The New Age of Procedural Dramas

Some people claim to hate procedural dramas. Most of those people even have good, long reasons why they do.

That they’re repetitive, cliché, and lacking in depth and originality are some of the most common complaints. And yet, we’ve all watched one at some time or another. They’re there. No matter the time, you turn on the TV and you’ll probably find either a new episode or a re-run. They might not be as popular as they were ten years ago, but the fact is, they’re not going anywhere.

Don’t believe me? Let me ask you this: Can you name the most watched scripted program on television? Do you know that the same show has held this spot for the past five years? Do you understand from my clearly not innocent question what type of show this is?

Yes, it’s a procedural. Yes, it’s a long running one. Yes, it survived the breakup of the main ship and the actress leaving the program. No, we don’t think people are going to stop watching. To be honest, at this point, we’re thinking maybe we should just give up and jump on the NCIS bandwagon.

Procedural dramas and TV go together like mac and cheese, mashed potatoes and gravy. (I don’t really like peanut butter and jelly, sorry). And it’s not hard to see why. They’re easy to get into, comforting, and at the end of the episode, the mystery is always solved! You can stop at one if you want to (not that we ever do). You can even come back later after having missed a couple of episodes and pick it back up without problems.

At least, that’s the way it used to be.

Procedural dramas today are not the same kind of beast that they were in the years of Dragnet or Columbo. In those days, the characters were quirky and fun, but shallow. You didn’t know much about their families or about their pasts, and you didn’t really care. That’s not why you were watching.

Today, however, these shows have complex characters, slow-burn romances, and even arcs that can last the length of the series. Some mysteries are still solved by episode’s end, yes, but the most important ones, those usually take a season or two (or five).

It’s not just in crime procedurals, either.

The first show to delve into a deeper story was The X-Files. I say The X-Files and you don’t think procedural, not like Law & Order, but just because they were notoriously bad at actually getting proof (or at least about managing to hang onto to the proof) and marking their cases as solved doesn’t mean that Mulder and Scully weren’t getting the answers. Most episodes ended with the viewers actually understanding what happened.

Except the ones that had to do with the overreaching mythology of the series, of course.

The X-Files was a pioneer of many, many things. Slow-burn romances (so slooow), horror, conspiracies, and, of course, mixing stand-alone episodes with a mystery that grew more and more complicated with each passing season. They never really solved that mystery to our satisfaction (despite nine seasons and two movies), but they got fans excited once again, and other shows took notice.

Crime, however, is not the only genre that breeds procedurals. The X-Files was more horror/conspiracy oriented. House was a medical procedural, where a mystery was solved every week. Suits is a law procedural. Yes, police-oriented procedurals are the bread and butter, but you can conceivably make a procedural out of anything.

Apparently, though, government agencies and police departments are the best place for week-to-week mysteries.

It makes sense if you think about it. The basics are there already. You have a cop and his/her partner. The first scene of the episode never features your main characters; instead, it features unknown guest stars getting killed (high-paid guest stars never get killed right away). After a commercial break, that’s when your police/random government agency agent makes his/her appearance.

The story is almost always the same. They arrive at a murder scene, poke around, come up with a couple of theories that are obviously wrong because it’s too early in the episode to figure out what actually happened and get to interview some people. There’s banter, because these types of shows thrive on opposite personalities being forced to work together, and then, the person you first interviewed and discarded ends up being the killer.

Of course, they only realize this because of new evidence discovered by the brilliant forensic anthropologist (Bones), some insight from the writer thinking outside the lines (Castle) some minuscule fiber that the crime-lab somehow managed to identify (CSI), good old police work (Law & Order), a crazy scheme (The Mentalist) or a couple of shoot-outs and five different explosions (NCIS).

How does that sound? Cliché, repetitive, and lacking in depth. Yes, I know. If this was all procedural dramas were doing these days I wouldn’t even be writing this piece, though (and I certainly wouldn’t be watching).

But in the new age of procedural dramas, the shows are more than just likeable actors trading barbs. On NCIS: LA, for example, the main character’s backstory has been revealed so slowly that we still don’t know the actual name of Chris O’Donnell’s character (to be fair, he doesn’t know either). We’ve been calling him G. Callen for SIX SEASONS!

On Castle we only found out Rick’s motivation for becoming a mystery writer at the end of Season 8. And, on Bones, they didn’t explore Booth’s addiction issues, which they’d mentioned plenty of times before, until Season 10.

That’s not even the fun part. The fun part is that the issues (good, bad, weird) are not pushed aside or dealt with in one episode, no. There are repercussions. Multiple story arcs spanning different characters developing at the same time. And they don’t ALL come to head in the very same episode. Because, more and more, procedurals are resembling real life instead of just presenting slices of it.

The same goes for the relationships. There are plenty of strong women in this genre, and more and more couples that skew stereotypes. For shows that were usually reviled for presenting the same thing over and over again in different packaging, the genre has, finally, found a way to diversify. Considering these series are usually mass-marketed, the fact that they’ve managed this bodes well for the rest of the products on TV today.

In conclusion? It’s time to go against conventional wisdom and give these shows a chance. The procedurals of today are still easy and fun, the equivalent of going to the movie theater and buying regular buttered popcorn. But, increasingly so, they are also like getting mixed popcorn, some sweet mixed in with the salty for a surprisingly savory combination. We never expected them to, but in this day and age, procedural dramas can be deep. They can be poignant. They even have OTPs.

And they’re definitively worth watching.

Have a favorite procedural drama? Share with us in the comments below!