John Langley

John Langley has solidified his place in television history by developing a signature style of "video verite"—one he has used for the past 21 seasons of the international hit series Cops. As the show’s creator and executive producer, Langley broke the mold of how documentary-style projects were shown on TV, paving the way for reality programming as we know it today.

Even before Cops hit the air, on FOX in March 1989, Langley was causing a stir as a producer of various two-hour event specials with Geraldo Rivera. American Vice: The Doping of a Nation featured three live drug busts, shown across the U.S. in prime time, and Cocaine Blues was a meditation on the drug prevalence of the 1980s. In the process of doing these types of shows, Langley had an ah-hah moment. "I thought, Wow, what an interesting show it would make to just follow police officers with no filters between them and what they do. Just to share their point of view could make a fascinating show."

But his catch-it-as-you-can, witness-reality-unfold idea was met with heavy opposition, he explains. "Everybody told me it would never work, that you could never do a show without actors, without narrators, without a host, without a script. Cops has none of these. It has a natural soundtrack, not music, only an opening theme song. It’s a song that everybody knows nowadays but also one that everybody initially tried to get me to abolish back in the day. That’s one of the ironies of life. What was once controversial and daring is now passé or has become institutionalized."

This shift has also played a hand in people’s willingness to reveal their identity when busted on Cops. "I rarely blur anyone’s face in this day and age," Langley says. "There’s a great receptivity to signing the release to be on Cops because it’s part of pop culture at this stage of the game. People are very accustomed to cameras. Even in the 21-year history of Cops, I’ve seen it go from reluctance to sign releases to an enthusiasm for signing releases, or an indifference to whether they sign or not, so why not sign. Cameras are no longer alien objects in our society. They are everywhere—at traffic signs, in liquor stores, on cell phones—it’s a different universe. In turn, there are even some boasting rights for certain people, to say they’ve been on Cops, which is an interesting reversal of history."

These changes over the years will be the subject of the upcoming NATPE Conference panel that Langley is participating in called "Think Tank: How We Got Here: Reality from Candid Camera to Survivor (and Beyond)," taking place January 27. "It’s a subject I know fairly well and have been doing for a number of years," he explains. "I come from the era when documentary was a dirty word. We had to start calling it ‘reality television’ instead of ‘documentary television’ because it sounded sexier. If you look at Cops, what you’re seeing is a documentary but in a format that’s acceptable for prime-time television. I’m proud of the fact that it is what it is, which is to say, a video verite slice of documentary TV. It’s not manipulated or staged or re-enacted. It’s not a game show. It’s ‘existential TV.’ You may not like the content, the ugly face of crime, but you can’t say it’s not an accurate portrait of the subject."

Langley has continued to present "slice-of-life" programming in U.S. prime time, with son Morgan as his producing partner, through his company Langley Productions. Aside from Cops, he has three other series: Jail, a companion series that follows what happens after offenders are processed; Street Patrol, dealing with patrol officers; and The Tony Rock Project, a show about misconceptions, pre-conceptions and prejudice.

Though some say that reality TV has hit its saturation point, Langley points out that this style of programming has been around for ages and likely will be for many more to come. "I think television in general is cyclical. It’s like the myth of the eternal return…You’ve always had documentary or so-called reality TV, you will always see some version of that. I suppose in the future we’ll have holographic TV, which will be the big breakthrough, but you’re not going to change the fascination with certain subject matter. We’ll still be watching human drama unfold before us, no matter the format."