Person of Interest: "A possibly-insane homeless man discovers a conspiracy around an artificial intelligence embedded in the computer systems of the entire world, analyzing and subtly manipulating the whole human race They fight crime"
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Blindspot: "An amnesiac naked woman wakes up stuffed inside a suitcase in the middle of Times Square She must search for clues to her identity based on flashes of disconnected memory and an intricate set of coded messages tattooed on her body She fights crime"
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They're all like this It's partly a structural requirement of American TV series being so long and having so much time to fill -- "solving crimes" is the catchall for "random sidequests" But it's telling that it's almost *always* specifically being a cop and busting criminals
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Like it's almost impossible for them to think of recurring problems for the heroes to have to solve while slowly advancing their main plot arcs other than "A criminal committed a random crime, as they are wont to do, hunt them down and send them to jail"
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I don't think this is a completely uniquely American cultural trait but it's one that you really notice a lot in American media I would compare it to Imperial China, surprisingly, being the culture that pioneered the mystery genre
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Much ink has been spilled about the gong'an (公案) genre -- literally the "public case" genre -- which evolved from nonfiction accounts of real bizarre legal cases (i.e. the "true crime" genre) into fiction spinning out a magistrate's investigation and resolution of a mystery
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Which started way back in the Song Dynasty (the legends of Judge Bao) and was a *massively* dominant form of literature through the Ming and Qing Dynasties Western scholars talk about how this obsession with "crime fiction" bespeaks a society struggling with "law and order"
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A society where authoritarianism means that all forms of disorder or unresolved conflict are seen through the eye of the state as "crime" and it is the agent of the state who brings about healing and peace via the rationalizing order of the legal system
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Which is fair, but, you know, looking at the culture we live in right now, it's a very "Physician, heal thyself" kind of thing
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(Ras al-Ghul as a Batman villain, although he's technically supposed to be an Arab, is a mishmash of pulp Orientalist tropes, and I always did vaguely appreciate the nod to Chinese pulp tropes with him calling Batman "Detective")
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(Like from his POV -- he's the keeper of secrets and Batman is the uncoverer, the exposer, the agent of the law who solves the mystery -- that's the most important of Batman's titles, the meaningful one as opposed to all the theatrical ninja warrior bogeyman crap)
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