ABSTRACT
The Danish Film Act specifically supports film art as a domain separate from, but feeding into, the film industry. American premium cable television, on the other hand, is pretty much the exact opposite of a state-supported zone of freedom from the market. There is, then, a ruse of the market in the arts: the cynicism of the market is entailed in the logic of the market, and has nothing necessarily to do with individual cynicism. The cop show protagonist is incapable of maintaining a domestic life more from a generic avoidance of sitcom and soap opera than from the perennially invoked motivation of pressure of the job and Lund is no exception. The logic of the Shakespearean plot, by which David Simon means a plot driven by the decisions of complex central characters quality television is entirely compatible with the logic of identity, of a social life made up of more or less loosely disorganized positive attributes.
