What about a cop who's a dragon

Tell me about your favorite show. I’ll tell you that I’ll put it on my list. I’ll get around to it. There are so many great shows obviously. I can’t wait to watch yours. But there’s no fucking list. Why would I need a list. There’s nothing to watch.

It’s all dragons and elves and magic and superpowers. I don’t want your super hero show. I don’t want vampires (unless they live on Staten Island). I will never watch your cartoon with irritating voices. I don’t want to learn a universe with stupid names that all sound the same. I don’t want the origin story of characters I didn’t give a shit about in the first place. I don’t give a fuck about the allegory. Oh but Deadpool’s really funny this time? For whom? Someone who thinks Big Bang Theory was the best comedy of the century? Go fuck yourself.

I want a war vet in tiny shorts staying in a millionaire author’s (lol) beach house, driving a sports car, shooting bad guys dressed as nuns. I want a grizzled detective in a raincoat asking to borrow your pencil before he nails you for murdering your wife. I want a murder a week in the crime ridden hellhole of Cabot Cove where the dipshit sheriff couldn’t solve a crime if Jessica Fletcher poisoned him herself. I’ll keep watching those because everything else is fucking dragons and elves. Or it’s too pretty cops training us all to love cops who sometimes have to break the rules, to get shit done, and only the guilty ask for a lawyer.

I don’t want explosions or beefy cops and a token latina who’s tired of her partner’s shit and I certainly don’t want firemen unless they’re alcoholics who talk to their dead best friend. I want my cops old and tired and wrong more often than not, dumb as shit and crooked as shit, and I want the DA involved in a massive conspiracy with a mob of fat sociopaths who go to therapy. I want teachers cooking meth and a spy who writes folk songs that are too honest. I want a rich family falling apart over a media takeover and a coke addicted son.

I want humans. I want human stories. I want a human being with a normal human body in an impossible situation. I want wrinkles and love handles and humor that misses half the dipshit population who need a laugh track to tell them it’s funny. I want affairs and lies and schemes and coverups.

And I want to have to wait.

The fuck are they doing to us. The fuck are they doing to shows. Dropping a whole ass season at a time so it’s forgotten in a week. So we forget it. Then canceling the thing we love because we didn’t talk about it enough, because we fucking forgot about it.

I want more than eight episodes. I want weird episodes that do nothing to advance the storyline. I want an episode about killing a fly. An episode about buying a piano. An episode about disappearing to the coast. An episode about the hobo that marked the fence. An episode about vacuuming. I want a real season of a real show about real people every Sunday night that we talk about all week and build anticipation and yell everyone shut up. It’s on.

Fuck dragons.

Bonus below the paywall, below. Substack is reminding me this piece was a year ago and telling me to share it so here’s that. Thank you, and have a good week!