24 is way up there at the top, and The Shield, as brilliant as it is, pretty much has you rooting for the corrupt cops the entire time. Beyond that, every other police procedural that pits accountability as the enemy. Everyone else is the bad guy, they deserve whatever they get.

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'.

It goes farther than that. Every cop show has themes like this.

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.

It's all 'good vs. evil' except that the 'good' side has a lot more latitude to be actually evil than the 'evil' side does.

There's no such thing as being good, and no such thing as being evil.

I really love 24. I just wish shows do not go darker over time. I mean, why should Bauer suffer more as time goes by. This belief that every serious hero must suffer some kind of greek tragedy just puzzles me to no end. What’s wrong with us simply enjoying Bauer defeating powerful villains?

Bauer and his team were bigger war criminals than the people they tortured and persecuted.

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.

For a more contemporary example, see this Twitter thread on The Dark Knight

https://twitter.com/storyslug/status/1297996912822493196?lan...

Hmm cute but I think off the mark. Batman's niche above the cops in the dark knight trilogy seems to be hand to hand combat, cleverness, stealth, and mobility. He doesn't really identify as a detective in those films at all. I don't think anyone would believe that the a legally unrestrained gordon could have defeated any of the trilogy's antagonists.

Superheroes acting above the law is a fairly generic problem outside of that

To go nerdily pseudoquantative I would expect roughly a exposure * quality * originality impact. If something introduces a new trope or context and it is widely watched it ends up echoing itself with imitators and callbacks unless discredited. If it is novel but is niche or panned it will introduce the idea to a few and may rarely get snuck in as an obscure reference or inspiration. (See the B-movie influences on major film-makers.) One random example for theory crafting is how Avatar has become infamous for how forgettable a movie it is from lack of originality and poor plot. Forgetability aside, if a myth or concept is already widely believed or known there isn't as much change it can introduce and worse, it risks becoming seen as boring.

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.