This came up in the group chat again today and–
You know what the really obvious answer is to the problem of police procedurals? In the sense that people clearly enjoy the tropes, the varyingly high stakes, the feel of a competent highly-trained organized team doing good together, the variety of storylines you can get, the operational style, etc, but are sick of copaganda?
Why do we have seventeen thousand police procedurals when we could have this instead???
Search and rescue procedurals would solve all the problems actually.
Like, you get that well-oiled machine thing. You get the radio protocols. You get the sense of organization, of rank, of a command structure, but without them being cops. Hell–in an SAR group you can even have the much-maligned plotline of “someone goes off the book on a hunch and ends up being right” and still have consequences attached to that but not, like, an intrinsic argument for routine violation of human rights.
You get the case-of-the-week and the variety; I feel like this is why firefighter shows don’t get nearly as popular, because there’s only so much variety you can get out of “there is a fire” compared to all the things that can go wrong in a police procedural (or an SAR show, especially if you were clever about where you set the story.)
You get the recurring diverse cast and their interpersonal relationship developments, and pretty much every cop show archetype slots gorgeously into an SAR group as well.
You get the wide variety of possible stakes; SAR teams sometimes have intense heart-pounding time-sensitive missions, sometimes they have lost hikers who are almost certainly fine, sometimes there’s suspicion of foul play…Christmas episode about returning a lost kid to his family against all odds, anyone? Sometimes there’s a search that’s been going for weeks and someone has to call it and be the bad guy…you could get GREAT drama over two team organizers butting heads about how no, dammit, we’re not calling in the cadaver dogs yet, we’re not giving up like that–
(Oh yeah also you can have some great canine recurring characters.)
Instead of “internal affairs is the bad guy because cops being held accountable for their actions is evil” you can get, like….tension between the rookies and the human remains detection teams, because if you’re new to the SAR culture you may not understand or appreciate the work that HRD dogs and their handlers do, see above re: the sense of giving up. You get the opportunity to engage with real-world issues and social justice but like, without them being cops. The world is your fucking oyster.
OR, YOU KNOW, WE CAN MAKE ELEVEN MORE SHOWS ABOUT COPS, I GUESS–
