Spooky Cops: From Buffy to The X-Files | Copaganda Episode 7
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
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The Spooky Cop Show™ genre used to be all about outsider heroes like on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files, but nowadays, uniformed police officers patrol the supernatural like on Fringe, Grimm, and The Outsider. What happened?
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5:28 - Trust No One… Except the Police
16:27 - Buffy Turned Corporate
31:37 - The End is Nigh
#copaganda #buffythevampireslayer #thexfiles
I've added a video on Paw Patrol as a Patreon goal 👀
Correction: at 31:15 these shots are from Grimm not from Buffy, my tag got all messed up :(
Can't wait! A video about how we portray cops to kids sounds really interesting and it's definitely not an excuse for me to stare at cute animated dogs for a while.
I can't wait to see how you take us from Paw Patrol to existential terror
Darn that's that episode I been waiting for
I just join your Patreon just for Paw Patrol
One more metaphor in Buffy that makes it very distinct from copaganda shows: Buffy is portrayed as the first Slayer who actually took help from her friends (Graduation Day Part 2) instead of isolating herself and acting as a lone wolf judge, jury and executioner.
Taking help from friends being a stand-in for working with the community (imho). Remember the season 6 finale where Xander "talking" saved the world. Powerful metaphor.
Best comment
Also Faith doesn’t just break bad, she does so while letting authorities become her father figure. That was extra creepy and excellent foreshadowing but yeah Buffy took many opportunities to paint law and law-aligned groups as the bads.
Angel actually features the police in some interesting ways. In the early seasons there is a prominent detective character. After learning about vampires and demons, she is eventually ostracized and expelled by the force essentially because she was looking deeper into the root of crime (demons) and trying to do the job right.
There's also an episode where a police captain raises a bunch of dead cops as zombies and has them patrolling and beating the shit out of anyone a cop would generally go after
Always irritated me that Supernatural never delved into the cops/government dealing with the supernatural stuff.
Instead of just...being super oblivious or dying to them.
good view
Problem with the zombie episode you mentioned is that it tries to end on some sort of "morally ambiguous" note by being like "well the zombies were bad....but crime went down!"
Like... wtf? It really didn't if you count all the assaults the zombies were committing at random. It could have been a strong episode but they botched it big time.
EDIT: Spelling
@@galactic85 yeah, that was definitely some nonsense devil's advocate shit. I think the episode's relevance is more than was intended from a very white show in the early 00's
Yeah...then Kate tried to kill herself.
Hurmm
THIS is why a lot of modern Urban Fantasy and even some Dark Fantasy rubs me the wrong way! Lots of nuance and empathy gets cut out in place of "cool authority defeats always chaotic evil others with no moral dilemmas ever"
The early RPG series Ultima has a great take on this kind of plotline. In Ultima IV, your character, the Avatar, has to retrieve the sacred Codex from the depths of the underworld, so you descend into the abyss, find the Codex, kill the demons guarding it and take it back to the surface. Yay! Happy ending!
Fast-forward to Ultima VI, and the land is invaded by a massive army of demonic-looking Gargoyles, hell-bent on killing the Avatar. Initially, it seems like standard fantasy fare, but when you do a little digging you find out that the Gargoyles are only invading because they're desperate. They were happily minding their own business until some asshole broke into their most sacred temple, killed all the worshippers inside and stole their holy book. Now their species is dying, and the only way to save themselves is to fulfill a prophecy by retrieving the Codex and sacrificing the person who stole it.
It's a great bait and switch. The "always chaotic evil others" weren't all chaotic evil at all, and you accidentally started a devastating religious war by treating them like they were.
So glad this video didn’t ruin Buffy for me hell yeah. Also, i feel like having many of the “bad guys” be transformed versions of everyday people, and having the pilot (not that it’s a great pilot lol) include a friend of Buffy becoming a vampire she has to slay is….if not unambiguously humanizing at least interesting food for thought imo
It's literally the wolf/sheep/sheepdog worldview that Dave Grossman professes. Did the writers of these cop shows attend killology sermons too??
@@guy-sl3kr fiction is great. The problem comes when people take it too literally and start thinking the same rules apply in real life. "If I kill people it's OK because I'm just like Buffy and I'm killing subhuman monsters!" The fact that people are seemingly unable to distinguish between a fictional evil like vampires and real life criminals is just disgusting.
I've just found this channel, and I've seen the videos on Brooklyn 99 and Veronica Mars. I'm glad you said it didn't ruin Buffy, because as my all-time favourite show ever, and one that's got me through some tough times (e.g. heavy relation to S6), I would have skipped this video if I thought it was just going to end up trashing it.
As a fan of Buffy and Supernatural a lot of my foreign internet friends recommended Grimm to me. I never got past the first episode though, because as a German watching the original dub, the overuse of incomprehensible German gibberish as their lore was impossible for me to get past. Like, when they first used "Wesen" I was like "That's a bit odd, but pretty cool they are using German words." Now "Wesen" can make sense in context, so it was more the odd pronounciation that threw me off. But then came "Blutbad". Which is German for "Bloodbath". I was puzzled, but still rolled with it. But then he said "The plural is Blutbaden not Blutbads!". Now, the plural to Blutbad aka Bloodbath would be Blutbäder aka Bloodbaths. Instead they used Blutbaden which is a nonexisting word which would translate to Bloodbathing. As in the act of bathing in blood. As the plural of a species. What? So when you say "Everything is vaguely German" that was precisely the reason I had to stop watching. Couldn't the show named after the German Brothers Grimm find a single German person that could proofread their German lore to make it fit to actual correct German language? I guess not.
Americans in a nutshell. Everything outside their small world, which contains only the United States, is either hostile or unimportant.
to elaborate on the Wesen pronounciation: If its pronounced like in the video they're putting the stress on the wong syllable. its kinda like pronouncing taco tuh-COE. Anglos are weird about grimm tales in general tho, thank god they only ruined the most basic ones
( we have gez sponsored modern fairytales to ruin more obscure ones on our home turf)
@@bortsimpson9308 Leave GEZ alone. It's the cllosest thing we have to content creators getting financed without the biggest spender calling the shots.
I found the words weird and the pronounciation ... but I imagined that
a) the word were very old archaic forms
and
b) they had been mangled by people living in the US (and elsewhere) a couple of generations.
This is reminding me of the episode of Supernatural that dealt with the "pagan deity Sam Hain" it hurt so much.
The main villains for the entire series of The X-Files are a small cabal of powerful old white dudes who agreed to end all human life on Earth just so they could save their own hides when the extraterrestrial invasion happens. Like, replace “extraterrestrial invasion” with “climate apocalypse” and it’s basically reality.
If you watched the revival seasons, it turns out it was just one white dude on an ego trip
so damn true
Although in light of recent Revelations by the US military to the Congress, the Extra-Terrestrial Invasion scenario is looking just as credible.
@@iwanttobelieve2 revival never happened u must of dreamed that. xfiles ended season 6 and thats where it definitely ended and nothing after that
@@stuck_around I wish
I kind of appreciated how Buffy explored brutal incarceration, too? I'm getting very tired of villains in superhero shows getting locked up in teeny isolation pods, without any social interaction, or anything to do, on far away islands, without any due process. And if anyone ever tries to challenge the conditions, they're just a bleeding heart and hopelessly naïve. And the villains will definitely escape if allowed to read a book, or go outside, or whatever.
Or how that’s good. So many show are like “some spooky cops kill the monsters but we only look them in a cell with standing room only that they’ll be in forever see we’re good spooky cops”.
Indeed, and I've seen the obsessively punitive approach become increasingly popular over time too, despite y'know the scientific evidence that there are much better ways to handle justice.
it is tv
This goes along with superhero media constantly asserting that killing the bad guys, in any situation, is wrong. And then regularly dishing out literal fates worse than death. Their whole concept of morality is based on justifying the endless reuse of villain characters. No matter how absurdly unrealistic it gets. The Joker would have been, legally, gunned down by the GCPD years ago.
Sometimes the monster escapes and gets killed anyway.
This started fun and got terrifying, it was like watching an episode of Buffy backwards. Bravo.
The TVA on Loki is very interesting because it’s not just Space time cops it’s ALSO an allegory for faith so it’s not just cops it’s also talking about institutionalized religion and the level of control the space cops spend their time ensuring is interesting as is the fact that this is God’s will or something very close to it that these people are imposing on innocent bystanders who have no say sounds a lot like Christian colonialism
Interesting take, but subject to change if and when the show delivers more info (also at time of comment haven’t seen episode 4 so no spoilers there please).
Comment aged pretty well post-S2
Since your an American, I understand you probably missed TORCHWOOD, the Dr Who spin-off. It was flawed but one thing that really stood out to me when I was younger was how anti-establish it was; especially how it took aim at its parent show’s occasional moral flippancy.
The three police themed Sentai would have been nice to cover.
yes! actually one of my fav shows as cheesy as it can be i really loved that jack completely changed the system so although his task was similar to the organizations he ran things completely different even trying to get that one alien home yk i feel like they really did martha dirty having her work for that other place
@ergonorm9960 Martha, as a character, never gets the respect her character deserves from both the fanbase and the writers.
@@ianisimoyeah, after seeing UNIT imprison Tosh without trial in solitary confinement indefinitely in Torchwood, it's really jarring to see them often represented as the good guys in Doctor Who. I enjoyed The Giggle but I couldn't help thinking... Kate Lethbridge Stewart could probably be put on trial for crimes against humanity or something, and here she is hugging the Doctor. But then the Doctor was also friends with Churchill and apparently Stalin(?!), I guess when you're travelling through space and time morality is always going to be relative.
One of the main antagonists of the X-files is the FBI, they're acknowledged as the villains too
Speaking of migrants, Supernatural got into offing or disappearing uncomfortable characters because they didn't feel like they "belong" in our word after all, and ended up going back to theirs.
As the show got progressively more conservative (abandoming the working class perspective and free will themes and the grey scales of the first few seasons) that got all the more uncomfortable
‘Supernatural isn’t misogynist’ LOOK AT THE BODY COUNT 🤦
Actually, the plural form of Blutblad is Blutbäder, but I guess no one on or watching the show would care. Blutbaden would be a verb literally meaning "to bathe in blood"
The state department is clearly team Riley
Like many things on SPN, they would introduce criticism of the good vs evil binary but they never knew what they wanted to say. They dipped their toes into the grey area with characters like Sheriff Jody & Donna being "good cops" pulled into the supernatural world by tragedy, but they never went as far to show that they themselves were interrogating their roles as cops and just kind of had them use it to their advantage when possible ie getting Claire out of trouble. On the other side, they introduce good monsters like Garth and his werewolf wife and children, but then never address the fact that they would go to Purgatory with all the other monsters when they die despite living normal human lives. You'd think they'd have time with 327 episodes but alas (love the show still but)
They do go into it kinda. They actually kinda blame it all on God and Christianity. He was the one who put them there. When they meet god, they actually hate them and ask how he could let all of this shit happen, and not doing a thing. God is shown to be wildly incompetent, a coward who is afraid of his own mistakes, and is really pretty selfish, and self-righteous. He really only liked Sam and Dean and helped them because he saw them as characters in a story he liked. God was gonna let all of humanity die and suffer because he got in a fight with his sister, and didn't want to stop her from ending the world. Dean even ends up in purgatory and meets someone who helps him and realizes it was really him that was the monster, as all the stuff he hunted was out hunt him like a mark, just like he had done in the past. Most angels in the show in general are pompous douchebags who see anyone especially monsters as subhuman. The show has like an entire season dedicated to it.
Amazing stuff, can’t wait to finish and also see your takes on Lucifer and Criminal Minds
Something I liked about supernatural was they would have a few episodes where they go to investigate for monsters and it’s just humans being awful and we see monsters just living day to day life and not causing harm and Sam and dean have gone out of their way to defend such monsters and call out hunters who go far and dedicated a whole season where the bad guys were a group called the men of letters a group who were crazy extremist who had a kill on sight rule for anything no 100% human, also Meg could be argued to be a good demon at least she becomes kinda good
I live in the PNW where we just experienced temperatures 30-40 degrees above average for this time of year. Can't nobody tell me climate change ain't real
I'm in southern Oregon and it's so unseasonably hot by June standards that I've been having panic attacks because I Know Why That Is. I miss our freak weather being blizzards in mid-April.
stay safe, dudes! i have a lot of experience with heat cause i’m from southern california recommend getting towels wet and then freezing them and also lie on a tile floor to cool down and make sure to learn the signs of heatstroke vs heat exhaustion. i know it’s not really the point of your comment but please stay safe!
Whoof. I described Fringe to friends as X-Files for the modern age, without having seen much X-Files, and it never occurred to me when I was saying that "the modern age" in this case is specifically the post-9/11 War on Terror world, but of course it is. Also the connection you draw between fantastical existential threats and the very real threat of climate collapse really took me out. This series continues to be fantastic
Trust me, if you‘re German, you were interested in the Grimm Origins AND were terribly disappointed. There was so much potential. (Wesen also means the core‘ or ‚spirit‘ of (sentient) beings, as well as it means ‚being‘ ‚beast‘ and ‚nature of something‘ so it was the most intelligent choice of the hole show)
They could have questioned the Wesen of the Grimm, but never really got around to that, always only scratched it on the surface before it went to seventh season quality from season two on.
I took that one personal. XD
Wow... This goes to places I didn't expect.
This video (like the rest of this series so far), was fascinating. It's so weird to look back on all of these shows that I grew up with and realize how pro-police they were. One thing that would really interest me would be a deep dive into why people are so interested in content about crime/policing in the first place, from true crime podcasts to shows about lone-wolf de-facto cops like Buffy.
I touched on this a little in my video about Mindhunter (which is kind of a prelude to the Copaganda series). It's a bit more focused on style/form, but the end is mostly about why we're so fascinated in understanding true crime/serial killers: ruclips.net/video/h727mq79mOk/видео.html
@@SkipIntroYT I mean, I think there's a pretty easy Ockham/Hanlon combo razor set here: Cops are one of the very few, and most prominent, occupation that is enabled with legal investigative powers. It's most likely just an easy choice for a writer when they want a character that's allowed to investigate in a contemporary society. It's a problem I run into with tabletop RPGs frequently.
@@BH-wh2vo They are also pretty much the only occupation, apart from the military, that is allowed to engage in morally permissible* violence! For middle-class white America, the target audience of most TV, most of those folks simply do not engage in or encounter violence in their everyday lives. So if you want your good guy to be able to wave a gun at bad guys, even if you throw a layer of fantasy or sci-fi over top, by default you are going to end up with some flavor of Cop.
*actual moral permissibility of the violence may vary depending on your stances on ACAB, as should be obvious to anyone watching this series
When you scripted, shot, and edited this you had no idea the sky in Canada and the sea in the Gulf would catch fire like a dang ol' Hellmouth.
This video inspired me to finally go back and watch every episode of the X-Files. Ironically this led me to discover what can only be described as a "Blue Bloods" moment at the climax of season 1 episode 16. The moral of the story is that Mulder should disregard proper police protocol and be more trigger happy.
ACABEFM (All Cops Are Bastards Except Fox Mulder)
I haven't been thinking about coming climate apocalypse for like 5 minutes. Thanks Skip Intro!
The U.S. is full of goofball centrists in the bottom 99% who think the uber-rich are gonna let us into their lifeboats while the world drowns... Like, if you can't be bothered to care about the death of innocent people outside our borders, could you at least not delude yourself into thinking you have any kind of shared community with billionaires?
(Also, excellent video & series! 💖)
They don't really care even if There own citizens die.
@@kaleeshsynth9994 They'll start to in the next ten years when it's them and their neighbors who start dying.
@@itcouldbelupus2842 exactly! Unfortunately, it will be too late by then! Idk exactly when it happened but at some point between 1870s (or 1 generation after the civil war) and 1950/60s (1 generation after WWII) people started to trust the government/powerful people of the country more than their neighbors!
There was a time when the people in a community (aka: neighbors) counted on each other and all did their part to make sure everybody had enough of what they needed to survive so if the community came under attack or was stricken by some kind of catastrophe, EVERYONE was capable of defending, rebuilding, etc.
Now look at the relationship between most neighbors... A lot of people don't even know their neighbors names (let alone their story), people calling the police/town officials on their neighbors for loud music or like a flower bed that encroaches onto an unused piece of their property by 2 inches, or they see their neighbors suffering somehow and offer no help, even if it wouldn't cost them a dime!
When this is the situation within most communities, when that metaphorical flood comes, neighbors become enemies, fighting for a spot on the life boat... rather than coming together, helping each other, thus not relying on government life boats...
Sorry for the rant... I'm pretty high rn 😂
@@phatnana2379 All good, I usually am high on RUclips as well.
People definitely used to know and rely on their neighbors more but trust in the govt was always quite high until around the 70s when corporations started pushing anti politics propoganda, saying all forms of govt are bad and inept, eroding trust and muddying the water so much most people don't even know the purpose of government.
Capitalism is the reason for our reliance on systems rather than each other, we are better consumers when we are all isolated individuals, people who have a sense of community don't need to buy as many things to make themselves feel good.
A system that prioritizes profits over people is always going to have negative societal effects.
Remember that Government holds the possibility of being democratic, corporations are tyrannys.
We need to rebuild our local communities and build trust in each other and then reform or form new governments that actually represent us, not corporate interests.
Unlike Marxists, who will declare the boats a bourgeois counter revolutionary crime and demand we build a giant tower for BIPOC only (only for it to collapse because architecture is a white supremacist patriarchal construct)
Skip Intro gonna talk about the X-Files?! Gimme gimme numnumnumnumnumnumnum
I started watching Supernatural after watching the first ep of Grimm. Grimm reminds me of Dean Koontz's Twilight Eyes, which has a similar thing about being the only person able to see Goblins who masquerade as humans.
Man, this video bums me out for the future. Wish, we could put our country's resources into helping people. I wouldn't mind if robots take over, they probably would do a better job
Always remember that robots are made by people and will be programed with the biases they currently have.
What Angel as a show did differently is that the black and white "all demons are evil" gets turned on its head various times, there is So Much Greyness in everyone's choices, S5 turns the establishment on its head. I'd be very interested in exploring that show through the lens of copaganda.
Just thought about how Sam and Dean had anti-possession tattoos that are star-shaped like police badges ensuring they would never be possessed by demons
Oh damn, you're totally right.
That's a pentacle, you ignorant ass, a symbol of protection from the Devil since the Middle Ages.
@@Laurelin70 calling someone an ignorant ass for taking place and shape of the tattoo to compare it to a police badge is… just outstanding. Like if such comparisons were completely unreasonable Germans wouldn’t have started to call a vagina "sheath" in the 17th century. No one ever would have "seen" that in Robert Jordan‘s Wheel of Time THE place of female empowerment does in fact look like one.
The similarities are there and even if something has a meaning already doesn’t mean it can’t be recontextualized.
The Othala Rune bears the meaning of heritage. Nazis recontextualized it (sometimes changing it a little bit) so it got a touch of "Rassenlehre und Ariertum" today’s pagans use Othala mostly in it’s original context and original form but sometimes they’re Neonazis too. And the TV series Sleepy Hollow (which also could‘ve come up in this video) only took it’s form and called it the "Thure Rune" (German dub atleast) which is used to ban gods into magic prisons.
See things can have multiple meanings and can imply different things. So the tattoos are definitely to keep them save from demons but they also work as a metaphor for a police badge because "saving people [and] hunting things [is their] family business"
The star shaped badge has occult origins, so it's not unusual on that level.
The star is a pentacle. It is occultic in nature, not the police...
"No government agency has jurisdiction over the truth."
Me: .... [looks at 1/6/21]
Well that aged poorly
As a person from and living in the Caribbean, the end of this video really hit me hard.
“In a Semisonic kind of way” 😂
EXCELLENT video and now I'm just going to think of how Supernatural is so complicated re: its position as copaganda
It's a bit different but Sense8 also has a version of a spooky cop. He doesn't fit the video's criteria but is certainly supposed to be a hero in a way that the rest of the gang aren't, influenced by 'cop' being a magical personality trait akin to 'captain america'.
I would love to share this with my hard-of-hearing friend. Is there a plan to add full captions soon?
Also worthy of note, Buffy continued as a comic throughout the 10's, wherein she worked as a police consultant and the final issue has her graduating police academy.
noooooo
I think we can all agree that the buffy comics are not canon
Ivan Illich's characterization of institutions on a spectrum from "convivial" to "manipulative" is a helpful framework for understanding the progression of spooky copaganda. Manipulative institutions are those that make people psychologically addicted to them, that force people to use them involuntarily. Simultaneously, they oppose any possibile alternative institutions. Convivial institutions are ones that people want to use based on their inherent usefulness rather than because they were persuaded or because that institution has a monopoly on its particular function. The hallmark of convivial institutions then, is freedom to opt in or out according to your needs.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a really good example of the difference between the two in season 4. The "Scooby gang" (what a stupid name, season 4 was the worst season) operated on a principle of spontaneity and participation while the Initiative was obviously about controlling people to create a super weapon. Unsurprisingly Illich also notes that manipulative institutions "tend to develop effects contrary to their aims as the scope of their operations increases." The initiative tries to create a monster to fight wars for the government, but instead causes more harm when John breaks loose. Manipulative institutions achieve goals opposite what they intend.
For a fuller discussion see Deschooling Society ch. 4.
I'm very curious about your stance on the X-Files, with your positive take on it, especially since it's stance on anti-establishment included vaccines being bad for you, the movie famously having FEMA as a secret organization out to get you, and other various right wing dog whistles about why you should have militias. Season 10 even had an Alex Jones stand in portrayed heroically for his conspiracy theory show. There was also the usual 90s racism on why those who were different from normal were dangerous, such as Native Americans having cultural practices of cannibalism, Haitian refugees practicing voodoo, gay marriage, etc.
Essentially, the X-Files was very much a call to action about anyone who was slightly different from the norm for most of it's run.
Nahhh chill out bruh, you just seeing things that aren’t there lol
In the end Fox Mulder was pretty calm when talking to one in the season 2 finale, also when Scully had to ask for help when Mulder was having an episode, predicting the future sequence and screaming none stop in season 6.
You can read anti establishment media in lots of different ways - and Alex Jones and modern leftists are both critical of the neoliberal order for reasons that overlap. In the 90s those critiques were far less clearly delineated than they are today, so it's unsurprising that a show from that decade is confused about them - but the fact that it is not simply a tacit, docile endorsement of the government of the Clinton years is notable, and distinct from most cop shows.
It does seem as though pre-2000s conspiracy theories, which the writers referenced and drew from, tended to be more apolitical and paranoid than reactionarily ideological as they are today (though many of the ones talked about in the show share a backbone of antisemitism). This may be the reason for some of the more regrettable plot points (i.e., smallpox injection *very* bad, give scar for aliens). I see the central theme of X Files as anti-Military Industrial Complex (not anti-1%), which made for a variety of paranoia targets but not in a distinctly left-right framework. They also wrote weekly episodes on cryptids, cultural practices (some weird exoticism there), etc. that led to bad episode arcs. In short, it was still the 90s, broadcast by Fox, written mostly by dudes, and not an ideologically left-ish show.
I wasn't around during the 90s so I'm not sure if the Haitian refugee camps refers to a crisis in the US (also not American), but that episode seemed to me like a criticism of a situation.
Mulder & Scully obviously didn't agree with the people who worked at the refugee camp. If I remember well, they go to Mr X for help, saying "why dont people know about this/isn't Congress doing anything?" and Mr X is basically like "haven't you noticed, Mr Mulder, Lady Liberty is on vacation"
I can't believe you missed the single most significant spooky cop show of the nineties: season 2 of Baywatch Nights.
Oh fuck, watercolor painter from Vienna was a supernatural being... Now I understand why you called "Grimm" bad.
Ohh, THAT watercolor painter?
Then you can consider as well Smallville a cop show, but is more in line with Buffy than Supernatural, also is very anti-corporate, Lex Luthor thirst for power and control droves so out of control that began to have a messiah complex, saying that someone need to fight against aliens and monsters, when a literal alien is already doing that, and sometimes even sympathise with them.
Dude! I was heavy in to xfiles and lone gunnman and I felt so crazy trying to tell people how this show no one watched producteded 9/11 and no one else ever talks about it 😅
Can I go on record and say that even though Supernatural is still ranking no1 in my best fantasy/supernatural TV shows of all time, I still say by the end of the show Sam and Dean ended up killing more people indirectly than any of the monsters in their universe. making them the best Anti-heroes/ unintentional villians of all time. next to the flash
Not that anything you said about Fringe is wrong, but for anyone who's never seen it, the show becomes very different part way through season 2, and ultimately becomes a magnificent, resonant show about a very complex father-son relationship. Also there's an episode, guest-starring Peter Weller, that's one of the finest ever produced in television history!
The father-son stuff is the only thing I ever liked about Fringe.
Just because it has Copaganda elements doesn't mean it's a bad show per se.
On the scale from Blue Bloods (copaganda is omnipresent and makes it bad) to The Wire (copaganda is relatively minor and doesn't affect it) its okay to be somewhere in the middle.
Agreed
Also yet another good show that was jerked around by near-cancellation the messed up the flow of the series. Just stop putting your name on things, JJ
Buffy was such a good show.
Fighting evil by moonlight, winning love by daylight, never running from a real fight.
This is incredibly depressing thank you
Really excellent iteration of this series imo
Throw in some Lost Girl - always fun to see the literal secret police of a hidden world bringing in a femme fatale with plot armor to bang/"bang bang" the enemies to death and it be portrayed as "good, actually"
Oh lord I entirely forgot about Lost Girl. That and Alphas just randomly pop back into my life lol
I was surprised that you didn't mention _Millennium_ a TV series created by Chris Carter, creator of _The X Files_ It certainly fits all of the elements of a "spooky cop" show.
Spoilers for Supernatural
I disagree about Supernatural being black and white. If it were, we’d see Heaven as the good guys. We’d see literal God as a good guy. But they aren’t. They’re the bad guys too. God is the biggest of the big bads.
Then we see “monsters” who are good people, or allies- like Garth and Benny, Rowena, even Crowley. Some of those allies are a lot more grey than white though. And even from the early seasons we got the message that sometimes the humans are the monsters, and the monsters are not bad at all (with Lenore being the first of those stories in season 2). And all of the “heroes” have been on the wrong side at least once.
The show is a lot more about Free Will than about being black and white in terms of morality or good v bad guys. So I disagree that it falls in the same category as Fringe. Given how much the heroes fight against “authority” (whether that’s the cops or the literal creator of the universe and his soldiers), I think it fits more into the Buffy category, personally.
If only the ending wasn’t so bloody awful. I’m more pissed about how bad it was then Game of Thrones.
Also, ScoobyNatural was an epic crossover. I don’t think any other show could have pulled that off. Or had one of their main characters being forced to be in an in show Herpes as. Or had the main characters go into an alternate universe where they were a tv show, and had to pretend to be the actors who play the characters in real life.
There’s meta, then there’s Supernatural. And, I’m also thankful for its immense gifting of gifs. There’s an appropriate Supernatural gif for every occasion. That’s impressive.
This video has been out awhile, but Olivia's actress in _Fringe_ played her character in the same vein as the main character from _Homeland._ They were going for that very specific vibe in post-9/11 police dramas (which apparently even spilled out into Spooky Cops).
Admittedly, iZombie is my favorite Spooky Cop:tm: show. While it moves away from being strictly cop related after season 2, it doesn't really question anything about policing. But it helps Liv Moore isn't a cop I suppose.
Also yeah Twin Peaks is indeed a monster in itself that I also love...
This is one of my favorite running series on RUclips. You are *criminally* undersubscribed. Consider me "patron"ized.
Hearing Lance Reddick's voice hit me with a burst of joy, until i remembered what happened.
I miss him.
Me: Is he gonna talk about Twin Peaks: The Return and Fire Walk With Me and how at times Twin Peaks feels like parody/commentary on police procedurals, and the distrust in the government is parallel to The X Files?
"I'm gonna save Twin Peaks for later."
Mmm, yes, smart idea it's only a 45 minute video, it cannot be covered in that time.
This video took a really depressing turn.
Finished watching. I'd definitely love to see your take on other types of entertainment and copaganda. Manga/anime, comics (other than the MCU) and video games specially. There's so much types of media you can tackle.
Forever Knight aired in the early 90's and in syndication on Sci-Fi later on. It was about a vampire cop who was trying to reform himself.
This is so incredibly my shit the algorithm really had my back today
I cannot overstate how much I NEED your Twin Peaks video!
Every government employee is contractually obligated to be team Angel. Obviously. Angel is clearly more cop than Spike.
If you watch Angel, Team Angel is very much anti cop
I have watched all of Supernatural up to season 10 3 times, and all the way till the end twice.
Thats hundreds of hours of my life I will never get back.
I truly don't think I'm any better for it. About the only skill I've gained is the ability to immediately recognize demons and an intuitive understanding of meaningless memes.
I really enjoyed the video... that massive amount of existential dread and a panic attack -- not so much but it's real and needs to be said.
Watching this two years later with the hottest year on record on going
Ok I'm gonna watch Buffy now. Sounds like a fun series.
Honestly the best explanation of why defunding the police is vital, great video.
the unflinching horror of the last third of this video hit me like an air conditioner dropped out an 8th story window
Been loving this series. I'm curious of you'll have a chapter that touches on Person of Interest, which IS a cop show at the end of the day, but also does the xfiles thing where it portrays most cops/government as amoral or corrupt and a major theme and basis around the premise surrounds the events of 9/11 it also predicted government surveillance on citizens pre-snowden.. granted there's still issues with it as a whole (and its another show JJ abrams helped prudce the pilot for then ran away. *dont talk about lost* ) but id be curious to see you touch on it.
If you do an international or sci-fi (in the future) copaganda analysis, I’d recommend Psycho Pass & Ghost in the Shell! I think both shows give a good perspective of antiestablishment but simultaneously are copaganda.
Death Note I’d say is also a fantastic crime drama that ultimately is copaganda played straight, directly stating that “justice in the hands of anyone else, especially someone with a god complex, is evil.”
Supernatural was interesting in that the brothers used to pretend to be from so many different fields but by the end they were only pretending to be FBI agents.
Spooky Cops!
Ayyy! You got the Curiosity Stream sponsorship! Nice, I knew you'd be up their alley.
33:00 - rewatching this in the middle of August 2023, where the average temperature range in South Florida is about 20 degrees hotter on both the low + high ends ... yeaaaaaaaaah
I loved the X-files and Fringe, because it looked like them being cops was just a prop to excuse the dive into the spooks.
But alas, now the tv is so full of pigs that I lost my appetite for ham sandwich. Its the reason I barely watch tv now. Thanx for explaining WHY THE FUDGE so much cops stories! I'm so fed up and miss the 90's other shows.
Sooner or later, I always come back to this series. It's just so good.
Although kind of sappy and sloppy, the episode "men against fire" of Black Mirror is a satirisation of that glorification of spooky cops, by making the "enemy" - essentially migrants - appear like monsters
Haven on Syfy was another example
Thank you for the fantastic video! I can’t wait for the next ones.
I understand it would probably be a lot of work but would it be at all possible to link some of your data ressources you show on screen in the description box for further reading?
That's a Patreon reward I believe. I got a monthly newsletter which included Jackson's "Copaganda Reading List" which had the links to every source and article he used.
Im loving this series, thank you!
I made a story about a spooky cop who was a lot more X-Files she hated the government with a passion, mostly because they kept fucking her over that every turn, and and hated that most of the shit she had to deal with, was hidden covered up because often the stuff could be used to help people a lot of people I literally have just a scene of her and her boss talking about how awful their jobs are, and how much they’ve had to sacrifice but they keep doing it because it helps people but most of the time she’s taking down like CEOs you know real criminals
I'm gonna write a long ass comment about a spooky cop book series that I love to bits but well... it's about cops.
The "Rivers of London" series is about Peter Grant, an idealistic London cop who joins the folly, aka the London police X-files, aka, just Thomas Nightingale, the one wizard who happens to also be a cop.
In this one, the cops we see are not corrupt. They are by the book investigators. But they are not quite on the case, because the "weird bollocks" don't fit into their forms and reports... As the series goes on, Peter becomes a driving force in transforming the Folly from a relic of 18th century ruling class working on unwritten arrangements into a functioning police office, with procedures and rules aimed at good relationship with the supernatural demi-monde.
So on one hand cops are mostly good, but they need to adhere to strict rules (there are jokey lines about police brutality - in the "if you want a confession hit a suspect, but if you want the truth just ask questions" style. Police brutality, corruption and even racism is largely presented as a relic of the past, and our Biracial hero represents a shiny alternative. While not questioning the institution of policing, the books go directly against the cowboy cop archetype.
The aspect explored most in depth in terms of bad policing is the evolution of mages themselves, where some supernatural people call the Folly "the magic Gestapo" for its violent past of being entitled, ambitious rich white men policing the magical world. The protagonists actively try to mend that terrible past by being helpful rather than repressive;
From the get go , the supernatural world is presented in a way where they are not the enemy. They are a presence that sometimes interacts with police matters. aside from the usual monster of the episode, there is a recurring B plot involving the eponymous rivers of London, that all have tutelary Goddesses and are mostly amicable if ambiguous powerful figures.
On a side note It's quite refreshing that while research into old tomes is presented as useful, the mages of old often get critical stuff really wrong, and knowledge has to be updated as a result.
Anyways, I'm not sure this idealized portrayal of the police is great, but at least, showing best practices seems to be a better route than just glorifying violent policing.
You do good stuff. Thank you for your commitment to Copaganda.
I think Supernatural is less a pro cop show and more of a fundie christian/libertarian-fantasy show. There are a few good cops in S., but the protagonists are actively hunted by the authorities for quite a few seasons.
Fundy Christians wouldn’t like Supernatural much. Not only because they play around with Christian myths, they make Heaven corrupt and bad, they make God the literal bad guy (and also an arsehole), but they make God canonically bisexual.
No way on earth would the fundies be okay with that. I can see some libertarians liking it, given the heavy anti authoritarian themes as well as the buttload of guns. Trump fans would be pissed about the show making fun of him though.
A fundie christian show where they kill god
I love skip intro. Like so much.
If you ever want to add to this category or make a companion video, I would love to hear your thoughts on the show Dark Angel. I feel like it would tie in very well with the things you discuss in this video. Namely the pre/post 9-11 differences in spooky cops (tm) shows since it had 1 season before and 1 season after 9-11. It also has unofficial investigating / procedural elements, corrupt government organizations and a post-apocalyptic setting.
Plus, I will always remember how they seemed to turn on a dime in the second season when it comes to their portrayal of cops. In the first season cops are the sort-of landlords of Max and her roommate Kendra. These cops harass them and extort money on a regular basis. But then Kendra ends up in a relationship with one of the cops who was a poor misunderstood soul under all that sexual harassment, i guess? 🤢
Wow, this took a turn but I'm here for it.
You might say that police only have three goals now: Secure. Contain. Protect.
I love this series so much I get so happy every time you upload a new video
Two years from the future, hottest day on record happened July 3rd, 2023.
The way you called the final length of the video at the 1-minute mark... well done!
Man, I love this series. Got my snacks out and everything. Good job. :)
Please do copaganda on Watchmen. It's a lot to unpack
Who watches the Watchmen?
I'm quite impressed but very glad that you brought climate change into this. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if you managed to cover police's relationship with every concept in existence by Copaganda's conclusion.
I love the X-Files so much. I watched a marathon on Sci Fi in 2004 and then acquired all the seasons on dvd. I fell in love. I still have yet to watch Lone Gunmen tho. I think I’m going to have to know.
WOW. I'm sending money.
Just discovered your channel Today via a conversation you had with FD Signifier. This Copaganda series is So important and SO well done. Happy to pay for it voluntarily
It was really cool for this new video to show up now cause I watched all the other copaganda videos the other day while I was drawing, and subscribed right after. Thought I'd have to wait longer to get a new one lol.
I remember really enjoying Fringe when it was airing. Very good actors in that show.