That is not the theme of Dirty Harry.
Callahan is fighting against a city overrun with crime, struggling against an inept, and in the other films in the series, corrupt, bureaucracy and police force. People forget that major American cities weren't the crime-free near-utopias they are now, or at least, were before COVID-19 hit. New York City was widely regarded as a bit of a shithole back then and in the early 80s.
The viewer is meant - and many did - to sympathize with Callahan as bends, and outright breaks, the rules in the pursuit of justice in a world where it all too often escapes the victims.
The Wire, graciously excluded as it takes a nuanced perspective.
The truly bizarre aspect of so many of these is that the story tends to pit the main characters against 'the man', or 'the system'. But for any normal person, they are 'the man'.
For example, in The Rookie, the titular character gets shot at at an alarming frequency per episode. If cops had to endure so many shootouts, a) their life expectancy on the job would be in the order of a few months at most, and b) militarization and shoot-first-and-ask-questions-never would be understandable (not defensible, but understandable). Seriously, front line soldiers in war zones do not see as much action as rookie cops in LA presumably do, if the show is taken as realistic.
Or almost in any cop show, only guilty people ask for lawyers. And if the lawyers get someone out of jail, it is depicted as an injustice and a technicality.
The list goes on and on. Police procedural, both comedy and drama, suffer from a serious lack of verisimilitude.
There's no such thing as being good, and no such thing as being evil.
I was going to say that this was created in the wake of 9/11 and, for the US, it was a sort of catharsis. But the US hasn't existed without an enemy, it appears to proactively create them.
The X-Files is one of the few series I know to directly call that out, because that's been US modus operandi ever since the Brits and the Confederates stopped being an enemy. An entire episode is literally "what do we do? we have no enemies." But of course, the show continues with the invention of a new threat.
https://twitter.com/storyslug/status/1297996912822493196?lan...
Superheroes acting above the law is a fairly generic problem outside of that
There are all sorts of messy cross-correlative details too like big budget works taking fewer risks and being less original owing to the stakes.
People want heroes. Heroes need bad guys. People thus want bad guys and will celebrate the groups that oppose them as heroes. In the US we had heroes fighting japs and nazis, then commies (notably no one ever fought the confederates in pop culture...).
But come the age of globalization in the 80's and especially after the collapse of the USSR, we just ran out of bad guys.
So we made some up out of the junkies on the street. I mean, certainly there was crime in that world. And at the top it was organized. And there was real violence between cartels and dealers. Those were bad guys! Go get 'em, heroes!
TV didn't do that. We did it to ourselves. TV just reflected what we all agreed on.
That could be worth unpacking, that one. The confederacy get remarkably good treatment by comparison. I think there's maybe a couple of Westerns on the subject? By comparison there's a lot of films depicting them as misunderstood honorable victims of circumstances.
Having watched a lot of bad 80s films in lockdown, it's remarkable how many post-apocalyptic settings look like New York if it was never cleaned up. The peak of course is Escape from new York
Also, I don't think _we_ need them, but narratives that justify the above do.
Friends and Seinfeld didn't have heroes and bad guys.
Worth noting that a lot of those you just mentioned either had direct government funding, or received government assistance, because of who they depicted as the bad guys.
It wasn't just human nature to paint them as the bad guys, it was part of a propaganda machine (overtly at first during WWII), and continues to this day. If you want to depict the US military in Hollywood, they will help you to do so, with certain rules about what you do or don't depict.
Until recently, TV networks received similar funding if they kept a anti-drug thematic in their works. (Though receiving networks of said funding said they didn't rewrite anything to fit those messages).
> TV didn't do that. We did it to ourselves. TV just reflected what we all agreed on.
I'm afraid I don't think that is clear. TV was actively influenced. What we watch was influenced. To what degree did that influence extend into the social conscience? That's a bit beyond me.
In modern mass media I can't contradict that, but Stephen Crane's book The Red Badge of Courage was very well received. I believe it is often ranked among the best American novels.