ABSTRACT
Sometime around 1996, I realized something about my television viewing habits: three out of the four TV dramas that I watched regularly (some might say “religiously”) were cop shows (the other was The X-Files [Fox, 1993-2002]). This was striking because I never previously cared for the genre. The formulaic car chases; the right-wing “lock ’em up and throw away the key” mentality; the overall cheesy production values; and the hypermacho leading men paired with super-sexy female partners: none of it gave me a reason to watch. Two examples should suffice-T.J. Hooker, which ran from 1982-86 on ABC and later on CBS; and Hunter, which ran on NBC from 1984-91-but the list is endless. But the shows that caught my attention in 1996 were different. Law &
Order (NBC, 1990-present), NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993-2005), and Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993-99) were all exceptionally well written, directed, and acted. As I wrote in “God in the Box: Religion in Contemporary Television Cop Shows” for the first edition of God in the Details (199-216), they embodied the “quality television” that was a hallmark of “a golden age of TV, second only to the 1950s” and had the Emmys and critical accolades to prove it. But more than that, all three regularly featured religious-themed episodes, and dealt “consistently, seriously, and self-consciously with religious and moral concerns.”1
