YMMV / COPS (1989)

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• Awesome Music: Bad Boys, Bad Boys, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Each department has their own fan favorite officer or deputy who is popular with fans and the production staff, who are spotlighted/namechecked, even if they only appear for a couple of seconds. Case in point, Deputy Win Sargent of Pierce County, Washington. Or Officer Duane Eamon, of North Las Vegas.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "I CAN BREAK THESE CUFFS! You can't break those cuffs!"
  • Comedians and commentators often note how often male suspects being taken into custody will be lacking a shirt.
    • And the guys who are wearing a shirt are usually in little more that a white, sleeveless undershirt. To the point where the frequent appearance of such men in domestic disturbance calls on Cops has lead such shirts to become irrevocably known as "wife beaters".
  • Vonda, the drunk woman caught walking down the street during a snowy night is a treasure trove of memes.
  • I'LL GET YOU, BITCH!
• Most Wonderful Sound: The awesome southern blues riff of the Barbour/Langley Productions/Langley Productions Vanity Plate, in both its 1994 and 2008 incarnations.
• Values Dissonance: The show didn't really ever keep up with Americans' shifting views on the War on Drugs and may have very likely contributed to its cancellation. During the show's first fifteen years or so, drug-related arrests, predominantly those of minority groups (mostly African-American and Latino men) made up a large amount of the arrests the show depicted. This worked at the time due to the fact that these policies were very popularly supported, even among minority groups. Around the mid-2000s, the massive change in public opinion on the War on Drugs (particularly how it affected said minority groups) and a backlash against police brutality as a whole made these arrests (and the show as a whole) look a lot less comfortable than it once was. The show's continued doubling down and increasing of these portrayals may have been a contributing factor to its second cancellation in 2020. The show being revived on the streaming platform of Fox News, whose history of racial bias and pro-"Blue Lives Matter" viewpoints have been well-documented, only continued the trope optics.

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