OVER the last year we have seen increasing state violence and violation of the right to protest in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and other places. We are now presented with two TV series that are perky and gleeful about those violations.

The US series High Potential and the Australian series Blue Murder Motel feature ordinary citizens — in the first a housewife/office cleaner and in the second two owners of a motel — trampling the rights of the accused, and all in a cutesy, light atmosphere where the hilarity never stops, unless you’re the victim of the characters in either of these series.

High Potential (ABC, 2024/2025), is a hit and has been renewed for a second season. It follows the fun escapades of Morgan, an overnight janitor at the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) with an IQ of 160, and by day a mother with three kids. The series, a combination of more standard ABC/Disney family melodrama and CBS police procedural, begins with a series of role reversals.

Instead of being an immigrant stuck in a low-paying job, Morgan is a Caucasian consigned to being a cleaner but who, between dusting, puts the police on the right track toward solving a murder. The upper echelons of the LAPD — the detectives, in this woke fantasy — are African American and Latino and their sensitivity contrasts to two white goon cops on the street who accost Morgan.

She bullies her way onto the staff and, in solving crimes, is distinguished by her utter disregard for 75 years of court protections of police suspects. She paws through a female biologist’s office in an illegal search as the official police detective is talking to the woman. She then brazenly steals a letter from the same office by posing as a cleaner and breaking and entering a safe because she figures out the combination. Finally, in an interrogation, she wants to play the bad cop, coming down violently on the citizen being grilled.

This is Desperate Housewives meets CSI: Miami, even employing the CSI flashbacks of suspects as Morgan tells their story. Morgan describes her flaunting of citizen’s rights as her “rebelliousness” and, in the end, we all have a laugh at her walking all over the constitution.

What could be funnier than to save a woman the suspects have kidnapped. It’s #metoo enlisted under the authoritarian sign of Joe Friday’s Dragnet (Universal Pictures, 1987).  

Blue Murder Motel (TVNZ+, 2026), a New Zealand series, is about a couple of former police detectives from the New South Wales force in Australia who retire and buy a run-down motel in New Zealand. The gimmick, alluded to in the title, is that every week there is a murder at their motel which the couple solve. The way Peter and Vanessa Coleman solve these crimes is, as in High Potential, by using their status as civilians to spy on and trample the rights of their guests at the motel.

In this combination of romantic comedy and detective series, Vanessa especially is the more aggressive, grabbing hold of one guest’s arms and twisting it to stop a verbal confrontation that even Peter thinks is too much on her part. She later breaks into the room of a suspect couple and steals the woman’s lipstick, to be used later as evidence against her. Peter, standing guard, calls to warn her the other couple is outside, putting us in the position of sympathising with her breaking and entering, hoping she gets away with it.

Later, Peter, in unclogging the suspect couple’s drain, finds the missing piece of evidence that seals their guilt. He suggests they simply install cameras in the rooms to spy on all their guests, which Vanessa resists because “it will kill the fun vibe.”

The pilot ends with the two dancing under a disco ball highlighting their romance which is enhanced by their combined flaunting the law. In our modern police state this is called a romantic interlude.  

It’s not often that a TV series spills directly into the headlines, but the New South Wales Police force, from which Peter and Vanessa retired, is in the news for the brutality with which they assaulted demonstrators during a rally to protest against the royal treatment accorded by the Australian government to the President of Israel Isaac Herzog, accused of perpetrating genocide.

Even the Australian mainstream media described the protesters as being “punched, pushed and arrested,” and questioned whether this was excessive use of force. It’s interesting to note that ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Company, there on the ground, ran with the story questioning the police, while the BBC, in their story defended the police, drawing attention instead to what they termed “protest violence.”

We also have the LAPD, Morgan’s force, accused of violent treatment of Ice protesters with a woman recently shot in the face by police.

These two series make light of ongoing violence as protesters ramp up dissent against governments which are becoming increasingly hostile and belligerent. They do it in a way that makes light of the police flaunting of rights. To demand that the police honour the rights of protesters is, for the police, “killing their vibe.” The problem, of course, is what constitutes the “vibe” that the police vibrate to.

High Potential Season 2 is currently streaming on ABC
Blue Murder Motel is currently streaming on TVNZ+; some episodes are available on youtube