I’ve started watching Father Brown on Netflix and I’ve taken quite a liking to it.
Similar to Sherlock and White Collar, I’ve really enjoyed it because it’s a Cop Show without all the things that usually make me hate Cop Shows– y’know, chest-beating interrogation scenes, a general attitude of moral fury, on-the-nose manipulative storytelling designed to make you think the newest suspect is the perp when you KNOW a twist is coming, implicit “shut up and trust the system” messaging.
I’ve been thinking for a while that every police procedural, or similar villain-of-the-week drama, has this implicit structure where there’s three types of people: cops, criminals, and bystanders, and the fundamental character of the show comes from which of these groups are considered more similar to each other than to the third– which of the groups are two sides of the same coin, and which is the outlier.
Sherlock and Moriarty are more similar to each other than either of them is to the rest of the cast. Same goes for Batman and the Joker, or White Collar’s Neil Caffrey and the con artists he chases after. In these shows, the Cops and Criminals are two of a kind, conducting a secret war with each other, and the Bystanders are the outliers.
Whereas in a standard police procedural like Law & Order or NCIS, the cops have a kind of contempt for civilians, and the narrative tends to focus on the ways in which Bystanders interfere with police work, usually by keeping secrets, or by government bureaucrats and private sector institutions challenging police power. In these shows, the Bystanders and Criminals are two of a kind, both “people who get in the way of THE LAW”, and the Cops are the outliers, the Only Adults in the Room keeping the squabbling children in line.
The Cops and Bystanders are considered two of a kind in Sentai shows, like Sailor Moon and Power Rangers, where there’s a lot of focus on the protagonists living double lives as both superheroes and civilians, and also in many adventure stories, where one of the major themes is the protagonists as ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. In shows like that, the Criminals are the outliers, and tend to be not merely strange or bad people, but an altogether otherworldly force.
But in Father Brown, these distinctions don’t exist. There are no hardened career criminals, heroic ubermensch cops, or clueless civilians. Everyone’s just people. And I think it’s the fundamentally religious character of the show that allows this to happen: nobody’s a superhero, nobody’s a monster, we’re all just all-too-human sinners.
I think Chesterton sometimes can’t be more heavy-handed with adamantly refusing the concept of dividing people into the good, the bad, and the Hufflepuff.
On top of “the bystander did it” and “the bystander did it because he didn’t want to be the bystander”, there’s at least one story that literally goes “the bystander did it because the cops assumed he’s the bystander so strongly that they didn’t even care”