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While there are obvious political-correctness-related reasons for this, you do have to consider the 'Dog Bites Man' angle. I wouldn't want detective shows to reflect real crime statistics, because most of the homicides making up those statistics are boring and obvious. 'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.' Right. Not exactly gripping drama. When it's an intelligent, wealthy man hiding a dark secret using an intricate fake alibi - then you have good drama, precisely because it's unusual relative to the real world.
Most of the homicides are boring and obvious but some of them are really funny because of how dumb the criminals are. 'The gun just happened to go off'. They did their drug deal under CCTV. Or the dumb, crass nicknames they have on 'encrypted' messaging for drug importation. Or how they brag about killing this guy in their chat group. Or how they realize only when prompted by a judge that while they're trying to cheat on tax they're only making it worse for themselves, so they completely reverse their story.
Dumb people lying badly is funny and makes the audience feel superior. I'm not a good storyteller and don't remember too much of what I've heard but there's great potential.
Oh, there's potential, but it's not going to scratch that whodunnit itch. It's something else.
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That's... pretty much Season 1 of The Wire to a T, which is widely acknowledged as one of the best seasons of television ever produced.
Yes, but it's a social realist drama where a big part of what makes it engaging is getting to know the low-rent ghetto drug dealers really well and understanding their quirks and motivations. Per @WandererintheWilderness's point, I don't think an episodic murder mystery series set in the same milieu would be engaging: in a murder mystery, the killer has to be someone unsuspected, and solving the mystery has to be at least something of an intellectual challenge. "Low-rent ghetto drug dealer murders rival drug dealer by shooting him in the back of the head" is prime fodder for a crime drama, but probably not for a self-contained episodic murder mystery: there is no mystery, about the identity of the perpetrator, their motive or their method.
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The Wire exists. As best as I can recall there is only a single real murder investigation in the wire that's not gang related. In fact there's an entire storyline about no one giving a shit about gang murders because they're not interesting or meritorious enough to devote resources to investigate.
The wire is a character drama focused mostly on the criminals as long-run characters in a broader narrative, though. Very different genre than episodic investigative dramas from the cop's perspective.
You can make an interesting show about investigating lowlives shooting each other. It just wouldn't look anything like CSI.
Okay, but the Wire has more investigative elements than most shows procedural or not. Procedural pretty much really only means self-contained because most investigative shows are filled with gobs of pointless drama and soap-opera b plots that are strung through many episodes or like any British investigative show about 40 minutes of the victim's family arguing about vague things to present them as red herrings. Law & Order is probably the only thing that represents a show that's just investigations contained in an episode, maybe the early CSI seasons as well.
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This is an astute observation, but I assume you can reason out what the result would be if an entire generation or two of Americans were raised only being exposed to the counterfactual reality presented in media, with no knowledge of our exposure to the mundane-but-not-telegenic underlying reality. They’d have an extremely skewed understanding of what the world is actually like.
Well, yes. But ultimately the problem is people forming their worldviews based on fiction instead of balancing their intellectual diet with non-fiction or, better yet, first-hand experience of the real world. It's a problem as old as Don Quixote, and I don't think the correct lesson to take from Don Quixote is 'how dare those irresponsible poets fill their ballads with giants, virtuous knights, and loyal servants? we need more books about windmills and scumbags to fix impressionable readers' sense of reality'.
(Granted, biases might still cause writers to limit themselves to a particular kind of man biting a particular kind of dog. But that's a whole other conversation than one about realism.)
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