Today, I take issue with how The Rookie oddly “nerfed” a mass shooting event.
This is Disgrace Distract and Bother Me, a feature where I just point out minor things that annoy me in pop culture. Basically, think of it like the lowest level of criticism, then Remember to Forget is the middle, where it’s like, “Okay, this is bad, but not, like, offensively bad” and finally, Things That Turned Out Bad is for, “This is seriously messed up.”
As you may have seen before, I’ve written before about how I think that there is a certain death total in fictional works where you can’t really have a “happy ending” (you know, “Yay, the good guys won! Oh, 200 innocent people died…shit…maybe we shouldn’t be celebrating”).
And TV showrunners know this well, which is why, for the most part, you don’t have mass casualty events on TV shows (and when they DO happen, I think they’re really bad ideas. See 24 trying to sell us on a “happy ending” in a season a fucking NUKE went off on American land).
That’s the tricky part, though, because sometimes showrunners then still want to DO mass casualty events, just without the mass casualties.
That is how we get this week’s episode of The Rookie (Season 8, Episode 2, “Fast Andy”), where the President is in town, and the LAPD believe that this disturbed gunman might be coming for the President, but in actuality, he’s “just” trying to murder his ex-girlfriend. He comes to her place of work (a sort of Amazon warehouse type situation) to kill her with a machine gun and body armor.
And he doesn’t shoot a single freakin’ person.
I mean, come on, show. We all know mass shootings are HORRIFIC and TERRIFYING, and I totally understand why a show like The Rookie, which is pretty light and fun, wouldn’t want to get into that sort of thing, and I actually absolutely agree with that train of thought, but with that in mind, then, you JUST DON’T HAVE A MASS SHOOTER.
What you don’t do is “nerf” a mass shooter, and make it so that this guy is the first mass shooter in history to walk into a crowded place of business, open fire repeatedly, but make sure to not actually shoot anyone. I mean, come the heck on, show.
Just don’t do mass shooting stories if you’re not going to have mass casualties. I’m TOTALLY cool with not having mass casualties on TV cop dramas, but to do so, just don’t have mass shootings then!
At MINIMUM there should have been injuries. There have been times where a shooter has come into a place of business, shot randomly, and only managed to hurt people (there was an incident in the town where I live where this happened in a restaurant).
It might come across as a bit of an A-Team solution to violence, but it would still be more realistic than zero casualties.