in the early 1960s working at a Madison Avenue advertising agency. It's one of the darkest shows on television right now, because the lives of these people, given the time period, is not pretty. It was a time when men drank liquor, smoked cigarettes, and wore their sexist attitudes on their sleeves all day long.
And yet, it works. It's entertaining, and I think the key reason is because it's a window into the past. If I may turn the mic over to my homeboy Oscar Wilde for a second: "The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass." Perhaps we can't stand to watch a show that's loosely based on the Enron scandal because we don't feel we've moved past it as a culture yet. Maybe the idea, while great, is still too close to home. But even that explanation is still incomplete, because people watch "CSI", and those crimes are (supposedly) happening all the time, almost everywhere.
Maybe because we can carry mace and feel like we have more control over "smaller" crimes like that. Maybe because homicides and rapes "bleed" more and they just make good (easy) television. Maybe because with a show that has a new format, the television executives are worried it's too big of a risk to produce it.
I remain confident that it will emerge on a network eventually. Give it twenty years, give or take.