What do Kojak and Designing Women have in common?

One of my wife's favorite shows is The Closer.  One of my favorite past times is analyzing pop culture and picking apart the meta-narrative of what seems to be mindless entertainment.  When I combine my past time with my wife's we have an interesting afternoon of discussion that usually ends with "but I don't care what the shows theme is I want to watch Deputy Chief Brenda Lee Johnson catch the bad guy and eat candy..."  Yes that's right eat candy, because all good detectives eat sweets, ask Kojak and Colombo, see that right there, yes I just did that.  If you want to take this a little further you could even take all these characters archetypes back to Sherlock Holmes, an eccentric genius detective.  Modern sensibilities prevent our current heroes from having cocaine addictions, so candy will have to do, until the HBO version of this character comes out that is.    

Yes, The Closer's protagonist is only the most recent in a long string of quirky detectives.  The twist they added to this character was that the detective is a woman, and, get this, she's a Southern Woman!!!  Oh yes, she eats grits, AND catches bad guys.  She has such a disarming accent, she's so cute and flustered by such things, not being able to find her keys and cell phone, and oh her poor little cat, until BAM!!!  She makes you confess for that double squirrel vehicular homicide you committed.    You were impressed with your ability to take them both out, and laughed that no one would ever know, yet now you've buckled under the sugar-high gaze of this southern candy freak.  This is the graphic they used to sell this show.

CSI: Designing Women, if CBS owned this show thats what they would have called it.

As we sit and watch this show all sorts of questions run through my head.  Is the fixation on sweets healthy, isn't this sending a bad message to an overweight America?  Does the LAPD have a really good dental plan for this woman?  Does the LAPD really have that much diversity or is that multicultural rainbow of a cast a PR story piece?  What is the show really saying?  Wait, your still staring at Kojak with his sucker aren't you, yeah you are!!!

Pay attention!!!

What is the show saying?  Well this season is about vengeance.  Every show seems to involve the blind spots in the justice system.  What is justice?  What makes the law the ultimate authority?  Who says what is right and why do they get the right to say it?  Says who?

This question is alive and well in many different movie and TV shows of late.  I believe our culture is adrift, the foundation on which we were built has been willfully removed.  We stand on nothing, our philosophy is existentialism, we all have our own world view, do what you feel, but how do you have a "do what you feel attitude" AND a civil society?  You cannot have law without a lawgiver.  If everything is subjective how do you have an objective law?  Everything becomes a "says who" all law is arbitrary.

What this equates to in The Closer is DA giving immunity bargains to someone who has committed a double homicide because of a politically charged situation.  By the end of the show justice is served by leaving the homicidal maniac on the street to face "street justice".  You may feel good about this, it feels right doesn't it?  I may feel better about it if the show were not so hypocritical.  The title character likes waxing very sanctimonious when catching a grandmother who has killed her drug addict daughter in-law to prevent her from gaining custody of her granddaughter.

What makes one right and the other wrong?

Anyway.  I had more to say about The Closer but I spent to long creating, I mean finding, that graphic above.  I'll consider this blogpost closed, I'm going to eat some candy.