TV Guide – Week 3

How’s your lecture attendance going? Good? Good. Now mess it up by watching all the good films showing on freeview this week, listed at the bottom. Before that, you need to know about Cops.

Cops is the best show. This snappily named documentary style series is one a kind, a perfectly formed piece of informative, thrilling televisual entertainment. In the words of the creator, John Langley, Cops is the only “real reality show” in existence. In each episode of Cops, footage captured by camera crews shadowing on-duty police officers around the USA is edited together to bring you a half-hour programme that contains an average of three genuine criminal incidents. In contrast to its British counterparts, Cops shows you everything—the fighting, the swearing, the drugs, the car chases… even the bodies. What American law enforcement personnel have to deal with often defies belief; between meth-heads, alligators and cheese thieves, many Cops encounters are stranger than fiction. Making Cops is dangerous, and they say that no art is worth human suffering, but Cops isn’t just art—it is, for many people, their daily lives. When the screen fades to black, fading to the chatter of police radios and the steel drums of the ‘Bad Boys’ outro, the lives of both cops and cons go on as normal. You can find Cops showing on CBS Reality and Movie Mix, practically non-stop. Watch it. It’s the bests how.

Films: Forrest Gump, Monday, Film 4, 9pm; The Terminator, Monday, Five, 10.55pm; The Blues Brothers, Tuesday, ITV4, 10pm; Taken, Wednesday, Film 4, 9pm; The Social Network, Thursday, Film 4, 11.30pm; if…, Friday, Film 4, 1.50am; Panic Room, Friday, Film 4, 11pm; Wall Street, Saturday, Channel 4, 12.35am; Dances With Wolves, Sunday, BBC Two, 2pm; Space Jam, Sunday, ITV2, 3.15pm. If you’ve got Sky or Netflix, then watch whatever you want, so long as that thing is either Boardwalk Empire’s final season—Saturdays on Sky Atlantic at 9pm—or BoJack Horseman, which can be found in Netflix’s stable, always and forever.