March 6th 2021 archive

The problematic optics of CW’s Walker: part three.

One of the things that Walker desperately tries to push, or make the audience see, is the “good cop” image.

In a world with Black Lives Matter and after the deaths of so many African-American men at the hands of law enforcement, this is another thing that has made me… for lack of a better way to say it, not watch the show. This is not something that we need right now. My feelings on law enforcement aside — I support defunding the police, do not like how our law enforcement system is set up in regard to police, and think the best cop is one who is no longer working — this is not a show that needs to air right now while so many tensions are still high. But the executive producers were, and are, desperate to push the idea of a “good cop” onto viewers… and, well, anyone who might even remotely watch the show. It’s bad enough that we are still in the midst of a global pandemic and shows are still being produced (why can’t we wait the pandemic out and then get on making new shows?), but now we have the show that the CW has sunk the most money in to advertise desperately trying to show us an example of a “good cop”… and to be honest, they aren’t even getting that right. (As it also stands, Texas Rangers are also inherently racist. There’s that to deal with.)

Barely out of the gate, Walker was renewed for another season, but I don’t see it lasting an awfully long time. Either that or I see it being drug along like a dead horse because the CW is desperate to make this as popular as Supernatural was. And Supernatural originally came over from WB. The CW could never conceive of a show like that on their own, and it became evident with some of the decisions that were later made in regard to the show (#SaveCastiel season seven when they wanted to kill him off, dumping character Charlie Bradbury dead in a bathtub purely for shock value having had a literal Nazi kill her).

These are also sentiments widely held by people who question the CW on… well, pretty much everything.