Flavorwire's 25 Best Cop Shows of All Time

Its stylistic trademarks — hard-boiled dialogue, detailed investigation play-by-plays, “ripped from the headlines” narratives — continue to influence the genre to this day.

It was a unique cop drama but it was its uniqueness that ultimately killed the show.”

The quintessential ’70s cop show, with all the trimmings: car chases, goofy fashion, a good-looking buddy hero team, and, yes, a supporting character named “Huggy Bear.”

Creator Alan Spencer took his inspiration from the Dirty Harry movies and period cop shows that took rule-breaking, trigger-happy, no-nonsense detectives as their heroes, and wondered what would happen if that hero was just a little bit… well, nuts. He came up with a wickedly funny, borderline surrealist comic masterpiece.

Creators Michael Schur and Dan Goor brilliantly meld the Law & Order aesthetic with the streetwise, station-house humor of Barney Miller, cooking up an ensemble comedy with huge laughs, yet real love for its characters.

This fast-paced procedural kept the energy high and the team dynamics lively for its entire 37-episode run.

Sure, it’s junk food — but at its best, in the glory years of the original iteration and the early seasons of SVU, it’s addictively binge-watchable junk food.

It’s undeniably entertaining, both consciously and unconsciously, while the efficient writing of co-creator Stephen J. Cannell (The Rockford Files) and his team keep things fast and clean.

It often captured the flavor and feeling of the era, and its cast — particularly the endlessly cool Clarence Williams III — is top-notch.

It didn’t just influence cop shows — it took over popular culture, influencing fashion, music, and filmmaking, while also capturing those elements and packaging them for a mainstream audience.

Crime Story remains a huge influence on shows in the current “Golden Age” — both for the moral complexity of its characters and the show’s habit of telling longer, serialized stories rather than locking in to stand-alone episodes.

It logs time in both Lexington, Kentucky and the hill country nearby. But locations isn’t all that makes the show unique; it’s got Timothy Olyphant being a badass, flawless supporting players, and more.

It veered into soapy self-parody in its later years, but in its prime, few shows on television could touch NYPD Blue.

Idris Elba plays the eponymous detective in Luther, which is reason enough to watch it. But it’s also more psychological than most cop shows, one that really likes to dive deeper and deeper into its characters.

A very funny show with more edge than was common at the time.

It revealed itself to be something deeper, darker, and more sinister — an honest-to-goodness television phenomenon, so rich and bizarre that everyone saw something different under its surface.

No film, series, or sketch satirized the police procedural as brilliantly as Police Squad!

Such programs have become an endangered species on the Big Four.

Sterling Silliphant’s adaptation of the brilliant 1948 film took a while to find its footing, knocking around the ABC schedule, tinkering with format, going from 30 to 60 minutes. But once it settled in, it was something new and exciting for episodic television: a semi-documentary style look at cops and criminals, shot on location in New York City.

The adventures of Lt. Frank Columbo weren’t conventional mysteries — no attempt is made to hide the culprits of the murder at each show’s center. Instead, we see how they do it, and then we wait, patiently, for Columbo to discover their mistake.

This seven-season CBS drama is most often referenced as a groundbreaking moment for women on television, a major network cop show fronted by two actresses. It should be celebrated as such, but not at the cost of forgetting that it was also just a damn fine police drama.

Shawn Ryan’s seven-season FX cop drama centered on a four-man anti-gang unit in the Los Angeles police department, and drew its style from theirs: fast, mean, and rough-and-tumble, shooting first and asking questions later.

It so effectively countered the fictions about police work that earlier cop shows had created. It did that, and much more, creating a cast of indelible characters, introducing a score of remarkable character actors in its ace ensemble cast (chief among them Andre Braugher, whose six seasons as Frank Pembleton remain among the finest acting in television history).

“You don’t realize how much you’re watching now is just riding Hill Street Blues’ coattails until you watch it.”

It wasn’t strictly a “cop show” (it wasn’t strictly an anything show), but it started as one, and tackled its later subjects — education, city politics, dock workers, newsrooms — in the procedural style. Authenticity was always job one, and The Wire always felt real, overheard, transcribed.