Abstract
This article answers the question of how contemporary Russian TV series portray the police. The results derive from a single-case thematic and functionalist study of the popular Russian TV series Glukhar’ (which aired from 2008 to 2011). The show merits special attention because it was on air when the Russian police were undergoing a legitimacy crisis, which lead to the 2009 police reform. The series recognized the crisis and responded to it with a set of justifications. I analyze the show’s social and cultural contexts, its plot patterns, and the functions of its characters. I build a typology of justifications and claim that the show justifies the police through an open discussion about the reasons for and consequences of their lawlessness. The series shows that the legitimacy of the police is repeatedly questioned, but trust in the police is always restored because police officers are depicted as estranged from the state but not from the community. Thus, the show contains an interesting example of overcoming a legitimacy crisis through its recognition. The study opens the floor to further discussions about how popular culture resolves intense social debates about policing by symbolic means in a moment when police legitimacy is contested.
Introduction
As police scholars, Reiner (2010, pp. 187–188, 194, 195) and Leishman and Mason (2003, pp. 67–86) have shown transgression of the law by police officers is a common motif in contemporary police television series. However, as these scholars have demonstrated in their typologies of law enforcement narratives, series differ on the degree of transgression and on the combination of transgression and its justification. Series usually represent transgression as a continuum, stretching from mild rule-bending to harsh rule-breaking; furthermore, some series legitimate the police’s wrongdoings, and some do not (Leishman & Mason, 2003, pp. 89–93; Reiner, 2010, pp. 188–199).
These authors mention some types of justifications, but overall they do not elaborate a typology of justifications. 1 In the contemporary world, as well as in the police series, as Reiner (2010) claims, justifications are usually invented in an ad hoc fashion: “There is no new legitimating myth, however. A more sophisticated public awareness of conflict, inside and outside the police organization, precludes anything but a pragmatic, conditional legitimation in specific narratives, challenged by others” (p. 201).
This study builds on these works and investigates the justification strategies of the police in police series in a situation where “public awareness of conflict, inside and outside the police organisation” is particularly tense. In Russia, the police recently underwent a legitimacy crisis that the state tried to ease by carrying out major police reforms in 2009. For this reason, it is productive to study Russian police series from that time period in order to examine whether the shows followed and responded to public debates, and whether the police were depicted in terms of the legitimacy crisis in these shows. More specifically, we can ask how exactly shows deal with crises in society, whether they justify the police, what legitimation strategies they use, and whether counter-narratives are offered.
Answers to these questions will build upon research conducted by Reiner, Leishman, and Mason, as well as other scholars who study images of the police. 2 More specifically, answers to the questions posed here will help us better understand how the police’s unstable legitimacy is negotiated or challenged at times of crisis.
The Case of Glukhar’
In this study, I examine the first episodes of one of Russia’s most popular police shows, Glukhar’ (which aired from 2008 to 2011). 3 This show launched at a time of intense public debate about police legitimacy, one year before major police reform began in Russia. The show depicted the police as lawless. Methodologically, this study is a single-case (George & Bennett, 2005), sequential, 4 thematic, and functionalist (Fiske, 2011; Turner, 1999) analysis of the show Glukhar’. Before proceeding to my analysis, I will substantiate my choice of Russian television at large and of Glukhar’, in particular, by showing how the country and this show are related to the aforementioned topics of legitimacy crises and justification strategies.
Russia is an important case because it was perceived globally as one of the most corrupt countries in the world in the 2000s. 5 This was mirrored by domestic sentiments. Due to public perceptions of Russian police as corrupt, President Dmitrii Medvedev launched a police reform in December 2009 (“Dmitrii Medvedev Podpisal Ukaz o Masshtabnoi Reforme v MVD”, 2009).
There are two reasons for focusing on Glukhar’. First, the show began to air during a time when actors from the Russian media were systematically challenging the police. Second, the show has enjoyed exceptional popularity in Russia. I discuss these points in greater detail later.
Legitimacy Crisis in the 2000s
When the show Glukhar’ appeared on Russian television in 2008, Russian media were saturated with images of corrupt police officers engaging in various highly unprofessional activities.
In April 2009, for example, police major Denis Evsiukov killed several civilians in a supermarket. This event caused a great uproar and discussion. Deputy Interior Minister Arkadii Edelev stated that this killing was an isolated incident. In response to his remark, in January 2010, the Russian edition of Esquire magazine published a piece called “We are working 24/7,” which resembled a calendar and contained daily reports about police crimes from 2009. 6 The Interior Ministry responded to this by publishing a “Calendar of virtue” on their website, which listed police officers’ daily acts of bravery from 2009 (“MVD Sostavilo Sobstvennyi “Kalendar’ Muzhestva” Militsionerov”, 2010). Later that year, a police officer named Alexei Dymovskii uploaded several YouTube videos addressed to then-President Dmitrii Medvedev, condemning the police for corruption. Glukhar’ reenacted both events in its last episodes.
Contemporary artists also addressed the legitimacy crisis. For instance, from 2008 until 2011, the police was a central theme for the War art-group. In 2011, some of the members of this group entered the band Pussy Riot, which continued to challenge authorities in Russia more recently. This constant symbolic exchange between the media, artists, and the state indicates that the issue of police representations was central to Russian society at that moment. The dominant image was that of a bad cop transgressing the law and threatening society through uncontrolled power. As I will show in this article, the show Glukhar’ fits this pattern.
Glukhar’ launched as these media scandals unfolded, and it continued to air as the 2009 police reform began. These circumstances make Glukhar’ worth studying as a case of symbolic production dealing with a highly contested topic.
My analysis of Glukhar’ revealed that the show acknowledges the legitimacy crisis by depicting the police as involved in activities that the show’s characters consider illegal. 7
Production and Popularity of the Show
Glukhar’ was aired from 2008 until 2011. It was divided into three seasons and comprises 160 episodes, 45 minutes each. According to TNS Russia Media & Custom Research data, during its last week on air, Glukhar’ was the most popular TV program on Russian television in general, the most popular TV show, and the most popular program on the channel which broadcast it. 8 Moreover, Glukhar’ became an umbrella brand. There were two feature films based on the show and four derivative TV shows based on its characters.
Glukhar’ was produced by a private production group called Dixi Media. The company was established in 1992 and made significant contributions to the Russian advertising industry and to Russian television (70 documentary movies, films, and shows, and 6 police television series). Glukhar’ was aired by one of Russia’s most popular private television channels, NTV.
The show’s scriptwriter Ilya Kulikov said in an interview that he based the series on stories that two of his friends, an investigator and a traffic police officer, told him (Gusiatinskii, 2011). He also said that he purposefully did not invite any police officers to consult him, as this would reveal their identities and could attract pressure on them from police chiefs who might have their own agendas.
The show’s producer Efim Liublinskii said that lower ranking police officers liked the show, while their higher ranking bosses did not. The latter were unhappy show’s depiction of officers. Liublinskii said he received calls from police chiefs who accused him of creating a negative image of the police. He contested these allegations, claiming that “Glukharev is a good person despite all his surface negativity” (““Glukhar’”, “Varen’ka” i Drugie Po-Nastoiashchemu Populiarnye v Rossii Serialy”, 2012).
Scriptwriter Ilya Kulikov also said that he wanted viewers to empathize with the show’s protagonists. To enable this empathy, he aimed to make the show “more realistic” than other police shows broadcast on Russian TV. Explaining the show’s success, he emphasized positive images of characters: “they are good people who do good things. And good people who do good things are always appealing” (“Interv’iu/‘Glukhar’’: Novyi Geroi Na Ekrane Ili Kleveta Na Militsiiu/Efim Liubinskii, Denis Rozhkov, Il’ia Kulikov”).
One of the main actors in the show, Denis Rozhkov, said that his fans often tell him that the show changed their attitudes toward the police for the better by helping them understand police officers. He added that many fans said that after watching the show, they wanted to attend police school and get police jobs (“Interv’iu/‘Glukhar’’: Novyi Geroi Na Ekrane Ili Kleveta Na Militsiiu/Efim Liubinskii, Denis Rozhkov, Il’ia Kulikov”).
Actor Maxim Averin, who played Glukharev, said in an interview that he believes the show was successful because viewers recognized a familiar person in Glukharev: “Single mothers saw their son, some guys saw a buddy, women saw their beloved. . . . People needed a person who would give them warmth” (Veligzhanina, 2011). Moreover, Averin said that his character is simultaneously close to ordinary people and from the intelligentsia circles, “which are disappearing in Russia today.” Averin also said, the heroes of our country are those who wear uniforms, those who serve. Because people need protection. Some people need police protection; some people need protection from the army; some need protection for their souls, and this is my job. I sometimes feel that I am a warrior. (Gusiatinskii, 2010)
Averin adds that he believes he “restored people’s trust in the police” (Gusiatinskii, 2010).
In his interview, Averin claims his protagonist is a contemporary Hamlet who is “not so bad after all” and is “sometimes funny, sometimes tragic,” but, most importantly, helps people feel close to each other after the tragic disintegration of the USSR created general alienation in society. He added that the 2014 Olympic Games in Russia and Crimea’s “unification” with Russia contributed to the healing of this trauma as well (Chornykh, 2014). When asked if the show’s ideology, which consists of justifying crimes in order to solve other crimes, makes him uncomfortable, Averin said it does not: “Glukharev is the son of his country and a hero of his time. There is a considerable number of cops like him in contemporary Russia” (“Gnezdo Glukharia”).
The series was received well by professional police officers and TV critics. It received four television prizes: three in Russia and one in Ukraine. Top police officials approved the show. Russia’s Interior Minister at the time, Rashid Nurgaliev, said in an interview in 2011 that he liked Glukhar’ and thought this was the first show to demonstrate “our life and our psychology,” referring to the police and those under his command (“Nurgaliev smotrit serial “Glukhar’”, schitaia ego samym ob”ektivnym”, 2011).
While the issue of audience perceptions merits separate discussions, this article addresses only the show itself. In this way, this study contributes to the existing body of research on images of the Russian police (Bondarenko, 2006; MacFadyen, 2008; Oushakine, 2007; Rawlinson, 1998; Tishler, 2003; Vatulescu, 2010; Vishevsky, 2001). It also helps develop categories that will be useful for further studies of audience receptions of Russian cop shows, of fictional representations of the police in TV series beyond the Russian context, and, finally, it will contribute to a better understanding of how culture and society function.
Protagonists
There are four major protagonists in the episodes of Glukhar’ selected for analysis: Sergei Glukharev, Denis Antoshin, Irina Zimina, and Nikolai Tarasov.
Glukharev is an interrogating officer working at a Moscow police station called Piatnitskoe. He is in his 30s, lives with his mother, and has romantic relationships with his boss Zimina, a single woman with a child. Glukharev has a close friend, Antoshin, who works as a traffic cop. They know each other since childhood. Tarasov is a law student who gets an internship at the Piatnitskoe office.
Police officers are involved in the same types of crimes as their prototypes in the media: They take bribes, they beat and torture civilians (sometimes during interrogations, sometimes without reason), and they even kill people. At the same time, the show distinctly separates the main protagonists from much more violent characters, who are described as cynics scrambling up the career ladder. Sometimes, this is a fine line, for example, when both the protagonists and the “real villains” kill people. But even in such situations, the former are justified as people with good intentions who are fundamentally kind, while the latter are devoid of such characteristics. Thus, the show does not necessarily whitewash or try to hide problems of the real Russian police, but rather the show reframes them: In the case of the protagonists, we see good people caught in bad situations, and in the case of the villains, we see bad people making every situation worse. As a result, the police depictions look realistic because they correspond to (or directly reenact) prominent media stories. Yet, unlike the media stories, the show justifies the police by suggesting that some officers who behave badly are essentially good people.
Methods
The method employed here is twofold. The first element consists of tracing narrative patterns and character functions (Fiske, 2011). A functionalist treatment of the character means that he or she is seen as “a paradigmatic set of values that are related through structures of similarity and difference to other characters” and “an embodied ideology” that “is used to make sense of the world by the relations of discourses and ideology that it embodies” (Fiske, 2011, p. 161). In other words, the character is seen as “a function of the plot,” and his or her individual traits are treated as “an ideological hook for the audience” (Fiske, 2011, p. 131) that enable the viewer’s identification with the character and hide the ideological agenda of the plot. In my analysis, I focus on plot patterns and corresponding character functions.
The second element of my method consists of coding scenes and memo-writing based on a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006; Creswell, 1998; George & Bennett, 2005). Coding was done in the following stages: First, open coding of the TV show’s scenes. This means I watched the first several episodes of the TV show in order to identify the key and reemerging category related to my initial question. This analysis allowed me to conclude that the motif of the police transgressing the law and the subsequent justification of this transgression was the most often-repeated motif. “Legitimation” and “justification” became the core categories of my analysis.
The second stage consisted of axial coding, during which I noticed that when actions labeled initially as “illegal” are in the end justified in the show, new categories also come into play. Namely, these are law, order, violence, justice, power, security, crime, morality, norms, and control. I also noted the characters’ judgments of police work and officers’ self-descriptions. Then I coded the scenes with these additional categories.
The third stage consisted of selective coding, during which I grouped transcripts of scenes by the categories mentioned earlier and wrote memos. Through memo-writing, I developed a model of illegal action justification in the show. In choosing between an extensive analysis of a large number of episodes and an intensive analysis of a limited number of episodes, I preferred the latter. I paid attention to both narrative development and to specific scenes within the episodes. I define “scene” as the representation of a completed social action. My total corpus consisted of 46 scenes from the first 9 episodes. All 46 scenes were selected on the basis of their relation to the key category, surrounding categories, and presence of verbal accounts about police work.
My model can be summarized as follows. The TV show is based on a narrative pattern which consists of the following sequence of actions: police officers act, someone claims that the police officers’ actions transgress the law, and police officers propose explanations that justify and legitimize the transgression. There are four stable patterns of justification: through the figure of the outsider who becomes the informant, through description of the seemingly illegal actions as humane and performed in the interest of the community instead of in the interest of the state, by deconstructing media stereotypes of police violence, and, finally, through pointing out the moral mission of the police.
In the subsequent parts of the article, I will address these four types of justification.
Analysis
From the Outsider to the Informant
The first type of justification is reflected in the following plot pattern: The outsider has a number of normative assumptions about how the police should work, she or he openly criticizes the police by saying that they are violating certain legal or moral norms. This criticism faces counterarguments in either a form of practical demonstration of how the police actually work or in the form of an explanation to the outsider of why existing policing principles are good. The outsider accepts these arguments, and then becomes an insider who later also partakes in explaining the situation to other outsiders.
At the beginning of the show, Nikolai Tarasov is such an outsider who is on his way to becoming an insider. The first shot of the show is filmed in a subjective manner, from the point of view of Tarasov as he walks to the police station. It seems that this is one of his first visits. This technique might facilitate the viewer’s identification with Tarasov, if the viewer is unfamiliar with the work done at a police station.
Tarasov has normative expectations of the police. He believes that police officers should obey the law. He thinks that all of society should function in accordance with formal laws, and, by extension, he thinks the police should be structured in this way too. Instead, he sees the police acting on informal, personal ties, and ad hoc contracts. This opposition resembles a pair of categories proposed by the 19th-century German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies: civil society on one hand and community on the other hand (Tönnies, 2001). By using these categories, Tönnies tried to show that European societies had shifted from a stage in which the prevailing form of social interaction was based on personal contacts to a stage in which social interactions became regulated by impersonal rules.
In Glukhar’, Tarasov gradually abandons his normative expectations and changes his preferences from the civil society model to the community model. Glukharev’s and Antoshin’s explanations of how policing is done show Tarasov that those actions which seemed simply illegal to him at the beginning are actually sometimes pragmatic, or, even more often motivated by certain values. While Tarasov is the main object of persuasion during the first three episodes, by Episode 5, he already starts to explain the inner logic of the organization to outsiders such as his relatives and his girlfriend Viktoria. Those explanations create conditions for a possible reconciliation of the viewer with the police corruption depicted on the screen.
Formal Norms Versus Humane Values
The second type of justification for the police’s illegal action is based on a binary opposition between the idea of formal norms and humane values. People outside the organization see the police’s illegal actions as determined by either police officers’ emotions and feelings (most often aggression) or habit and tradition. Glukharev explains his actions as if he is driven by the value of humanism. These interpretations of the police’s actions can be described through Max Weber’s classification of social actions. Weber (1978) divides social action into four categories: instrumental rational, value rational, affectual, and traditional (pp. 24–25). In relation to the show, we can say that people outside the police are disappointed with the police because they expect police officers to act instrumentally rationally or value rationally, with the law as the value. The police, however, seem to act affectually or traditionally. Members of the police see themselves as acting value rationally, with humanism being the core value. Humanism should be realized flexibly and informally, and it opposes to formal norms, which are seen as inhumane because of their strictness.
Formal norms stem from the state, and either the state or regular citizens force the police to follow them. Norms are expressed in a bureaucratic language. Bureaucratic language has to be respected in protocols and opposed to the language of everyday conversation (Episode 3, 14:50; Episode 7, 26:23–26:45). Police officers react negatively when people voice their concerns or disappointment with how informally police work is conducted.
The most emblematic example of this opposition can be found in Episode 4, in which three minors steal a car, and the car’s owner, Vadim, demands the most severe punishment for them: Vadim: Excuse me, how many years of prison will they get? Glukharev: Two of them will get a one-year conditional sentence, and the third one, who’s faced trial once already, will get a two-year conditional sentence, perhaps, but maybe not even that. Vadim: What?! And you call this a justice system? Hand me a piece of paper, please. Glukharev: What for? Vadim: What do you mean? Do you realize how long I’ve been saving up for this car? And now they’ll only get a one-year conditional sentence? Hand me a piece of paper, please, I’m going to write up another claim! Glukharev: And what are you going to claim? Vadim: Firstly, (he takes an edition of the criminal code out of his bag) a claim about hijacking. Secondly, (opens the book and quotes from it) about large-scale property damage. Third, what’s it called? Hooliganism . . . Drunk driving without a license. They will really be in for it this time! Glukharev: Listen, man, are you sane? You got your car back. So it’s a little dented. I’ll talk to the parents; they will pay you for the repair. Vadim: No! Glukharev: Why ‘no’? Don’t you get it? They are just kids! What? They have to go to jail because of you? Vadim: Exactly! That’s exactly where they belong! (Episode 4, 17:03–19:49)
Vadim demands implementation of the formal norm, while Glukharev is depicted as the agent who customizes law implementation to concrete circumstances. Moreover, Glukharev is guided by the value rational principle, that is, the idea that the law is a flexible tool of normalization and inclusion of the delinquent person back into society, and not as a stern instrument of punishment and exclusion. Vadim insists on the implementation of abstract principles and does not take the circumstances into account. Glukharev, on the contrary, does take them into account and functions as a mediator between the law and the community, rather than as a force external to the community. Furthermore, it can even be said that interests of the community are more important for Glukharev than the abstract and impersonal implementation of the law. He can ignore the law, he is able to withdraw himself from the obligation to carry it out, but he is depicted as incapable of ignoring people’s requests if they coincide with his personal vision of humane norms and justice. In the follow-up of Vadim’s car case, Glukharev suggests that one of the children’s parents should propose to Vadim to pay for the repair of his car; then, later in the episode, when they fail to make this arrangement, Glukharev himself organizes the repair through his informal connections at a car repair shop, also involving one of the children who happens to have a part-time job there. This work is paid for unofficially as well.
There is an additional dimension of the formal norms versus humane values motif here: It touches upon the parallels between parenting and implementing the law. The police’s informality is represented as their parenting of a community.
Thus, the police are represented in the TV show as separate from the state and society with their official, impersonal, and abstract norms, and as close to the community of people based on personal contacts. What is described as illegal at first is later interpreted as flexible and humane normalization. What seems to be uncontrolled violence turns out to be action regulated by moral ideas.
Counterclaims to Media Stereotypes of the Police
Several Glukhar’’ scenes put forward a counterclaim that the image of the police as a corrupt and violent organization is a media stereotype and not a true depiction of the actual condition.
The plot pattern of this type of legitimizing narrative is the following: At first, some characters are described as those whose only source of information about the police is the media. In their opinion, the police are gangs of violent and corrupt criminals. Then, a representative of the police, an insider, establishes informal contact with people who mistrust the police. Finally, the insider persuades these people to suspend their mistrust and even to change their attitude toward the police from a negative to a positive attitude.
It should be emphasized here that media stereotypes about the police are deconstructed not so much for characters who express critical opinions about the police in the first place, but for viewers of the show who know these opinions from previous scenes. People who expressed their concern with the police are not usually present in scenes where these concerns are addressed. Thus, the show’s police characters seem to justify their actions to the viewer, not to characters who voiced their criticism. This circumstance can be interpreted as an indicator of the fact that the viewer’s opinion about the police matters more than the opinion of the character who expresses his or her mistrust in the show.
Policing as a Moral Mission
There are several scenes in which policing is depicted as a moral, even semireligious, mission. This mission aims to implement certain high-order principles. Within this pattern, the police officer is represented as a person who is either an agent of these principles or a witness of their realization that happens by itself, independently from human action. The following scene illustrates this point: [In a bar. Glukharev and Denis Antoshin are sipping beers] Glukharev: Den [diminutive form of Denis], I think I want the Apocalypse to come. Antoshin: What are you talking about? Glukharev: You know . . . I want the global overturn to come. So that all this crap, all this dough, you know—statuses, positions, laws, decrees—so that all of that would lose its meaning in just one second. And then everything would start over. From scratch. (Episode 2, 28:51)
Here, Glukharev equates social statuses and laws: He wants them both to lose their meanings. We can determine from this phrase that in Glukhrev’s vision, the Apocalypse is not the final and the highest court where those who have not obeyed the rules would be punished, as it is stipulated in Christian texts, but the moment when all rules are simply dismissed. Thus, we can say here that rules are neither ultimate nor are they entirely arbitrary and subjective. The reason they are not ultimate is that they can be dismissed. The reason they are not arbitrary or subjective is that it is only during the Apocalypse that they can be taken away. However, an individual cannot get rid of them. Rules belong to a higher order, and thus only the higher order can dismiss them.
Other instances where the semireligious motif surfaces in Glukhar’ further prove the point that the police’s actions and judgements are based on the assumption that moral values are not products of interpersonal arrangements, conventions, or education, but that they exist independently of people’s opinions about them. There is an objective order of things that divides people into two groups: those who live out of prison and of those who do not. A crime is thus equivalent to an attempt to surpass a physical law: This attempt will inevitably have material consequences. The police officer is depicted as a referee standing on the outside and giving an account of what is going on in the world. She or he does not have to actively implement the law. The law would carry itself out, and the police officer would just witness it. The police officer is a mediator between God or the moral standard and human beings, a prophet who delivers the truth to people.
In ethics, the belief in a division between of moral norms and subjective opinions is called “moral realism.” Thus, it can be said that Gkukhar’s moral metaphysics is in fact a version of moral realism.
Conclusions and Perspectives for Further Studies
The analysis presented here revealed that the show depicts the police as a group which operates via informal and personal connections in the interests of community. This function is not presented in a straightforward manner, but rather results from the struggle of characters to label certain actions as either legal or illegal. The police’s actions defined in the show as illegal do not remain uncontested, but instead they are repeatedly challenged and are usually justified and legitimized. Thus, Glukhar’ does not instil radical doubt in police legitimacy. The show first problematizes only some patterns of police functions, such as its use of informal rules and its recourse to illegal means, and subsequently justifies them.
My analysis has shown that there are four justification strategies present in the show. First, police work is portrayed from the point of view of an outsider who becomes a participant observer, who then also gradually takes on the values of those he is observing. Second, transgression of the law is presented as a form of disregard for formal norms of the state and society, and in favor of more pragmatic, experience-based, humane principles of community. Third, media stereotypes of corrupt police officers are challenged. Finally, the mission of the police is described in semireligious terms.
Glukhar’ offers an opposition between society and community. Civil society is based on formal contracts with no feelings and no emotional belonging, while the community is constituted by internal and emotional links and informal contacts. It can be further argued that the first and the second legitimation strategies reinforce the image of Russia as composed of communities, and the image of such communities, in turn, reinforces the legitimacy of illegal police actions in the TV show: Community can only be policed informally, and such informal policing produces and reproduces communities.
If we relate Glukhar’ to Reiner’s and Leishman and Mason’s typology of law enforcement narratives, then the show reflects the vigilante type of law enforcement narrative most closely. In accordance with this narrative type, Glukahr’ portrays the police officer as “the street-wise cop, understanding the vicious nature of criminals, can deal effectively with them, defying any restraints posed by legal or departmental rules and regulations” (Reiner, 2010, p. 194), who is also in conflict with “management cops.” The citizenry is “nominally the justification for the vigilante’s battle” but “do not adequately appreciate or support his actions” (Reiner, 2010, p. 194). However, the show Glukhar’ ultimately goes beyond this type because it portrays not a “lone-wolf cop,” as the vigilante type stipulates, but rather a group of officers. Also, unlike the vigilante narrative type, we see that Glukhar’ depicts citizens who do not justify corruption. In addition, the show deals first and foremost with the police as a community, rather than with the theme of fighting crime. In this respect, the show might also fall within “the deviant police,” “the police community,” and even the “community police” types of stories, never fully coinciding with any particular type.
I do not believe that Glukhar’s cultural specificity explains its inconsistency with the mentioned typologies. Even though the show’s stories are richly ornamented with details of contemporary Moscow life, deep narrative patterns and character functions can easily be described by the language proposed by Reiner and Leishman and Mason. In other words, while superficial aspects of the show are culturally specific, its deep structure is not; and while some types of transgression might be seen as culturally specific, their justifications are not culturally specific at all. Regarding justifications, I would argue that Glukhar’ adds to the list of possible justifications that Reiner and Leishman and Mason have discussed. The show proposes an additional, unique justification through its open recognition of a crisis of legitimacy, and through its subsequent resolution of the crisis through the strategies I described earlier. Glukhar’ does not try to hide the legitimacy problem; on the contrary, it admits there is a crisis and discusses it openly. The series does not show the police as a homogenous organization; it gives voice to characters who challenge police authority. It does not try to establish a single and totalizing myth of the police. Instead, it shows the complexity and ambivalence of policing in the society where the police do not enjoy universal trust. However, this openness about the problem functions as a new way of justification, a type that has not been widely discussed in the research literature. Thus, a thematic and functionalist analysis of Glukhar’ contributes to our understanding of how popular culture can symbolically justify the police whose legitimacy is contested.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.