The XX Factor: What women really think.

It's Hard Out Here For A Cop

What do you have to do to make a gritty, boundary pushing cop show these days? You can't top The Wire's complexity, soul crushing realism or commitment to unhappy endings. NYPD Blue fully explored unappealing semi-nudity, as well as racist badge holders—an archetype Crash then overdid to the point of absurdism. Law & Order: SVU has been beaming extremely unsettling sex crimes into living rooms for years. The Shield took on corruption and the CSI franchise has a lock on fancy gadgets and newfangled technology. What does that leave for a freshman cop show, out to prove that it's not just old and borrowed, but also something new?

Southland, an ensemble series about working the beat on the mean streets of Los Angeles that premieres tonight on NBC (it's also streaming on Hulu now), has come up with a fairly effective solution: Kill children. Grit cred established.

Television has become so "edgy," and viewers so familiar with the tropes of that edginess, that it's extremely difficult to subvert audience expectations, or more to the point, to make audiences feel something about all the dark events taking place on screen. (Some people unwind to episodes of Grey's and some to SVU. Just depends whether you prefer relaxing to elevator make-out sessions or sexual predators being brought to justice). Tonight's episode of Southland follows a rookie cop who is having a seriously unsettling first day—the kind of first day that involves gun-wielding, trigger-happy gang bangers, a racist, sexist, unhinged partner, a john picking up a prostitute with his baby in the back seat, an innocent teenager shot down in the street for no reason and a missing little girl. In other words, he's having the kind of day that makes him seriously consider quitting—but he's also having the kind of day cops have on cop shows all the time, the kind of day we've all seen before. Until a kid turns up dead. Southland is an extremely well-made, satisfying genre series that's in some ways a throwback to Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue— but to be as cutting edge now, as those shows were then, it has to be that much more brutal.