LEGO has halted marketing on its “LEGO City Police Station” and “Police Highway Arrest” sets.
Last week, Tom Scharpling, an executive producer of “Monk,” criticized his own show on Twitter: “If you - as I have - worked on a TV show or movie in which police are portrayed as lovable goofballs, you have contributed to the larger acceptance that cops are implicitly the good guys.” Griffin Newman, an actor who appeared in two episodes of “Blue Bloods” as a detective, donated his $11,000 in earnings to a bail fund, inspiring other actors who have played cops to do the same.
The reckoning has come for newspapers, food magazines, Bravo reality shows and police procedurals. New and intense relationships with content have filled the gap, and now our quarantine consumptions are being reviewed with an urgently political eye. The protests arrived in the midst of a pandemic that has alienated Americans from their social ties, family lives and workplaces.
“Paw Patrol” seems harmless enough, and that’s the point: The movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm. The effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop archetype, which reigns on both television and in viral videos of the protests themselves. Even big-hearted cartoon police dogs - or maybe especially big-hearted cartoon police dogs - are on notice. As the protests against racist police violence enter their third week, the charges are mounting against fictional cops, too. “Defund the paw patrol.” “All dogs go to heaven, except the class traitors in the Paw Patrol.” In the world of “Paw Patrol,” Chase is drawn to be a very good boy who barks stuff like “Chase is on the case!” and “All in a police pup’s day!” as he rescues kittens in his tricked-out S.U.V.īut last week, when the show’s official Twitter account put out a bland call for “Black voices to be heard,” commenters came after Chase. The team includes Marshall, a firefighting Dalmatian Rubble, a bulldog construction worker and Chase, a German shepherd who is also a cop.
It is basically a pretense for placing household pets in a variety of cool trucks. “Paw Patrol” is a children’s cartoon about a squad of canine helpers. It was only a matter of time before the protests came for “Paw Patrol.”