Hey Starsk, can you believe we don't have our own entry yet? It's a revoltin' development Hutch.
"Dwarves and trolls get along in Ankh-Morpork City Watch, but if Completely Mismatched Police Partners didn't Eventually Get Along and Overcome Their Differences the entire narrative universe would come to halt."
Every police force in the US always contains two officers who are direct polar opposites, but are forced to work together, before eventually getting on quite well.
Hollywood Rule Book Vanity Fair
A
Cop Show which focuses on a partnership, as opposed to a
Cop Show which focuses on a single officer/detective or an entire squad.
A Buddy Cop Show that tightly focuses on the emotional lives of the two protagonists risks exciting
Ho Yay among its fans, c.f.
Starsky And Hutch. If the characters spend leisure time together off the job, they're
Heterosexual Life Partners. The buddies are often an
Odd Couple, occasionally
one black and one white
Movie versions abound, or at least they used to:
Bad Boys,
Lethal Weapon,
Die Hard With A Vengeance, etc. It was so common at one point, even making jokes at the expense of the genre is a dead horse.
Hot Fuzz is an excellent
Affectionate Parody.
For the female version, see
Lovely Angels.
See also:
Crime Time TV,
Forensic Drama,
Cop Show,
Police Procedural.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- Alarm Fur Cobra 11
- Cagney And Lacey
- Hunter
- Starsky And Hutch
- Due South, which was not only a Buddy Cop Show but also an Odd Couple.
- Sledge Hammer
- Dalziel and Pascoe
- Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) where one of them is a ghost.
- Alien Nation, where one of them is an alien.
- The Professionals
- TJ Hooker
- Dempsey and Makepeace
- Life On Mars: Another Odd Couple variant, where one is a sexist homophobe and the other is a Fish Out Of Temporal Water.
- The Taiwanese Black And White is a borderline case. It has two badly mismatched partners as main characters but also a large supporting cast of cops, gangsters, mercenaries and hitmen tangled up in a Love Dodecahedron which get a lot of screen time.
- The Sentinel: Blair's technically not a cop, but most of the Major Crimes Unit tends to overlook this and treat him like Jim's official partner.
- The Taiwanese Black And White has Chen Zai Tian who is a dandy and a womanizer and straight-laced Wu Xiong who looks like he has a constant headache from working with Zai Tian.
- Played with in Psych, slightly subverted as Shaun and Gus are best friends who don't get along, and neither have connections to the police force outside Shaun's dad.
- Law & Order has several examples of this, with countless different partnerships over several seasons and two spin-off shows. Notable examples include Briscoe and Green from the original series, Benson and Stabler from SVU, and Goren and Eames from Criminal Intent.
Comic
Western Animation
- Ozzy And Drix, which takes place inside a boy's body, and is based on the much-maligned movie Osmosis Jones.
- Funky Cops
- The Critic,in the episode "Sherman of Arabia", heavily mocked this genre with Beverly Hills Robo K9 Cop and a Half 2, wherein Cowboy Cop Dirty Harry is partnered with, to quote the IMDb...
Da Chief: ...a woman, a cute little kid, an ugly old dog, a dinosaur, and a leprechaun.
Leprechaun: I'll be your lucky charm!
[Leprechaun explodes]
Not Schwarzenegger: You think you've got problems? I'm partnered with a pig, an alien, Siamese twins, a sofa, and a second rate mime.
(The mime also exploded.)
- Fillmore: A Buddy Hall Monitor Show.
Anime and Manga
Literature
- Discworld partnered Cuddy, a dwarf, and Detritus, a troll. Of course, Discworld being a narrative universe, they eventually became best friends. Then brutually subverted when Cuddy is killed suddenly. Detritus has gone on to become arguably the fourth most powerful cop in the city, behind Angua, Carrot, and Vimes.
- Isaac Asimov's Robot series, with Elijah Baley and Robot Daneel Olivaw. Lije and Daneel are partners in the first book and remain good friends throughout the rest of the series, but each book of the trilogy examines a different facet of the relationship between robots and humans at a societal level.
Fan Fiction
- Double K, an AU Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann webcomic based off of what the show would be like if Kamina and Kittan were two cops partnered up Starsky and Hutch-style.
