Netflix's Seven Seconds, CBS' The Red Line and Fox's Shots Fired were the rare shows to depict police violence in recent years

HuffPost

All three shows provided a rebuttal to the "feel-good" TV cop story that has been criticized amid the George Floyd protests for promoting "copaganda." "In the last several years, as fatal police shootings of unarmed Black men have gone viral on social media, such shows as The Red Line, Seven Seconds and Fox’s Shots Fired have attempted to shift expectations by showcasing the effect of brutality cases on victims’ families, the police force and the judicial system," says Leigh Blickley. For Seven Seconds, writer David Shanks worked with creator Veena Sud to craft a drama to portray the truth about brutality in the force and the system that protects officers from being held accountable for horrendous actions toward black communities. “It’s sort of a self-perpetuating culture of, ‘We protect one another at all costs. The public be damned.’ And that’s not right,” says Shanks. “Now we’re sort of watching it all play out, and people are, like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s really happening.’ And Veena had the wherewithal and thought to put something together and present something like that to an audience. It was, and still is, necessary.”