Crime and Police TV Shows Like ‘Criminal Minds’ Are Big Streaming Hits

“It only makes sense that a viewer is going to say: ‘I want to watch something. I don’t have time to watch 100 hours of it, or even 10 hours, but I want to commit to three, four hours to it. I want to feel like I had a whole meal,’” he said.

He continued: “You feel you’ve had the whole totality at least of the storytelling experience in three or four episodes, and then you can choose to go back to that restaurant or not for another meal.”

Going back to the 1950s with “Dragnet,” or the 1980s and ’90s with “Murder: She Wrote” or the 2000s with “Law Order: SVU,” the procedural has survived technological shifts before.

Steven Binder, an executive producer of “NCIS,” said he believed that older procedurals and other network-style dramas had a “universal appeal” that allowed them to thrive in streaming libraries.

“When I look at other shows in history that have been as popular as ‘NCIS,’ back to ‘Gunsmoke’ or ‘Star Trek,’ you’ve got characters on the show working together to solve problems,” he said. “Our show isn’t about the fighting between the characters.”

He pointed out that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of “Star Trek,” had a concept: no conflict among the Starfleet crew.

“It was groundbreaking back in the time when he said, ‘No, we’re not going to have our characters fighting each other — they’re all a team, and the conflict is going to come externally,’” he said. “That’s what our show is: It’s competent, capable people working together to solve problems. I think people have always liked seeing that. They’re heroes.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/08/business/media/police-crime-tv-shows-streaming.html