On this month’s subscribercast I break down and analyse an interview by the Hollywood Reporter with Warren Leight, the showrunner of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, about the role of TV cop shows in promoting the police and normalising racism and brutality. I outline how the interview consistently eats around the edges of the topic, and how Leight is a well-meaning producer working in an industry that doesn’t allow for much in the way of originality or creative approaches to political issues. I also express some opinions about how the language used to describe people subject to certain crimes helps promote deeply sexist narratives that feed into the tiresome ‘gender war’ and how cultural censorship often produces the opposite of the desired result.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed