Two New Cop Shows Draw from Stephen King and…Communism? New at Reason

TV has been riffing on cops for close to seven decades now, going back to the days when half the Nielsen families in America gathered around their black-and-white tubes once a week to watch Dragnet‘s Joe Friday smack around all the usual suspects, and sometimes you wonder what’s left to say. And then you see a couple of shows like Mr. Mercedes and Comrade Detective and you realize that even two decades of CSIs and Law & Orders can’t kill this genre.

Both Mr. Mercedes, an adaptation of Stephen King’s 2014 novel on AT&T’s Audience channel—available only the company’s ATT U-verse and DirecTV systems—and Amazon Prime’s gloriously nutball Comrade Detective are reimaginations (or, in Comrade Detective‘s case, maybe a hallucination) of the genre’s past.

Mr. Mercedes updates the much-honored hardboiled noir detectives of the 1940s. Comrade Detective, on the other hand, is a double-barreled satire of two forms that sharply declined in popularity at the end of the 1980s: the cop buddy show, and communism. Television critic Glenn Garvin reviews them both.

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