GUY WARNING AGAINST ME JOINING A CULT: fall not for their honeyed words
ME, SLURPING THE HONEY OFF THE WORDS: what

Nothing Doing no. 15

i desperately need to track down all the episodes of this show now

CopRock is.... madness. It's just madness. And you need to understand me when I say this, because I am not exaggerating; this show is the product of giving an 80's TV exec unlimited freedom to pursue his dream project, NO MATTER THE COST.

The show was created by Steven Bochco, reknowned for heading up the new wave of gritty, realistic, no-flinch crime dramas that were dominating prime time in the late 80's. Hill Street Blues, Bay City Blues, L.A. Law, the man was UNSTOPPABLE! His in your face content shocked and thrilled us, and the people wanted more! So much more! So the big wigs call him in and say "You are the perfect drug. You cannot fail us. Here is All the Money, and None of the Oversight. Make us proud!" And he takes it and runs.

Now, unbeknownst to the big wigs at the time, Bochco's real passion for human drama and emotionally evocative storytelling came from his love of musical theater. So he calls up his pal, award winning songwriter Randy Newman, and he says "Randy, do you have a few free weekends? I want your input on this idea I got banging around. I wanna do a TELEVISION MUSICAL about COPS ON THE EDGE!" and Randy, perhaps only out of polite respect for their friendship, took a deep breath, penciled some time into his schedule, and did not simply tell Steven that this was a bad idea. CopRock is the mind-breakingly stupid result.

This show is not only insane from first principles, it takes that madness to nearly Paul Verhoeven levels of 90's political satire, only it does so ENTIRELY BY ACCIDENT, because, and I cannot stress this enough, this was Steven Bochco's BABY. This was his DREAM. He was 10,000% genuine with ALL of what transpired. And what transpired, as you have only just BARELY glimpsed, you sweet summer children, was pure lunacy. You know what happens when you mix a turn of the decade gritty crime drama that doesn't flinch when it touches all the hot surfaces it can, with the heightened reality of musical theater? CopRock.

CopRock is a show which in it's first episode features:

1. an illegal police execution and crime scene tampering to exonerate themselves.
2. an old man cop singing a sad song about how hard it is to have a hot young wife who is also a cop.
3. a woman selling her baby for drugs.
4. a cowboy chief of police who inexplicably has a cowboy robot in his closet.

Randy had left before most of the music was written, contributing a bare minimum number of song ideas to the pilot, and the intro theme "Under the Gun," a song which does not match the show tonally at all, because it's Randy Fucking Newman and why would anyone think he could write a Cop show intro? Famously short-sticked actor Ernie Hudson, in desperate need of Ghostbusters grade casting was probably thrilled to land a key support role. But he bailed the second the pilot was done filming and he did not look back. Test audiences HATED it. The big wigs HATED it.

So much 90's money had been sunk into this. Back then it was prime-time or DIE. You were competing for the key after work and dinner time slots when every eyeball in america was deciding what to do with their evening, and your highlight series was hyped months in advance to get people salivating all fucking Summer for the new hotness of the Fall TV season. CopRock had to be a BLOCKBUSTER. The execs greenlit an entire season, sight unseen, with almost no clue what Bochco had cooking. And it was all hyped up as the next big stroke of genius from the man who brought us Doogie Howser M.D. just last year! This was a fucking HINDENBURG of a disaster. They were, effectively, 98% confident that their Ace pitcher was drunk on power, throwing grenades into the audience.

They begged Bochco to cut the musical numbers. They pleaded with him to have mercy, and let them air the cop drama part, without the musical numbers that were as inexplicable as they were tasteless. They offered him contracts. Money! COCAINE! More seasons of his other shows, with concessions! They cursed God and themselves for giving this lunatic so much creative power, before sadly, pitifully... shoving it to the Wednesday 9pm time slot, and stillbirthing it onto the airwaves to baffle and horrify audiences nationwide. All eleven episodes were universally despised, and most affiliate channels stopped airing it after the second episode. Affiliate stations threw their tapes out, and ran re-runs in the slot instead. Most of the world never saw more than one episode, or two if morbidly curious. The show was unceremoniously canceled no sooner than it had been released, allowing a stricken nation to grieve.

A number of the fresh new faces in starring roles essentially had their careers cut short, and never landed a meaningful role ever again. Steven Bochco would go on to create NYPD Blue, the last of the cartoonish crime dramas until Blue Bloods arrived 20 years later. But his torch had already been passed to Dick Wolf of Law & Order fame. Randy Newman won an Emmy award for Outstanding Achievement in Music and Lyrics for his theme song contribution. Bob Iger, ABC exec most responsible for the fiasco... well, he's busy strike breaking right now, and trying to shovel the future of all creative endeavors into an AI furnace, because after CopRock he'd just go on to fail upward until someone made him the CEO of the Disney Corporation. Having seen what man is capable of, given unlimited creative freedom, you could almost sympathize with the desire to never trust a writer ever again. But then you'd be a good for nothing scab!

It was, and is, the worst show ever made. And if you want to watch it, PLEASE KEEP IN MIND: LA in the 90's SUCKED ASS. It was as racist as the confederate south, and this show tackles that subject and many many more with a cavalier glee that, once again, you would expect of satire and comedy. Instead, it's just an atonal mess of lighthearted rom-com antics, stoic police apologia, cartoonish depictions of 90's LA crime culture, and acts of racist police violence, terror, and intimidation. It is decidedly Copaganda, despite it's occasional forays into moral hand-wringing about whether or not Cops should be punished for murdering suspects extrajudiciously. The show is, at all times, viewing all events, from the perspective that the cops are ultimately "the good guys." You should know that going in, or you're gonna have a bad time instead of a hilarious night with your friends watching insane trash TV.

Godspeed children. And watch out for strangers offering you less than fair market value for your White infants!

I hang out a lot in r/upsstore, because I work at one. Franchised, usually independently owned and operated stores that do shipping, printing, faxing, notaries, mailboxes, some even do passport photos and fingerprinting.

But if you've ever worked at one, or even been inside one for any period of time, you'll know that none of that comprises the majority of the job. The vast, overwhelming amount of time inside any UPS Store across America is spent processing Amazon returns.

I mean it. You'd be surprised. However many Amazon returns you think we see in a day, it's higher. Sometimes people ask how many we do, and when I say "400 to 800, depending on the day," they usually think I'm exaggerating for a laugh. I'm not. Not in the slightest.

A majority of these returns are done simply because they're free. I've had people come in and wait in line 10 minutes to return a single charging cord. But I've also had people come in with two large laundry baskets full of clothes they tried on once and have been "saving up" to return 37 items in one go, because apparently Amazon doesn't ban your account for doing that. The system is absurdly exploitable. It's gotten so bad that people often come in with Shein or Temu returns thinking they can just have us scan a code and then walk out the door, because they're so used to that being how Amazon does returns, they can't even conceptualize that that whole thing is an Amazon-exclusive program.

Lately, Amazon have been encouraging customers to do their returns at other locations, like Whole Foods, Kohl's, or more recently, Staples. This is because Kohl's and Staples were foolish enough to agree to do Amazon returns for free, believing the "increased walk-in traffic" would translate into increased sales. It won't. Ask any UPS Store employee. Hell, ask any Staples employee.

One of the many threads in r/upsstore about this was brainstorming ideas on how this system could be improved somehow. Everyone agreed the best, easiest first step would be limiting returns. Make it so a customer can't have more than 5 or so returns open at any time, with a cooldown timer as well of 12-24hrs between returns. A self-proclaimed store owner chimed in with their opposition to this idea:

So the issue with your thing, is you are now punishing people who don't cause trouble for the program. Example, this lady buys 3 to 4 outfits a month, She buys 5 different sizes (try before you buy) as she can go from xs to med/large depending on the brand. So if she has 3 dresses, she is returning 12 items, or 4 dresses 16. If she has shorts/pants with a shirt, then we are looking at 24-32 items. But you know something, she has her shit together. Straight up, Screenshot with what goes with one, 1, 2 ,3 on the bags, and her SS has 1,2,3. So why should she be punished when we have a customers who would take longer to do 1 return than for her to straight up do 30.

I've never read something so... blind? Just, completely glazing over the hugest, most Titanic-destroying-iceberg sized problem in their argument. I had to respond. It's something I felt very strongly about. I figured I'd share it here.

What she's doing is, at its very core, a pointless, wasteful, horribly harmful thing - the amount of waste generated in shipping all of that to her and shipping it back to a landfill, all the material used to make the clothes she tries on once and then gets thrown away (by Amazon), it's unsustainable and destructive at its core. It's the retail equivalent of smoking cigarettes and then littering the butts. Why should littering be made illegal, it'll mean this one smoker I know won't be able to toss their lit cigarette butts out their car window! Well, that person shouldn't be smoking ANYWAYS!

We used to have a solution for not knowing what size clothing to buy - it was called going to a store and trying things on. I've read, in the history books, that these mythical "clothing stores" even had entire ROOMS dedicated to trying on different items to see what fit you, and anything you didn't decide to keep didn't get immediately shipped halfway across the state and then dumped in a landfill!

I'm just sayin'

Obviously this doesn't apply to disabled people or anyone who for any genuine reason can't go out to stores. But to be clear, it's never the disabled, the immunocompromised, or those with genuine reasons who come in to return their garbage to Amazon. It's almost universally the affluent upper middle class who have more money than sense and are too lazy to get up off the couch in their cushy, isolated suburban home. They'll arrive in their Mercedes SUV, unload 30 cheap pieces of crap, scream when you tell them one of their items needs to be packaged, and then huff and storm out when they're done. These people don't deserve this lifestyle.

And this lifestyle isn't a real lifestyle anyways. It's propped up by an absurdly evil billionaire who knows he's losing money to support their addictions and he doesn't really care, because as long as you're locked in, as long as you're addicted to his services, he's in control. And it's not a matter of if, but of when he gets tired of it, or Amazon spontaneously goes out of business, or he gets his head chopped off, or anything happens that this always-unsustainable house of cards comes crashing down. Your life hasn't actually been improved by Amazon, they just really want you to think that, so that you'll keep using Amazon.