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Police procedurals are stasis machines.
They are designed to run in place.
Oh, sure, they look like theyre moving.
Crime after crime is introduced and solved; cast members come and go.
Its a genre built to resist change.
So the summer of 2020 posed a problem for some creators of TV cop shows.
But how, without dismantling the basic idea of what a cop show is?
One year later, its clear that most shows barely tried to answer that question.
Which is what made this season ofNCIS: New Orleansso surprising.
It did not reinvent the wheel, but it tweaked it.
Pride himself goes from self-certain white knight to a man questioning his privilege.
The shows new direction has been obvious enough that a vocal portion of its viewership grew frustrated.
Fox and Newsbusters ran glibly furious coverage of the season, explaining thatNOLAhad doubled down on false liberal propaganda.
Facebook and Twitter commentersregisteredcomplaintsabout the shows woke-ness.
Nash steered Silber toward a deeper exploration of its protagonists.
It wasnt that they were brand-new stories, Nash told me.
It was that she wanted to spend time making the characters into more self-reflective people.
Kern had been obsessed with making Dwayne Pride go rogue on the job.
When Nash came onto the show, one of her first questions was,Why is he like this?
Early in its final season,NCIS: New Orleansaired a scene that signaled its protagonist had changed.
In it, Pride challenges one of his colleagues a retired police superintendent named Holland (Gareth Williams).
Holland is furious about the confrontation, but Pride pushes back.
He tells Holland hes being an ass.
He scolds him for being disrespectful.
We had our time, Pride tells Holland.
Its her time now.
Its not a flashy setpiece.
But some epiphanies are quiet.
The showrunners were initially hesitant, particularly Nash.
Its a fair point.
Structure is a key reason why change is so hard in this genre.
It was ultimately COVID that provided Silber and Nash with a solution.
The decision was made purely for safety reasons.
Fields newly large role meant the writers needed to give her and Pride something to do.
He stares at himself in the mirror while Rita looks on, concerned.
Hes done things, he tells Rita.
On one hand, this is an obvious opportunity for Pride to do some politically de rigueur soul-searching.
Its also markedly different from the way Pride was depicted during Kerns era running the show.
How could someone call him bad?
But its not nothing, either.
NOLAis not the lone cop show that attempted to meet the moment this past year.
ABCsThe Rookieput its heroic lead character, played by Nathan Fillion, in newly uncomfortable situations.
It was easier forThe Rookieto pivot thanNCIS.
Its a patrol-policing show, which frees it from the strict regime of one mystery per hour.
Its protagonists are not detectives, solving a new murder every week.
Theyre newbies, chasing down shoplifters and learning how to be undercover.
Somehow, data pipe televisions unending appetite for police procedurals has only grown in the last year.
Even at the time, that scene created a lot of discussion.
I felt pretty strongly that we werent giving this moment enough screen time, Burton says.
Burton anticipates that the current appetite for stories about social justice will be a passing fad.
He sounds frustrated and sad.
That was a conversation this nation had never had before, he said.
The expectation that it was the beginning of a sweeping change did not bear out.
