Cops, Little Britain, Gone with the Wind taken off air as Black Lives Matter protests put spotlight on TV
- US police series Cops won’t return after more than 30 years on air, while streaming services rethink iconic yet racially insensitive shows in the current climate
- Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s show, the First, may also be axed because of O’Reilly’s history of insensitivity to racial issues
The long-running police reality show Cops was cancelled by the Paramount Network this week, and reruns of a popular British comedy have been cut from Netflix – the latest signs of how the media industry is grappling with portrayals of race and policing.
After pulling Cops from its schedule, ViacomCBS confirmed the show was cancelled. “Cops is not on the Paramount Network and we don’t have any current or future plans for it to return,” the network said in a statement. The reality show, which had aired on various networks for three decades, billed itself as a “raw and realistic series” with “unprecedented access into the daily lives and work of police” across the US.
The British comedy Little Britain was removed from several streaming services, including Netflix, the BBC’s iPlayer and BritBox, over its repeated use of blackface, according to multiple reports.
A BBC spokesperson told The Telegraph newspaper that “times have changed” since the sketch comedy programme first aired in the mid-2000s. But other shows with blackface portrayals or white actors caricaturing people of colour are still available on streaming services, the Daily Mail newspaper reported.
ViacomCBS employees are also asking the media company to drop a streaming channel carrying a new show by former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, because of its insensitivity to issues surrounding the death of George Floyd.