Thanks to Zoë Samudzi and Briana Ureña-Ravelo for feedback on parts of what follows. Deeply influential but not directly cited below are Sylvia Wynter on the idea of The Human and Che Gossett‘s years of twitter musings on humanity/animality along with decades of Black feminist abolitionist visions and critiques, especially the works of Ruth Wilson-Gilmore, Mariame Kaba and Angela Davis. Credit for anything useful below is theirs. Feedback – constructive, destructive and other – welcome.

FBI is a police procedural running on CBS since 2018 with an ensemble structure centered around two leads. It tells fictional stories of the FBI focused around partners Maggie Bell (Missy Peregrym) and Omar “OA” Zidan (Zeeko Zaki) as they try to incarcerate or kill the people they or the state criminalize.(1) It has single episode story lines with the occasional longer arc or recurring story element mixed in. FBI shares a lot with Criminal Minds, NCIS and CSI in how it uses database searches and panoptic surveillance as an unnamed, pseudoneutral character that lends other characters omniscience (Criminal Minds also has an actually omniscient character in Spencer Reid). Season one has two recurring story arcs that affect multiple plot lines: Maggie discovers that someone murdered her husband and she tries to track down the killers, and Jubal interacts with other characters in substance abuse recovery.

The two leads are more or less competent in producing formulaic characters. Missy Peregrym reproduces her vulnerable-yet-violent-cop character Andy McNally from Rookie Blue except this time it’s her dead husband haunting her instead of an alcoholic dad.(2) Zeeko Zaki is a grim-faced agent who draws hard lines in the sand about any legal transgression and is constantly overcome by his emotions. FBI is more character driven than producer Dick Wolf’s famed Law & Order series and about the same mix of character + procedure as his Law & Order: Special Victim’s Unit. The only semi-novel aspect is Zaki from a representation perspective. There aren’t many Arab Muslim protagonists in US cop shows. The institutions are inherently reactionary so representation in them isn’t so interesting but is slightly novel. Like Wolf’s earlier shows, FBI is highly procedural if not always very realistic. It does resolve many story lines by killing the villain which is unlike Law & Order, but makes rare use of torture and ticking time bomb stories, both of which are more common on contemporary shows like Blue Bloods.

Below are data tables that look at how frequently various things happen in FBI‘s first season’s stories. All of the categories reflect things seen in other cop shows too. For each table I try to offer context in the surrounding annotations. While FBI has no novel or outlier data categories, some things do happen more or less frequently in FBI than other cop shows so some table descriptions focus differently from other shows’ data already presented on this site. FBI‘s one significant outlier is that it spends no time in season one demonizing journalism. This is uncommon among cop shows.

Season one police killings

FBI at least partially resolves six of season one’s twenty-two episodes with the death of the person the feds are pursuing and the FBI kills five people they are pursuing in two others. The amount of people killed by any particular agent in season one is only slightly remarkable though both OA and Maggie in season one kill more people than most of the people they criminalize. More troubling is how FBI normalizes police shootings as heroic outcomes as explored below the table.

Episode name/date	Killed by police	Episode resolved via suspect’s death	Suspect killed by
E1 “Pilot” 25 Sep 2018	0	No	N/A
E2 “Green Birds” 2 Oct 2018	1	Yes	OA
E3 “Prey” 9 Oct 2018	0	No	N/A
E4 “Crossfire” 16 Oct 2018	1	Yes	Unnamed FBI sniper
E5 “Doomsday” 23 Oct 2018	0	No	N/A
E6 “Family Man” 30 Oct 2018	1	No	Unnamed FBI SWAT
E7 “Cops and Robbers” 13 Nov 2018	0	No	N/A
E8 “This Land Is Your Land” 20 Nov 2018	0	Sorta	N/A
E9 “Compromised” 4 Dec 2018	0	Yes	N/A
E10 “The Armorer’s Faith” 11 Dec 2018	5	No	OA (1), British cops (1), other FBI (3)
E11 “Identity Crisis” 15 Jan 2019	0	No	N/A
E12 “A New Dawn” 22 Jan 2019	0	No	N/A
E13 “Partners in Crime” 12 Feb 2019	0	Yes	Killed by kidnapee
E14 “Exposed” 19 Feb 2019	1	Sorta	Maggie & OA shoot the same person
E15 “Scorched Earth” 26 Feb 2019	0	No	N/A
E16 “Invisible” 12 Mar 2019	0	No	N/A
E17 “Apex” 26 Mar 2019	1	Yes	Maggie
E18 “Most Wanted” 2 Apr 2019	0	No	N/A
E19 “Conflict of Interest” 16 Apr 2019	2	Yes	Maggie (1), Jubal (1)
E20 “What Lies Beneath” 30 Apr 2019	0	No	N/A
E21 “Appearances” 7 May 2019	0	No	N/A
E22 “Closure” 14 May 2019	0	Yes	N/A

The FBI is involved involved in the deaths of people they pursue in about one-third of the season one episodes. FBI is not responsible for material world police shootings but it, like all cop shows, plays a role in (re)producing public support for police violence through discursive illustration. It offers an imaginary heroic police violence. It relies on an audience that already accepts these outcomes as palatable or else audiences would read it as the sadistic horror it is or, possibly, the audience would be aware of their enjoyment of sadistic horror. In Weber’s description of the state as the claimant to a monopoly over legitimate violence, FBI normalizing police violence is the same as normalizing the state itself. The relationship between the showrunners producing these stories and audiences receiving them as virtuous is part of statism; the organization of sociality around monopolies over legitimate violence.

Who do the cops pursue?

But to what end is the monopolized legitimate violence deployed? FBI portrays the U.S. carceral system as not being built around Black Captivity. It tells stories of Black Captivity largely without Black people. This is not a disavowal of Black criminality nor white innocence. It still narrates through Black criminality, at times explicitly beginning with the show’s pilot episode. Instead it relies on Black Captivity being grammatical to the viewing audience that brings knowledge of Black Captivity and mass incarceration to the show already. It doesn’t have to be spelled out when it is the framework through which the audience understands the concept of prisons. So when FBI represents FBI agents largely criminalizing white people as their universe, it still does so through Black Captivity.

FBI‘s first season presents a radically different picture of police violence than the material world offers. The FBI in season one pursues predominantly white people. The table below shows the demographics.

Episode name/date	Racialization of person/people the cops pursue	Episode notes
E1 “Pilot” 25 Sep 2018	White, Black, non-Black latinx	Richard Spencer stand-in tries to instigate gang war. OA introduced as ex-counter-terror
E2 “Green Birds” 2 Oct 2018	Arab Muslim, South Asian Muslim	Muslim man seduces USian women to join ISIS
E3 “Prey” 9 Oct 2018	White (Eastern European migrants)	Eastern European sex traffickers
E4 “Crossfire” 16 Oct 2018	White, Black	White ex-soldier mentors Somali child as sniper
E5 “Doomsday” 23 Oct 2018	White
E6 “Family Man” 30 Oct 2018	White	FBI asks if non-white latinx maid is connected to a cartel
E7 “Cops and Robbers” 13 Nov 2018	White (3), Black (1)
E8 “This Land Is Your Land” 20 Nov 2018	White
E9 “Compromised” 4 Dec 2018	White, Black, latinx	Black man is gang leader, non-Black latinx is cartel
E10 “The Armorer’s Faith” 11 Dec 2018	White, white latinx	Latinxs are Los Zetas
E11 “Identity Crisis” 15 Jan 2019	White latinx	White latinx coke dealers are Sinaloa Cartel
E12 “A New Dawn” 22 Jan 2019	White, Black	Black anti-racists are randonly dangerous
E13 “Partners in Crime” 12 Feb 2019	White
E14 “Exposed” 19 Feb 2019	White
E15 “Scorched Earth” 26 Feb 2019	White
E16 “Invisible” 12 Mar 2019	White, Asian
E17 “Apex” 26 Mar 2019	White
E18 “Most Wanted” 2 Apr 2019	White
E19 “Conflict of Interest” 16 Apr 2019	Black	Black men are gang affiliated
E20 “What Lies Beneath” 30 Apr 2019	Arab Mulsim, Arab Jew	Muslim Brotherhood only named organization
E21 “Appearances” 7 May 2019	White (2), non-Black latinx, Black	Multiracial meth dealing biker gang
E22 “Closure” 14 May 2019	White, white latinx, non-Black latinx	Juarez Cartel story

FBI often works to have contrasting “good” characters every time it produces a racist character type. In Arabs and Muslims in the Media Evelyn Alsultany describes a “field of meaning” beyond simple ideas of representation. She writes:

The critical cultural studies approach that I employ strategically privileges the analysis of ideological work performed by images and story lines, as opposed to reading an image as negative or positive, and therefore gets us beyond reading a positive image as if it will eliminate stereotyping. If we interpret an image as either positive or negative, then we can conclude that the problem of racial stereotyping is over because of the appearance of sympathetic images of Arabs and Muslims during the War on Terror. However, an examination in relation to its narrative context reveals how it participates in a larger field of meaning about Arabs and Muslims. The notion of a field of meaning, or an ideological field, is a means to encompass the range of acceptable ideas about the War on Terror.

Here I use this “field of meaning” to look at how FBI ties racialized subject positions to specific racist types. So in keeping with Alsultany’s focus, how often are Arabs and Muslims story lines not articulated to terrorism? As in, does FBI allow Arabs and Muslims to have meaning that is not tied to terrorism?

FBI makes latinxs part of the plot in six episodes. In each the latinx characters, primarily white latinxs (though some might be positioned non-white in the US and Canada by non-latinx white settlers), are articulated to gang or narcotrafficking stories with MS-13, the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas and the Juarez Cartel all making appearances. Gang and cartel life is FBI‘s full imaginary, the field of meaning, for latinxs from MS-13 in the season opener to the Juarez Cartel in the season finale.

FBI features Black characters as central to storylines in four episodes and as ancillary to a few others. In the pilot episode Black characters are gang members or otherwise articulated to the gang story. It’s the same with episode 14, “Conflicts of Interest”, about a Nigerian fentanyl gang. Anti-Black portrayals of Black people go beyond racist types, they (re)produce a Black Criminality through which we are to understand Blackness as a whole. In “A New Dawn” the FBI is called in to investigate the killing of some alt-right blowhard who was inciting violence against non-white students. The person who killed him is a white anti-racist working with a group of Black liberation activists. The episode narrates the group as being too extreme – as opposed to moderately anti-racist? – criminalizing Black opposition to white violence. The Black liberation activists are dangerous to random people necessitating a COINTELPRO-style attack against the group. Though the show doesn’t intend this, the episode affirms resistance to anti-Blackness as something to be punished and the white communities attacking Black people are the victims of the anti-racists. The episode rejects the dead alt-right dude’s politics while faithfully producing imaginary “reverse racism”. The episode even reproduces the right wing trope that Black activists aren’t motivated on their own, but by white liberals intervening, in this case a college professor.

Both season one episodes with Muslims as parts of plot lines involve terrorism. “Green Birds” has an ISIS member seducing young white girls to carry out attacks. The white girls are dupes and the ISIS member’s actual romantic partner is a Nigerian Muslim girl. In “What Lies Beneath” the FBI provides security for a visiting Egyptian official with a history of torture. The group targeting him is never named in the end and the only organization named is the Muslim Brotherhood. OA himself is introduced in the pilot with a supervisor telling him he’s “no longer undercover tracking terrorists,” experience referred to throughout the season. OA’s meaning  and professional capacity is still tied to terrorism. FBI has no concepts of Arabs or Muslims outside of the War on Terror’s islamophobic field of meaning.

Big Hero vs. Big Villain storytelling

FBI barely uses a cop show trope I’m calling Big Hero vs. Big Villain. Big Hero vs. Big Villain are story arcs where the police are less systemic violence’s agents and more individuals in contest with others. Big Hero vs. Big Villain can be done in a way that includes a systemic framework, if not critique as in The Wire‘s story lines of McNulty vs. the Barksdale Crew or Stringer Bell. Season one has only one Big Hero vs. Big Villain story. Bell has a personal quest to solve her husband’s murder in an arc spanning several episodes and concluding with the season one finale. The only thing keeping this from being a true Big Hero vs. Big Villain story is the hero and villain are unknown to each other.

Heroic portrayals of torture and police brutality

FBI only makes use of torture in a single season one episode, “What Lies Beneath”, where OA sticks his finger into a hospitalized person’s bullt wound in and attempt to extract information. This is rare by the standards of contemporary cop shows like Blue Bloods or NCIS but in line with Wolf’s earlier shows.

The Ticking Time Bomb

FBI in season one has two Ticking Time Bomb episodes, “A New Dawn” and “What Lies Beneath”. This is rare compared to contemporary shows and more like those in the 1990s.

Other cop show tropes

FBI invokes few other cop show tropes in season one. Feedback appreciated. Thanks for reading.

(1) I say “or kill” due to FBI frequently resolving storylines by killing the suspect. This occurs far too often to consider it anything other than an expected outcome for the showrunners.

(2) This isn’t a slight against Peregrym. Young Woman Cop In A Mainstream Procedural only allows so much expressive range.