Daily Archives: February 15, 2020

(Maurizio Cattelans Comedian)

This is an art which no longer presumes to speak to or for the general public. Such an art assails all previous art and even ridicules art itself.

It seems every year or so some new peculiarity from the Art World is cast into the public spotlight. Most recently, a single banana duct taped to a wall at the Basil Miami Art Fair sold for $120,000. Apparently, before artist Maurizio Cattelan (of golden toilet fame) could even cash his check, someone came along, untaped the banana from the wall and ate it.

The general public is more or less amused by such antics, while critics enlighten us on their cultural significance. We are told that a banana duct-taped to a wall is more than a banana duck taped to a wallor, alternately, that a banana duck-taped to a wall is nothing but a banana duck taped to a wall. Apparently the words profound and banal are now synonyms. As often as not, we are further informed that our sensibilities have been challenged and subverted. Most of us dont seem to be aware that weve been challenged and subverted, which is apparently why the adamantine public is in perpetual need of ever more challenging and subverting. This kind of thing has been going on for quite a while now, so we might well wonder: Why does it persist?

A Return to Nothing

Cattelans banana and golden toilet partake in a century-old tradition of anti-art. Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassetin his 1925 essay The Dehumanization of Artdescribes the emergence of a radically new sensibility in art, which was arising in response to the cultural and institutional collapse of Europe. For artists, all forms and conventions were called into question, and the very nature and purpose of art became problematic. This new art turns away from lived reality, observes Ortrega, and the artist is going against reality. He is shattering the human aspect, dehumanizing it. This is an art which no longer presumes to speak to or for the general public. Such an art assails all previous art and even ridicules art itself.

Marcel Duchamps ready-mades epitomize this absurd state of human creativity, stripped of its historical powers of depicting a common reality. Duchamps inverted porcelain urinal is the ultimate parody: not only has art become uselessart makes the most utilitarian useless. Ortega was ambivalent about this emerging sensibility. Who knows what will come of this budding style, wondered Ortega: the task it sets itself is enormous, it wants to create out of nought.

Europe found itself in a state of nought very much as Nietzsche had prophesied more than a generation earlier. He called this state of civilizational and psychological collapse nihilism. Nietzsche saw this as simultaneously a disasterbut also as a great opportunity. He envisioned two kinds of responses to nihilism: one response as divine or activeand another as pathological or weak.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see these two responses to an experience of nihilism manifest in two strains of art. Nihilism, according to Nietzsche, is overcome by an immersion into the world of experience and the acceptance of conflict and suffering as necessary aspects of a unified universe. This active or healthy response to nihilism is found in artists like Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee. The collapse of art represented the possibility of a wholly new beginning, an unprecedented opportunity to shed dysfunctional conventions. Kandinskys abstract art represents a return to essentials, purging itself of its now useless outer forms, and it was guided by an inner necessity. Kandinskys abstract art contains the hidden seed of renaissance, and artists were to be, in effect, the invisible Moses who sees the dance around the golden calf.

For Klee, the disastrous collapse of Europe could be seen as a part of an ever-greater transcendent whole. Evil is not conceived as the enemy whose victories disgrace us, wrote Klee, but as a force within the whole, a force that continues into creation and evolution. This divine or transcendent strain of art accepts the reality of the modern human condition, while affirming the many millennia traditional function of all art as a unifying power (as a way of reconciling us to nature). This is Camille Paglias characterization of art as, revelation of the interconnectedness of reality.

Nietzsches weak or pathological response to nihilism is characterized by a confused understanding of the very nature of the experience of nihilism. The collapse of the Christian interpretation of reality, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations are false. Absurdity, disorder, and meaninglessness are not understood to be aspects of reality but to constitute the very nature of reality. This sensibility does not embrace and transcend its historical moment; rather, it succumbs to nihilism. To reconcile meaning and meaningless requires an affirmation of the unity of history and nature. As Nietzsche imagined, this weak response to nihilism has prevailed. It is precisely Nietzsches last man who fails to transcend nihilism; he is sterile and incapable of creative acts of affirmation and renewal.

Some of the pathological aspects of nihilism can be seen in sentiments expressed in the anti-art Dada movement. The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art but of disgust. wrote Tristan Tzara in 1924. As Dada marches it continually destroysThe Beautiful and the True in art do not existEverything is incoherentThere is no logic. This tendency to reject lived reality (and this incapacity to affirm a unity of experiential reality) suggests a kind of art and a whole sensibility that no longer serves as a revelation of the interconnectedness of reality. This strain of art became a revelation of the disconnectedness of reality.

Both Nietzsche and Ortega anticipated this tendency to dissociate from experiential reality into the world of ideas and ideation (this is indeed the soil out of which would grow the great totalitarian monstrosities). The idea, writes Ortega, instead of functioning as the means to think an object with, is itself made the object and the aim of thinking. Writing in 1946 Marcel Duchamp recognized the Dadaist movement as serviceable as purgative, but Duchamp himself did not re-engage the world of experiential reality; rather, he ceased creating art and immersed himself in the world of ideas. And so the experience of meaninglessness became the idea of meaninglessness. Nihilistic Dada arose from experience but became a state of mind, incapable or unwilling to reengage with paradoxical reality and, in the words of Ortega, doomed to irony.

The Opposite of All Earthly Things

Ortega recognized the youthful nature of this new artistic sensibility, which recognizes no past and no obligations. However, nothing is free to remain young forever. Its been more than a century since Duchamp first exhibited his inverted porcelain urinal. Art as provocation, subversion, and a challenging of norms has now been around long enough that it has become quite normal. The iconoclasts are now icons, and unorthodoxy is the new orthodoxy.

A sensibility of disconnectedness and absurdity has become routinized and institutionalized. We now have what Arthur Danto christened as theArtworld: an international complex of artists, museums, galleries, critics, theorists, and educators who propagate various forms of art as concept, art-as-art, art as self-expression, as a display of wounds, as provocation, etc.This is generally a dehumanized self-referential art that makes no attempt to give form to a common reality, except, of course, ironically. Czesaw Mioszcharacterized this sensibility as, the rapture of self-liberation. What began as an experience of disconnectedness became the idea of disconnectedness, and, finally, the idea becomes idol. The visions of the prophet become the dogma of the priests.

This sensibility of absurdity inevitably would percolate down through consciousness into pop culture. The nihilistic anti-art sensibility even made its way into comic books. In 1961, DC Comics published a strange satirical inversion of Superman comics called Tales of the Bizarro World. Bizarros are inverse duplicates of Superman; they insist on doing the opposite of normal: they say goodbye when they arrive, hello when the leave; they punish their children if they get good grades, andin Bizarro Worldgold is worthless and rags are riches. Bizarro anti-morality is actually well-described by the Bizarro Code:

Us do opposite of all earthly things!

Us hate beauty!

Us love ugliness!

Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizzaro World!

I discovered Bizarro comics when I was around twelve years old. What appealed to me and my friends was the unrelenting silliness and absurdity of the Bizarros. We ourselves would play at Bizarro logic, which would, of course, quickly devolve to pure inanity. (You dont have to go very far with the logic of negation to arrive at complete nonsense.)

A total negation of any thing is no thing. There is, then, no Bizarro worldor, more precisely, there is no Bizarro world in itself. Bizarro comics are a pictorial representation of the human minds amazing capacity to play games with itself. Bizarro comics reflect an imaginary unreal world. Bizarro comics are part of a greater physical, social, economic order, but they tell us nothing about how disorder is part of ordernothing of the interconnectedness of reality. Bizarro comics are simply the objectification of an experience of absurdity for twelve year olds

In one episode of Bizarro comics someone commits the great crime of building a beautiful museum. This museum is apparently full of great classics of art, which, of course, disgust the Bizarros. We can well imagine the kinds of art that would fill a proper Bizarro museum: perhaps an upside down urinal, an 18k gold toilet, a blank painting, a banana taped to a wall. The anti-art of the modern world is our Bizarro Art. The likes of Maurizio Cattelan seem to have stepped right out of the pages of Bizarro Comics. Anti-art is the objectification of an experience of absurdity for adults.

Absolute Irony

A twelve year olds reaction to Bizarro comics is quite similar to the way most of us react to contemporary anti-art: We are amused and move on. However, a flirtation with absurdity can cultivate a healthy sense of irony. Irony helps keep the mind supple by understanding the fragility of the forms of existence. A sense of irony reflects an awareness of the fragile balance of order and disorder and an understanding that we never get something for nothing.

All traditional art has an element of irony insofar as all art understands there to be a tension between the work of art and reality, a tension between the surface world of appearances and distinctions and the greater whole. But, an irony which presumes no underlying reality is an irony unmoored from reality. This is an absolute irony. Anti-art has come to embody an absolute irony.

No artist is presumed to embody this absolute irony of anti-art more than Andy Warhol. He famously said: If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings, my films and me, and there I am. There is nothing behind it. Andy Warhol is the Chauncey Gardinerof anti-art, and, arguably, he didnt have an ironic bone in his body; he simply tells the truth as he sees it.

The anti-art acolytes of a beatified Andy Warhol confuse his banality with profundity. They encase themselves in a prophylaxis of irony presuming to protect themselves from the bourgeois sin of actually taking experiential reality seriously. They seem to actually believe that the Bizarro-speak of absolute irony transforms their own banality into profundity. This absolute irony, this hyper-awareness of the illusory nature of all forms, pushed to its limits resembles obliviousness, idiocy and ultimately navet. This is an irony, which presumes to see through everything and ends up seeing nothing at all.

So again, why does anti-art persist? Every kind of art, Nietzsche observes, tells us something about the artist and, in turn, something about the civilization that sustains such art. An art of disconnectedness reflects a civilization of disconnectedness. A civilization which is so powerful at controlling and manipulating nature has no apparent need to articulate a relationship to nature. A civilization which presumes we can get something from nothing supports and celebrates a kind of art which, in effect, reveals and affirms nothing.

Anti-art is, then, the tip of a civilizational iceberg. The persistence of anti-art is merely one manifestation of a way of thinking that presumes reality can be subverted, broken down into pieces, and reconstituted as we please. When all forms appear as arbitrary or self-serving, then nature and history are merely raw materials. We dont participate in reality; we fabricate reality. Reality is our idea. Which is to say, reality, like everything else, is a choice, a commodity. Society itself is a ready-made, which can be remade from nothing.

When Arthur Danto pronounced the End of Art in 1984, arguably what he was doing was acknowledging that the transcendent powers of the human imagination had been rendered impotent and absorbed into the greater economic order of disorder. Which is to say, the human imagination has been doomed to irony. Anti-artists propagate ways of thinking that reflect and reinforce a sense of fragmentation and a larger economy of disconnectedness. Anti-artists are the propagandist and performers for the disconnected universe. Far from subverting the greater commercial and social order, they reinforce a fragmented kind of thinking best adapted to that order. They are apparently ironical about everything but themselves.

Anti-artists have even figured out how to capitalize on our fragmented psyches while presuming to maintain their own innocence. I cant wait to make really bad art and get away with it, pronounces a youthful rebellious Damien Hirst. Decoding this Bizarro-speak means that he cant wait to do exactly what hes expected to do and get handsomely compensated. Anti-artists are celebrated and paid large sums of money by those most invested in a fragmented universe, those most abstracted from the world of conflict and connectedness. Its no coincidence that anti-art reflects and justifies the world of urban intellectuals and cosmopolitan capitalists.

A Return to Earthly Things

Our anti-art artists, experts, and educators tell us one thing, but reality increasingly appears to be telling us something else. Anti-art does, indeed, address an aspect of our modern experience, but it declines to look at the whole. We, as individuals and as a civilization, live on the razors edge of order and disorder, and it was once the role of artists and poets to articulate how it all interconnected. Today, our anti- artists apparently have nothing to say and would convince us there is nothing to know.

Our art has been dehumanized, but we remain human. Even those who presume to do the opposite of all earthly things always seem to end up doing some kind of earthly thing. Anti-artistsjust like the rest of uslive in a world of relationships, which sustain life. Artists who affirm a fragmented, meaningless universe are affirming a reality which even they themselves in their daily lives do not actually experience. No doubt Maurizio Cattelan eats food on plates, defecates in toilets, puts his pants on one leg at a time, says hello when arriving, goodbye when leaving: No one actually lives by negation, absurdity, or disorder. Every twelve year old knows: Bizarros are notand never can bereal.

Chris Augusta is an artist living in Maine.

Link:

Maurizio Cattelan and When Art Ridicules Art Itself - Merion West

Jeremy Bamber looks very smug at the beginning of White House Farms finale. Hes in St Tropez sipping cocktails on a sun lounger, hes jumping into the pool, chain-smoking Marlboros and sleeping with a glamorous woman who likes paying for his drinks. He even retains this smug expression when police arrest him at the airport for the suspected murder of his family.

Seeing the details of the White House Farm investigation unfold piece-by-piece has made for a satisfying watch. The decision to draw out the series into six parts means that the evidence has been easier to follow than in other recent police procedurals. But I was hoping that it might have interrogated something beyond the murders themselves: how quick police were to believe a woman suffering from a mental illness could murder her children, for example, or perhaps the pitfalls of the drug-fuelled nihilism and excess of the Seventies. Instead, White House Farm fixated on bullet angles and breaking and entry points throughout.

Jeremy Bamber relaxes by the pool in ITV drama White House Farm (ITV)

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The last episode sees us leave the mustard yellow and kitsch china of domestic family life for the clinical whiteness of the courtroom. Much focus is placed on wrapping up the details of the case. At points, it feels as though we are rehashing details we learnt in previous episodes. Did Jeremy leave the gun out overnight on purpose so he could grab it quickly? Why did Jeremy ring the local police station rather than 999? How did Nevill Bamber walk downstairs to call Jeremy if by that point he would have supposedly have been shot in the jaw twice? We have already been told that none of this makes sense, we dont need to be told again.

Launched to much fanfare as a television movie and boasting a killer theme tune from Quincy Jones, Ironside starred Raymond Burr, who was still hot after his stint as televisions Perry Mason, as San Francisco Chief of Police Robert T Ironside, who is confined to a wheelchair after an attempted assassination. Over 199 episodes, the series followed Ironside and his team in his role as consultant to the Police Department as they sorted out the bad guys of the City by the Bay.

NBC

Ian Rankin says he has never watched any of the television adaptions of his famously brooding, heavy drinking, loner detective because he didnt want the actors faces replacing how he envisaged Rebus in his head. Two actors have played Rebus on screen, John Hannah and Ken Stott. Hannah gives the role his best but was probably too young and lacked the cynical gravitas that Stott gave to Rebus. With similar roles in The Vice and Messiah giving Stott an identifiable acting persona, he perhaps has the same problem as Humphrey Bogart being too much like Bogart to play the definitive Philip Marlowe, but in the absence of any other candidates, Stott is just fine. Rankins central theme of the Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy of Scotlands capital city remains intact, and as in the novels, the real star of the show is of course, Edinburgh itself in all its historic beauty, showing the dark underbelly of the city behind the chintz curtains.

Nostalgia might not be what it used to be, but the biggest mystery with Life on Mars is why it took someone so long to come up with this inspired paean to the pop culture and TV cop shows of the 1970s. Throw in the fish-out-of-water time travel motif and the tongue in cheek non-PC scripts and characters, and its not hard to see why the series struck a chord with audiences.

BBC

Like many of his ilk, dedicated near-genius DCI John Luther (a brilliant Idris Elba) is a tormented soul, struggling with his own inner demons, hugely affected by the stomach churning crimes he investigates. Luther is so obsessive that he will do anything to get his man (or woman, in the case of his nemesis, the psychopathic scientist Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) Both cerebral and heart pumping, Luther was created by Neil Cross and has spawned American and Russian versions.

BBC

Gillian Anderson is the deliberate, dedicated senior detective on the trail of an equally meticulous serial killer in this controversial drama filmed and set in Northern Ireland. The Fall survived accusations of misogyny and voyeurism to lift a Bafta for best television drama and keep viewers hooked for three series, but remains a troubling, unsettling experience for many.

The cop show that more than any other blew the stereotypical image of female police officers out of the water, and challenged the sexist attitudes of many executives in the television industry. Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless won the hearts of millions of viewers, and six Emmys between them, as two dedicated New York police officers who happened to be women with normal lives and challenges like everyone else. The bond between the two characters was unbreakable despite leading entirely different lives (Lacey was married with a family and supportive husband, Cagney drifted from relationship to relationship). A game changer in many ways, Cagney and Lacey explored issues such as rape, abortion and Cagneys alcoholism head on.

Set in the Metropolitan Police Complaints Investigation Bureau, the Bafta winning Between the Lines follows ambitious Chief Superintendent Tony Clarke and his team as they investigate corruption within the police force. Between the Lines drew praise for the way it tackled topical issues of the day as it attempted to address the age old moral dilemma, quis custodiet ipsos custodes who will guard the guards themselves?

The cop show that more than any other blurred the lines between the good guys and the bad guys. Rogue cop Vic Mackey leads the elite strike force of LA detectives who routinely break the law to keep the streets safe, but also to feather their own nest. There are subplots aplenty, and Mackeys downfall plays out almost like a Shakespearean tragedy.

Set in the fictional northern town of Newtown, Z Cars broke new ground in police drama shows, challenging the homely predictability of the likes of Dixon of Dock Green. Devised by Allan Prior and Troy Kennedy Martin, the series centred on not just one central protagonist, but rather several police officers both uniformed and plain clothed. Z Cars brought some iconic characters into the nations living rooms such as detective Charlie Barlow, PC Fancy Smith and desk sergeant Bert Lynch. The police officers themselves were portrayed warts and all, with gritty subject matter, including domestic abuse at the hands of a police officer, at the heart of the storylines. The actors became household names with the iconic theme tune whistled on everyones lips, and of course there were the Z cars themselves, the American-style Ford Zephyr and Zodiac patrol cars.

If Cagney and Lacey blazed the trail for female cops, then the first series of Prime Suspect in particular indicated a seismic shift in the perception of, and the attitudes towards, the female police officer. Helen Mirren is outstanding as DCI Jane Tennison who heads a murder squad hunting a sadistic serial killer, but has to overcome opposition and resentment from her team as well as the institutionalised sexism of the police department itself. Subsequent series concentrated more on Tennisons inner demons as she began to rely on alcohol to help her cope with the pressures of the job.

This Danish police procedural and prime example of Scandinavian noir attracted criticism for its violence against women. It did, however, become an international success particularly in the UK. Viewers were gripped by the formula; that of each episode reflecting 24 hours in the same murder case, and by the cold-fish female detective protagonist Sarah Lund, while developing an almost fetishist fascination with her knitwear. The Killing paved the way for other subtitled European crime dramas and equally popular and acclaimed entries such as The Bridge and Borgen quickly followed.

Filmed in New City with a two-pronged approach of the investigation of a crime and arrest of a suspect, followed by the suspects trial, Law and Order introduced one of the great small-screen detectives, recovering alcoholic Lennie Briscoe. (Jerry Orbach). The shows boast was that many of its subject matters were ripped from the headlines and it was this approach that gave it a compelling topical feel and made it the longest-running American crime series and the benchmark for police procedurals.

An outstanding ratings success for BBC2, Jed Mercurios masterful police corruption thriller gripped viewers from the very beginning and kept them guessing until the explosive climax to the third series. The bold, serpentine and gripping storylines provided the exemplary cast with parts of a lifetime, with the most outstanding feature of Line of Duty undoubtedly the lengthy interrogation scenes as the tension was racked up notch by notch.

PA

After Bing Crosby turned the role down, Peter Falk became synonymous with the cigar smoking, dishevelled police lieutenant in a shabby raincoat, winning four Emmys and a Golden Globe. Referred to as a howcatchem by its creators, Columbo deviated from the traditional whodunit in that the audience and, it seemed, Columbo himself, knew the identity of the murderer from the start. Half the fun of the show was watching the murderer (frequently an A- or B-list guest star) underestimate the seemingly bumbling, absent-minded detective while he baited the trap to snare them. Oh, and just one more thing, as Columbo himself might say: although Columbo routinely spoke of his wife, she was never seen in any episode, but the character was later given her own, short-lived, spin-off show, Mrs Columbo.

It has been compared to the works of Dickens and Dostoevsky and lauded as the greatest television programme ever. But the triumph of The Wire is how it tells the story of the decaying city of Baltimore through the lives of the police, drug dealers, politicians, children and the dispossessed, making no moral judgements between good and bad in a predominately grey world. The Wire may not be the greatest television programme ever, but its realism and authenticity can never be in doubt. In 2005, members of a drugs gang claimed they had studied The Wire in order to learn about the latest police surveillance techniques, surely the ultimate example of life imitating art.

Aping its antecedent Hill Street Blues cinema verite style, multi award winning NYPD Blue was a natural progression for co-creator Steven Bochno, who along with David Milsch came up with even grittier storylines, atmospheric New York locations and warts n all characters to create a hugely compelling and influential cop show. But lets be honest, despite a terrific ensemble cast, Dennis Franz as scenery-chewing recovering alcoholic detective Andy Sipowicz, was virtually the whole show, appearing in all 261 episodes and in the process searing his psyche in viewers minds.

Getty

Baltimore native Barry Levinson was a natural fit as executive producer of this ultra-realistic police procedural, based on The Wire creator David Simons book chronicling his experiences following homicide detectives at work in the so-called City of Firsts. From the very first episode Life on the Street succeeded in dispelling the myths and stereotypes about the television cop, showing that murder and violence were just a routine parts of the job. Indeed the murder of a schoolgirl in that first episode was never solved. Aficionados rate this show even better than The Wire. Some have called Homicide: Life on the Street the missing link between Hill Street Blues and The Wire. Beg, borrow or steal the box set and find out why.

Such is the renown of the celebrated television adaptation of Colin Dexters novels featuring the enigmatic real-ale swilling, arts loving, crossword buff detective, that theres very little left to say apart from its basically a brilliant variation on the classic English whodunit, Kevin Whatelys Lewis is to John Thaws Morse as Dr Watson was to Sherlock Holmes, and Thaw is simply wonderful.

Rex

It has become so caricatured and parodied in recent years that its easy to overlook the fact that The Sweeney made Z Cars look as antiquated as the former did Dixon of Dock Green a decade earlier. Created by Ian Kennedy Martin, brother of Z Cars co-creator Troy, The Sweeney was shot in 16mm film and that, along with extensive location shooting, gave it a more cinematic look than other studio-bound rivals.

Rex Features

Created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll and still celebrated, still hugely influential, and still the cop show to which almost everything that has come since owes a huge debt. From Mike Posts iconic theme and the innovative cinema vrit-evoking handheld camera, to the brilliant ensemble cast creating beloved characters and dramatic storylines in the urban sprawl of an unnamed US city, Hill Street Blues pioneered a new wave of cop shows. Ironically, it never gained huge audience ratings, but garnered a grand total of 98 Emmy nominations. Groundbreaking, thought provoking, emotional and funny, Hill Street Blues stands tall in the canon of truly great television.

Hulton archives/getty images

Launched to much fanfare as a television movie and boasting a killer theme tune from Quincy Jones, Ironside starred Raymond Burr, who was still hot after his stint as televisions Perry Mason, as San Francisco Chief of Police Robert T Ironside, who is confined to a wheelchair after an attempted assassination. Over 199 episodes, the series followed Ironside and his team in his role as consultant to the Police Department as they sorted out the bad guys of the City by the Bay.

NBC

Ian Rankin says he has never watched any of the television adaptions of his famously brooding, heavy drinking, loner detective because he didnt want the actors faces replacing how he envisaged Rebus in his head. Two actors have played Rebus on screen, John Hannah and Ken Stott. Hannah gives the role his best but was probably too young and lacked the cynical gravitas that Stott gave to Rebus. With similar roles in The Vice and Messiah giving Stott an identifiable acting persona, he perhaps has the same problem as Humphrey Bogart being too much like Bogart to play the definitive Philip Marlowe, but in the absence of any other candidates, Stott is just fine. Rankins central theme of the Jekyll and Hyde dichotomy of Scotlands capital city remains intact, and as in the novels, the real star of the show is of course, Edinburgh itself in all its historic beauty, showing the dark underbelly of the city behind the chintz curtains.

Nostalgia might not be what it used to be, but the biggest mystery with Life on Mars is why it took someone so long to come up with this inspired paean to the pop culture and TV cop shows of the 1970s. Throw in the fish-out-of-water time travel motif and the tongue in cheek non-PC scripts and characters, and its not hard to see why the series struck a chord with audiences.

BBC

Like many of his ilk, dedicated near-genius DCI John Luther (a brilliant Idris Elba) is a tormented soul, struggling with his own inner demons, hugely affected by the stomach churning crimes he investigates. Luther is so obsessive that he will do anything to get his man (or woman, in the case of his nemesis, the psychopathic scientist Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) Both cerebral and heart pumping, Luther was created by Neil Cross and has spawned American and Russian versions.

BBC

Gillian Anderson is the deliberate, dedicated senior detective on the trail of an equally meticulous serial killer in this controversial drama filmed and set in Northern Ireland. The Fall survived accusations of misogyny and voyeurism to lift a Bafta for best television drama and keep viewers hooked for three series, but remains a troubling, unsettling experience for many.

The cop show that more than any other blew the stereotypical image of female police officers out of the water, and challenged the sexist attitudes of many executives in the television industry. Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless won the hearts of millions of viewers, and six Emmys between them, as two dedicated New York police officers who happened to be women with normal lives and challenges like everyone else. The bond between the two characters was unbreakable despite leading entirely different lives (Lacey was married with a family and supportive husband, Cagney drifted from relationship to relationship). A game changer in many ways, Cagney and Lacey explored issues such as rape, abortion and Cagneys alcoholism head on.

Set in the Metropolitan Police Complaints Investigation Bureau, the Bafta winning Between the Lines follows ambitious Chief Superintendent Tony Clarke and his team as they investigate corruption within the police force. Between the Lines drew praise for the way it tackled topical issues of the day as it attempted to address the age old moral dilemma, quis custodiet ipsos custodes who will guard the guards themselves?

The cop show that more than any other blurred the lines between the good guys and the bad guys. Rogue cop Vic Mackey leads the elite strike force of LA detectives who routinely break the law to keep the streets safe, but also to feather their own nest. There are subplots aplenty, and Mackeys downfall plays out almost like a Shakespearean tragedy.

Set in the fictional northern town of Newtown, Z Cars broke new ground in police drama shows, challenging the homely predictability of the likes of Dixon of Dock Green. Devised by Allan Prior and Troy Kennedy Martin, the series centred on not just one central protagonist, but rather several police officers both uniformed and plain clothed. Z Cars brought some iconic characters into the nations living rooms such as detective Charlie Barlow, PC Fancy Smith and desk sergeant Bert Lynch. The police officers themselves were portrayed warts and all, with gritty subject matter, including domestic abuse at the hands of a police officer, at the heart of the storylines. The actors became household names with the iconic theme tune whistled on everyones lips, and of course there were the Z cars themselves, the American-style Ford Zephyr and Zodiac patrol cars.

If Cagney and Lacey blazed the trail for female cops, then the first series of Prime Suspect in particular indicated a seismic shift in the perception of, and the attitudes towards, the female police officer. Helen Mirren is outstanding as DCI Jane Tennison who heads a murder squad hunting a sadistic serial killer, but has to overcome opposition and resentment from her team as well as the institutionalised sexism of the police department itself. Subsequent series concentrated more on Tennisons inner demons as she began to rely on alcohol to help her cope with the pressures of the job.

This Danish police procedural and prime example of Scandinavian noir attracted criticism for its violence against women. It did, however, become an international success particularly in the UK. Viewers were gripped by the formula; that of each episode reflecting 24 hours in the same murder case, and by the cold-fish female detective protagonist Sarah Lund, while developing an almost fetishist fascination with her knitwear. The Killing paved the way for other subtitled European crime dramas and equally popular and acclaimed entries such as The Bridge and Borgen quickly followed.

Filmed in New City with a two-pronged approach of the investigation of a crime and arrest of a suspect, followed by the suspects trial, Law and Order introduced one of the great small-screen detectives, recovering alcoholic Lennie Briscoe. (Jerry Orbach). The shows boast was that many of its subject matters were ripped from the headlines and it was this approach that gave it a compelling topical feel and made it the longest-running American crime series and the benchmark for police procedurals.

An outstanding ratings success for BBC2, Jed Mercurios masterful police corruption thriller gripped viewers from the very beginning and kept them guessing until the explosive climax to the third series. The bold, serpentine and gripping storylines provided the exemplary cast with parts of a lifetime, with the most outstanding feature of Line of Duty undoubtedly the lengthy interrogation scenes as the tension was racked up notch by notch.

PA

After Bing Crosby turned the role down, Peter Falk became synonymous with the cigar smoking, dishevelled police lieutenant in a shabby raincoat, winning four Emmys and a Golden Globe. Referred to as a howcatchem by its creators, Columbo deviated from the traditional whodunit in that the audience and, it seemed, Columbo himself, knew the identity of the murderer from the start. Half the fun of the show was watching the murderer (frequently an A- or B-list guest star) underestimate the seemingly bumbling, absent-minded detective while he baited the trap to snare them. Oh, and just one more thing, as Columbo himself might say: although Columbo routinely spoke of his wife, she was never seen in any episode, but the character was later given her own, short-lived, spin-off show, Mrs Columbo.

It has been compared to the works of Dickens and Dostoevsky and lauded as the greatest television programme ever. But the triumph of The Wire is how it tells the story of the decaying city of Baltimore through the lives of the police, drug dealers, politicians, children and the dispossessed, making no moral judgements between good and bad in a predominately grey world. The Wire may not be the greatest television programme ever, but its realism and authenticity can never be in doubt. In 2005, members of a drugs gang claimed they had studied The Wire in order to learn about the latest police surveillance techniques, surely the ultimate example of life imitating art.

Aping its antecedent Hill Street Blues cinema verite style, multi award winning NYPD Blue was a natural progression for co-creator Steven Bochno, who along with David Milsch came up with even grittier storylines, atmospheric New York locations and warts n all characters to create a hugely compelling and influential cop show. But lets be honest, despite a terrific ensemble cast, Dennis Franz as scenery-chewing recovering alcoholic detective Andy Sipowicz, was virtually the whole show, appearing in all 261 episodes and in the process searing his psyche in viewers minds.

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Baltimore native Barry Levinson was a natural fit as executive producer of this ultra-realistic police procedural, based on The Wire creator David Simons book chronicling his experiences following homicide detectives at work in the so-called City of Firsts. From the very first episode Life on the Street succeeded in dispelling the myths and stereotypes about the television cop, showing that murder and violence were just a routine parts of the job. Indeed the murder of a schoolgirl in that first episode was never solved. Aficionados rate this show even better than The Wire. Some have called Homicide: Life on the Street the missing link between Hill Street Blues and The Wire. Beg, borrow or steal the box set and find out why.

Such is the renown of the celebrated television adaptation of Colin Dexters novels featuring the enigmatic real-ale swilling, arts loving, crossword buff detective, that theres very little left to say apart from its basically a brilliant variation on the classic English whodunit, Kevin Whatelys Lewis is to John Thaws Morse as Dr Watson was to Sherlock Holmes, and Thaw is simply wonderful.

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It has become so caricatured and parodied in recent years that its easy to overlook the fact that The Sweeney made Z Cars look as antiquated as the former did Dixon of Dock Green a decade earlier. Created by Ian Kennedy Martin, brother of Z Cars co-creator Troy, The Sweeney was shot in 16mm film and that, along with extensive location shooting, gave it a more cinematic look than other studio-bound rivals.

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Created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll and still celebrated, still hugely influential, and still the cop show to which almost everything that has come since owes a huge debt. From Mike Posts iconic theme and the innovative cinema vrit-evoking handheld camera, to the brilliant ensemble cast creating beloved characters and dramatic storylines in the urban sprawl of an unnamed US city, Hill Street Blues pioneered a new wave of cop shows. Ironically, it never gained huge audience ratings, but garnered a grand total of 98 Emmy nominations. Groundbreaking, thought provoking, emotional and funny, Hill Street Blues stands tall in the canon of truly great television.

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HBO miniseries Chernobyl also ended inside a courtroom, but it got away with such an enclosed setting by unveiling new evidence on the podium and through a series of dramatic turns where people you considered cowards decided to speak out against injustice. As is the problem with dramatising a crime so heavily publicised, we always knew Shelias memory was saved, we always knew Jeremy did it and we always knew Julie will speak out against him.

DS Stan Jones watches Jeremy Bamber trial in ITV drama White House Farm (ITV)

Granted, it is very satisfying to watch a woman who'd been whittled down by emotional abuse confront her tormentor. Freddie Fox is great as the sharp-tongued and theatrical Jeremy Bamber, and though hes never sweating, you do get to see the smirk wiped off his foppish ex-private schoolboy face. Julies character transition is an interesting one: she goes from hiding in the corner of parties as Jeremy flirts with other women, to pushing past paparazzi camera flashes to tell the world of the horrors he is capable of. But as the episode comes to an end, theres a slightly confusing reversal. Having been pushed to recognise the bravery involved in Julie speaking out against the man she loved, we are then made to think of her as a money-hungry vulture, wholly undeserving of the 25,000 she receives from publicity.

Julie Mumford enters the courtroom in ITV drama White House Farm (ITV)

After the penultimate episode sees him taken off the case, I thought we had seen the last of Stephen Grahams DCI Thomas Taff Jones. But we are forced to sit through another few minutes of Grahams lukewarm Welsh accent. The cynically careerist bad cop has come to the office to congratulate his rival DS Stan Jones (Mark Addy) on Bambers arrest: I guess its my turn to take my leave he snarls. It should be a satisfying moment: the weary and unappreciated good guy has finally been proved right, but the script renders both characters too cartoonish for even talented actors such as Graham and Addy to pull it off.

You get the impression that Bamber would be quite pleased with his presentation in White House Farm. The only humiliation he suffers the removal of his tie and shoes as he moves into the blackness of his cell. Though Bamber has complained that the series could potentially damage his latest appeal of innocence, you cant help but think a narcissist such as he would delight in the attention. After all, according to Julie, the first thing Bamber said after committing his crimes was: I should have been an actor. I imagine he still looks pretty smug in his cell in HMP Wakefield.

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Repetitive and laboured White House Farm finale is too focused on the details - review - The Independent

Faber & Faber, 18.99

WHERE and when does a movie begin? How far back can you trace its origins? How close can you get to the source?

Take Chinatown. Do we trace it back to writer Robert Towne reading Chandler and getting nostalgic for the Los Angeles he remembered as a kid? Or him watching developers tearing up the land around his home in LAs Hutton Drive waved through by city hall?

Or do you go back further to the Second World War and the Jewish ghetto in Krakow where Chinatowns eventual director Roman Polanski spent his childhood and from where the Nazis took his mother?

Or maybe, like every other crime story, we start with a murder. Maybe we go back to an August night in 1969 when Charles Mansons followers broke into a house on Cielo Drive and murdered the five people they found inside, including Hollywood actress Sharon Tate, Polanskis pregnant wife.

In The Big Goodbye, author Sam Wasson explores all these tributaries and more in telling the story of the 1974 movie about crime and corruption both financial and moral in 1930s LA. Wasson in the past has written about Audrey Hepburn and the choreographer Bob Fosse. Here, he argues that Chinatown is one of the last gasps of the New American cinema of the 1970s before the blockbuster bulldozed in and took over the neighbourhood.

He locates Chinatowns story within the lives of four of its main participants, adding the stories of its star Jack Nicholson and its producer Robert Evans to those of Towne and Polanski. Nicholson was the coming man, an actor who had shared a flat with Towne, was the star of The Last Detail, written by Towne, and someone who felt he owed Evans a favour. Evans was enjoying his status as the man who saved Paramount, after a run of hits including Rosemarys Baby, The Godfather and the hugely successful Love Story.

Evans saw in Chinatown a chance to combine Hollywood traditional glamour with artistic integrity and he was prepared to push Townes desire to direct to the side as a result. Polanski, meanwhile, had come to believe, from experience, that there was no such a thing as a happy ending and kept pushing against the romanticism of Townes script. Hard to see how else he could have reacted given what happened to his wife.

Wasson deals with the murders of Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steven Parent and Jay Sebring sparingly. At the same time, he refuses to look away from the horror of it. As a reminder of what happened it shows up the callowness of Tarantinos counterfactual take on that night in last years Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The senseless murders of that summer marked an end of innocence for the hippy idyll of the 1960s (Altamont was still a few months in the future). Strung out on grief, Wasson reports, Polanski turned himself into a detective in its wake. He would sneak into friends garages and swab their cars for fingerprints. He bugged their homes. Hed even surreptitiously checked Bruce Lees lens prescription against that of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses found at the scene of the murder.

There were no lessons to be drawn from the murders, Polanski would say. There is just nothing. Its absolutely senseless, stupid, cruel and insane. Im not sure its even worth talking about. Sharon and the others are dead. I cant restore what was.

That nihilism followed him through to the making of Chinatown a few years later. Shooting started with casting not finished and no agreed ending. The films female lead, Faye Dunaway, quickly made herself unpopular with crew and her director. At one point Polanski pulled an errant hair from her head which was ruining his shot. It didnt go down well. Nicholson had it easier, although Polanski did end up chucking Nicholsons TV out of his trailer during a Lakers game when the actor wouldnt present himself for a set-up because he was trying to catch the end of a game.

No wonder, then, that Nicholson was worried Polanski was to be the one who was to slit his nose with a prop knife that had to be sliced in the right direction in one of the films most notorious moments. Polanski shot 12, maybe 14 takes. Hed got the shot he wanted on the first.

Evans was the man who had to placate everyone. Including Towne who was seeing his romantic vision darkened, his story tarnished.

But maybe he shouldnt have been surprised. America was going through Watergate, the fag end of the Vietnam war, an oil embargo. Nihilism, understandably, was in. As the films last line has it: Forget it Jake, its Chinatown.

Wasson corals all this with energy and commitment. His style at times overblown, reaching for effect, seductive for that very reason is obvious from the first line after the introduction: Sharon Tate looked like California. If you respond to that, then this is for you.

Wassons argument is that 1974-1975 was a pinch point for Hollywood. The last hurrah for the American version of auteur cinema; the kind of films Evans produced and Polanski directed. In 1974, the year Chinatown was released, so were Alan Pakulas The Parallax View, Robert Altmans Thieves Like Us, Francis Ford Coppolas The Conversation and Steven Spielbergs The Sugarland Express, movies that were ambitious, adult, arty.

Spielbergs next movie, Jaws, would change the current, opening in hundreds of cinemas rather than trying to build an audience as had been the release pattern before. It worked. Spectacularly.

Soon the blockbuster was key. TV execs began to take over Hollywoods studios and the appetite for ambitious, adult and arty began to recede. Deal-making took over from film-making, Wasson argues. There were still ambitious films ahead: Altmans Nashville, Michael Ciminos The Deer Hunter, Coppolas Apocalypse Now, but the tide was going out. And Star Wars was waiting in the wings to change everything. Who wants auteurs when you can have franchises?

Wassons book is a lament for a style of movie-making that is no longer in favour. It has not, despite the books elegiac tone, disappeared though. Martin Scorsese kept making movies and, in the years that followed, American directors such as Michael Mann, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson would all emerge.

Still, the film ecology did change. It keeps changing. Chinatown the movie is now as distant from us as it was to the 1930s. It stands as a reminder of how Hollywood once was.

Wasson wants us to believe that Chinatown is a heroic achievement. But he doesnt hide away from the fact that there are no real heroes in this story. Townes reputation soared after Chinatown but so did his appetite for drink and drugs. Evanss, by contrast, took a huge hit with the failure of The Cotton Club. And Polanski? He pleaded guilty to statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Nicholsons house and then fled to Europe. Some things you should never forget.

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Review: The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood - HeraldScotland