Another Television Symposium Class in the past...
This weeks class included the top three cast members from the new television show Southland. The cast that showed up were Michael Cudlitz, Benjamin McKenzie, and Regina King. Also, the Emmy winning writer of the show Anne Biderman showed up to talk with us too. The show Southland, for those who are not familiar, is a series about LAPD uniform cops and detectives. It was canceled from NBC and has found a new home on TNT.
The reason I thought this was relevant for our Stars class is that Southland is a rugged cop show that reminded me of the success of the western. During one of my classes it was mentioned that cop shows (From Dragnet to Southland/NYPD Blue/The Shield/&All the CSI's) have been some of the most successful plot lines in recent history. It seems to me that the modern day cop story parallels that of the western. Today's industrialized no-man's-land is only found in the world of the beat cop. Many of us don't have to directly deal with crime in our day to day life, but the cop story revives the western notion of the wild frontier in a non-frontier era. Cops shows show many of the same plot lines as the western such as good cop gone bad and other interesting story lines.
Also, one last side note...(slightly off topic, but having to do with westerns)
I was thinking further about the idea of what modern character could represent the western hero John Wayne, and although I struggled to find a specific actor, I was thinking about how the character representation of Batman illustrated many of the Ideas about what John Wayne. I mean even the character for Batman carries the same last name bruce WAYNE. Coincidence?
Batman is the rugged figure set out to clean the wild streets of Gotham. Maybe a stretch, but in many ways the uncontrollable Gotham mirrors the wild wild west. I could be completely wrong, but just an idea, and a good conversation starter as clearly batman also differs in many ways from previous western depictions.
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