In a bit at the Emmy Awards earlier this month, Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni, aka Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler, reprised their signature will-they-wont-they sexual tension. Introduced by announcer Sam Jay as two cops no one wants to see defunded, the beloved Law and Order: SVU duo leaped onstage to apprehend a masked thief stealing an Emmy statuette, before presenting the award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series to Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis.

It was admittedly fun: Benson and Stabler together again! But it was also copaganda, which is par for the course for the Law and Order franchise .

Historically, most police procedurals and other crime-related shows have lionized cops and presented a one-sided view of policing. After the murder of George Floyd went viral in 2020, increased public scrutiny of what has become known as copaganda forced TV creators and executives to reexamine how they depict police and other law enforcement stories on-screen . That June, in a poll conducted by Morning Consult and The Hollywood Reporter, 56% of all respondents and 59% of Black respondents said shows about police should change to better represent the criminal justice system. In a long overdue moment of assessment, some shows were axed completely, like the reality shows Cops and Live PD, which followed police officers in real time and often sensationalized violence. Some creators and writers of scripted police series, from the Law and Order franchise to Brooklyn Nine-Nine , promised to retool their shows, with mixed degrees of success.

More than two years later, little about policing on TV seems to have changed substantially. Live PD is back . Meanwhile, the tried-and-true genre of the police procedural is still chugging along. This fall, two of the new network TV shows are law enforcement dramas: ABCs The Rookie: Feds and CBSs East New York. The structures of these new shows end up being an apt metaphor for what has happened with policing itself : Theyve made some incremental changes, but fall short in truly interrogating the system at large.