The Mythcreant Podcast 514 – Buddy Cop Stories Without Cops
We love stories where two contrasting characters overcome their differences to become good friends, but we don’t love how that genre of stories is forever associated with cops. This week, we’re discussing how the vaunted buddy cop arc actually works, what it requires, and how you can use it in your stories without ever involving law enforcement. Also, a fun moment to remember how mad certain goobers got about Fury Road, and now they don’t say a peep about it.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Latifah K. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Intro music]Bunny: Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Bunny and with me today is-
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: -and
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: And today we are going to be talking about creating a buddy cop dynamic without cops, and from doing my research and studying a lot of classic buddy cop movies, I come to the conclusion that buddy cop movies are just rom-coms for straight dudes.
[laughs]Yeah, I said it.
[laughs]Chris: That doesn’t make sense.
Bunny: They’ve got so many of the same traits as rom-coms, so many of the same romantic beats, maybe we should call them brom-coms.
Oren: Brom-coms. Oh yeah, that’s good. I like that.
Bunny: Like bromance. Bro-coms.
[laughs]Rolls off the tongue.
Oren: Well, fortunately for us, the famed Chris Winkle has already written about this in a blog.
Chris: I did?
Bunny: Uh, praise be.
Oren: Yeah, “How to write three types of friendship arcs?”
Bunny: Oh, yeah.
Oren: The second one is the buddy cop arc-
[laughs]-and as we point out in there, it doesn’t have to be cops. It’s just what it’s called because it’s associated with that genre. So, we’re just going to go ahead and read this aloud for the next half hour, and we should be good to go.
[laughter]Chris: And I’ll just be like, “What? I wrote that.”
Bunny: You could be like, “Oh, wow, that’s really smart. Oh yeah, that’s that sounds good.”
Oren: To very simplify it. What we tend to think of as the buddy cop arc, and there are different stories that this label gets applied to. They don’t all fit this definition, but the most common version is basically two characters who don’t like each other forced to work together or at least be in proximity and then slowly overcoming their differences and being better together than they were apart, but usually as friends.
And yeah, that’s very similar to a lot of romances.
Bunny: Yeah. Enemies to lover is the classic romance, right?
Chris: Yeah, if you have any romance where the world is forcing them together, they don’t want to be together. That’s the kind of archetype we’re going for here.
Bunny: And usually the sort of buddy dynamic also as humorous elements. I won’t say that’s absolutely necessary, but it will be less recognizable as like a buddy cop dynamic if it’s just completely serious. Hence brom-com.
Oren: And having it be funny is useful because that way the characters not liking each other can have less edge, because similar to a romance if the characters don’t like each other and are just crappy to each other for a while, it can just be like, “Okay, seems like maybe they shouldn’t be together,” but if it’s funny, if it’s comedic antagonism then it’s like, “Oh you scamp.”
Chris: I think probably what you would end up with if you played it really seriously is the kind of thing where you have the villain and the hero teaming up. Maybe it would be like Loki and Thor, except for that probably has comedic elements as well.
Oren: They do make Loki funnier as they are redeeming him.
Bunny: Loki is already a comic villain, right? Comedic villain from comics, I should say.
Oren: Nope. Mm-mm, Mm-mm, Mm-mm.
Bunny: No?
Oren: Assuming we’re talking about the MCU one, right? I don’t really know Loki in the comics, but no, when Loki first shows up as like the big villain, he’s not really funny. In like, the Thor movie, he’s got a joke here or there, but not much of one. He’s supposed to be serious.
He’s not that threatening because his power is that he’s supposed to be good at lying and he can’t actually be that good at lying. So, he gets found out pretty quickly.
But he’s not what I would call funny, right? He starts to get funnier as they work on redeeming him and granted, a lot of that happens in Ragnarök, which is a very, you know, they turned the humor up to Taika Waititi levels.
Bunny: All right, that makes sense. I guess I’m going off of that.
Oren: And there are some sequences where he is humorous before then, some of them ill-considered like everyone laughs when Hulk is thrashing him around. But to me, that just drove home how underwhelming he was as a villain.
It’s like, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re going to beat him because there’s just one of him and there’s five of them.” He has minions, but they don’t matter.
Bunny: I can’t say I’ve seen a whole lot of Loki, but I guess, just the general impression. Now, maybe just because he’s played by a charismatic actor is that he’s like a goofy dude, and I guess canonical great mythology Loki was never all that good at lying either, but you know.
Oren: Yeah. Although it’s hard to tell if him being bad at lying is because he’s supposed to be bad at lying, or if the people creating these stories just didn’t create very convincing lies-
[chuckles]-like his lies are often fallen for despite not being very good. So, is that like a commentary on how gullible the other characters are. I don’t know.
[laughs]Chris: But you could certainly have a drama about, for instance, estranged siblings who have to come together because somebody in the family died. For instance, we could say that’s not buddy cop anymore, but you’re going to find a lot of similar things without the comedy, I think.
Bunny: Yeah, I do feel like the comedy is a pretty important part of it, even if it’s not absolutely necessary, and these elements still work without it. I think it’s pretty important.
Oren: A lot of it’s going to come down to how strong an arc do you want because you can have characters be friends, but if there’s not a strong arc, it’s not necessarily going to scratch the same itch, and there will be different levels of it, right?
Like in the show, Loki. Loki teams up with Mobius and he doesn’t like Mobius at first, but Mobius doesn’t have any problem with him. So, the arc is entirely one-sided. It’s just part of Loki’s general chilling attitude arc and it’s over pretty quickly.
So, there’s an element of it, but most stories that we think of as being buddy cop movies have a stronger relationship arc because that’s a big central part of the movie.
Bunny: Yeah, and I think the other key part of buddy cop dynamics is that the two buddies have to be different like you’ll have grumpy, sunshine or like one of them is shy and the other’s outgoing, one of them is earnest and the other one’s conniving, one of them is hip and cool, and the other one’s dorky, right?
But no matter what their differences are, they need to have comparable skill sets, which is part of realizing why they’re better together than apart because usually they ultimately end up either teaching each other their skill sets or learning to play off of each other. So, we need a level playing field. One of them should not be like a tiny baby compared to the other one.
Chris: So, when I was looking at duos, generally I think any duo, you need contrast of some kind and so usually they are designed so that they are very different. Having them be at the same level so that they’re equal in skill, I think if you want a kind of buddy story, I think that’s important.
But for instance, we have a lot of important duos that people really like that are essentially hero and sidekick like Sherlock & Watson. Clearly, Sherlock is supposed to be more–
This is complicated because the story is told from Watson’s viewpoint, which definitely muddies the waters a lot. I think it’s actually clear in a visual medium where we just take away that complication, that Watson is a viewpoint character and then it becomes more like a hero and sidekick dynamic. So, we could have important duos that don’t have them on an even level, but then the character with more skills is more central and the story is usually more about them.
Bunny: Yeah, I don’t think every duo is a buddy cop. I don’t know if I would count those as buddy cops.
Oren: I wouldn’t. Yeah. I’m just talking about different types of relationship arcs you can have.
Chris: So given that we’re not doing buddy cops, since we’re not doing cops.
[laughs]Another question is, we can cast a broad net or may keep it small and narrow depending on what we want to do and what we want the dynamic to be like. But if it’s like best friend buddy is the important thing, then yeah, we want them to be on the same level.
Oren: Yeah, and you want them to be very different just– partly because that’s the trope, but also because that’s how you create contrast and it’s not as much fun to watch two characters who are similar in a scene together. This is like, “Okay well, do they really both have to be here.”
Chris: I will say, I really like Gravity Falls, but like one thing that does annoy me is Dipper and Mabel are initially presented right there as two siblings, and they are equally important, but it’s very clear that the storyteller identifies with Dipper and thinks of Mabel as being the sister, and the story gravitates and prioritizes Dipper more.
Which, again, I was personally annoyed by this because I thought that they should be on the same level. I would just say that’s why setting expectations is important. If you do want to have one character be more important than the other, people should know that from the start, so your audience doesn’t feel jilted-
[chuckles]-when the character that they thought was important was shoved to the side.
Oren: It’s just this, oh, it’s disappointing because Mabel just doesn’t really solve that many problems. Not like she never does, but usually, Mabel just does random stuff and creates chaos, and then Dipper has to fix it. It’s not inherently wrong, but it’s definitely a disappointment.
Chris: I think if we were going to make the story about Dipper, and Mabel as one of the side characters, that’s just how it should be presented and packaged. Whereas the way that the show is framed makes it feel like it’s about them two as a duo.
Bunny: I felt not so similar because they’re definitely a duo, but parts of the Good Omens show felt like Aziraphale and Crowley weren’t on the same level. Like in the book, they pretty much felt comparable, but I was watching the show and there’s like a montage where Aziraphale keeps just stumbling into situations and then Crowley saves him, which is one of those situations where it feels like one of them is a tiny baby compared to the other one.
Chris: Yeah, no, it definitely has that problem where Crowley has all the candy and only Aziraphale makes mistakes.
Bunny: You could definitely tell who the writers liked more, and Aziraphale just acts childlike and naive.
Chris: I also think the problem there is that they’re trying to– Crowley is technically a demon, and I think that they are afraid of making him make mistakes because he would make immoral mistakes. So, they’re trying to start him off where he’s already learned to be good.
He just has bad boy persona, and so, it’s riskier to show him– because he would do evil things. So, it’s easy to show Aziraphale making mistakes in the direction of being too lawful, for instance, and following the rules too much.
Bunny: Although in some of those cases, it’s just like he’s trusting people too much which is like, “You’re friends with a demon. I think you can still be angelic. Give this guy a little side eye, you know.”
Oren: One of the problems that Good Omens has is that it can’t decide if heaven and hell are actually good and evil, or if they’re law and chaos. And often it wants to make them good and evil, but if they’re good and evil, that’s a boring conflict and it doesn’t want it to be boring. It wants it to be two-sided and so the way that it handles that is by making the angels all just real not smart.
[chuckles]That’s Aziraphale’s thing is that Aziraphale just makes very bad choices because that’s the only way they know of to write him as having anything to learn.
Bunny: It’s not a level playing field If one of them is just so bubbly. It does feel like you can have one buddy cop be very earnest and genuine, and even a little naive, and the other one be cynical and street smart. In fact, that’s the Zootopia model. Judy, the– one of the buddy cops, the bunny cop buddy cop, is the earnest, dedicated loyal one, while Nick the fox is the conniving street smart, a little sleazy one, right?
And the same is true in Rush Hour, Jackie Chan’s character, Lee is very loyal and devoted, and Chris Tucker’s character is brash and foul-mouth and so they clash with each other, but neither of them are like infants.
Oren: [chuckles] Yeah. I do think it would be useful to talk about what it is you’re going to need if you want to do this arc without them being cops because there are some things about the cop setup that have been being grained that authors who leave it behind can find themselves lacking.
Chris: Like for instance, they are assigned to the case together by their boss.
Oren: Yep, that’s a really convenient thing that is used in the cop framework as not only do they have a reason they have to work together because the boss said so, but they also have a built-in problem they need to solve because in fiction cops solve crimes. Hot take, I guess so.
[chuckles]That’s something that authors often forget when they are trying to do something similar without using actual police. And so, you end up with, “Why are these characters working together, like they hate each other? Why would they even bother?”
Chris: Because they’re on an adventuring party and the GM told them to.
[laughs]Oren: Right. And what are they trying to do exactly? Do something eventually. Be roommates.
Bunny: This is another thing that you can take the page out of romance, right? Because a lot of the enemies to lovers’ arcs are like how do we put them together like forced proximity, not just for romance.
Chris: Arranged marriage.
[laughs]That’s it. I mean, I will say I do like arranged marriage romances, but this might not be the best time for that.
Oren: No, no. You got to take the other thing from romance and have them be friends at first sight, but then constantly be like, “No, that person would never want to be my friend, even though we’re magically destined to be best friends, they hate me. They would never want to be friends.” And that’s just the entire story.
Bunny: Brilliant. That’ll go great.
Oren: Yeah, I love it. Just churning out good ideas over here.
[laughs]Bunny: You know, I even managed to find one buddy movie where the one-bed trope comes up, which is planes, trains, and automobiles, where our buddies are Adele and Neil, and at one point they have to share our hotel room bed and there’s only one bed
Oren: Oh no.
[laughs]Bunny: I was like, “Oh my gosh, this really is just romance for straight dudes.”
Oren: But you don’t necessarily need to have a boss who assigns them together, although you could, right? There are bosses in the world other than cops, so that’s still an option. Your characters could be study partners at a magic school, and they are put together by their teacher, and now that’s why they have to be together.
But you can also create a situation where there is simply a recognized problem that both of the characters understand is important enough that they will try to work together despite their differences. Like they can be union organizers at a workplace, even if they don’t like each other. If they’re union organizers, they probably understand the need for there to be a union and will make some effort even if they have very different styles and very different ways of going about it.
Chris: If they recognize they have the same antagonist or fighting the same struggle that will give them a strong incentive to at least start interacting and coordinating a little bit, and then they might have to realize that, “Okay, it’s going to take two of us to do this thing, so we’re going to go breaking into this together because one of us can disable the alarm and the other can crack open the safe.” Or something like that.
Bunny: And you can also have the comedy of circumstance too, right? Again, planes, trains, and automobiles. The two characters dislike each other, but they keep being forced together because they’re trying to reach the same destination and one of them always has what the other one needs.
Oren: I’m a big fan of stories where both of the characters each have one piece of information, or maybe an item you could get away with, but usually it’s going to be a piece of information that is needed to accomplish whatever it is they both want. So, you might have two smugglers who are trying to find a hidden space treasure and one of them has the location and the other one has the code to get into the treasure vault that is otherwise impenetrable. And that’s a good reason, right? Even if they don’t like each other, they both want the treasure and they have to work together because otherwise with only one of them, they can’t get it.
Chris: You could also do the Han Solo trick where one of them hires the other and usually with that, they have an arc, or at first, they’re like, “Oh, I don’t care about causes, I’m in it for the money,” and then they come to care. And then they’re like, “Okay, you’re not actually– actually I don’t want you to pay me, and I’m just going to help you from the goodness of my heart,” at some point.
Oren: Generally speaking, anytime you have a character who starts off doing the plot for money, they will almost certainly want to develop a reason other than money for doing the plot, because after a certain point, money is just not a convincing set of stakes anymore.
Bunny: It’s the thing– The opening situation, a thing that gets them together and then they must grow beyond that.
Chris: You can also create and use magic or technology to just tie them together like Eddie and Venom, one of them being a parasite, or in One Dark Window, Elizabeth and the monster that possesses her and talks to her. I was honestly disappointed that the monster was not the love interest.
Oren: Yeah, that’s so sad.
[chuckles]Bunny: They shouldn’t have done that.
Chris: Instead, we have a cardboard love interest, unfortunately.
Bunny: More and more monster love interests.
Oren: Or I think Chris will actually really like this one. You could have a science fiction show where the captain and his doctor love interest, get these little implants that require them to be close together-
[laughs]-but also let them share their thoughts and they have like a bonding thing. And then at the end, they say, “Maybe we should be afraid.”
[laughs]Chris: So, everybody knows this is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where they decided to have a romance episode between Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher. And they did this whole thing where they get these random implants, where they have to stay close to each other and they hear each other’s thoughts, and they do this whole thing where they realize that they like each other. And then we have this closing scene where they’re all dressed up in super romantic garb. Crusher has a fancy dress on, and even Picard has an open silk shirt or something like that.
[laughs]And we’re like, it’s like they’re all ready to confess their love and then it just ends. Picard is like, “Maybe we shouldn’t be afraid to explore our feelings,” and Crusher is like, “Or maybe we should be afraid,” and then she just gets up and leaves. And that’s it. It’s like, “What? What just happened?”
Bunny: Every great relationship is built on dramatic exits.
[chuckles]Oren: One of my favorites is from Deep Space Nine with O’Brien and Bashir. Their story is interesting because it develops over a period of several episodes. There are three episodes where they go from not liking each other to being friends, and it takes some time, but you see them, they’re forced to be together because they’re on a mission together or trapped on a planet together. And they start to learn from each other. Bashir learns to be a little more circumspect, and not just rush off and try to do everything because O’Brien is there to give him caution and O’Brien learns that maybe he doesn’t have to be super grumpy all the time.
[chuckles]It’s a valuable lesson for him to learn and that one, I could not find if this is true. That one in fan lore was added because Rick Berman was worried that Bashir and Garak were too gay.
[chuckles]If that’s true, it’s unfortunate, but I actually haven’t been able to find any direct evidence that it’s true. I think this is the thing fans repeat, and since I’ve seen Star Trek fan conspiracies be born in real time, I’m not convinced until I see some evidence. But it’s still a good friendship regardless, like they do some cool stuff with it, and I get why. According to some writers, every one of the writers wanted to do O’Brien-Bashir episodes because they were just really fun to write.
Bunny: Yeah, and I think you just also touched on the other crucial part to the buddy dynamic, which is that they bond through antics.
Oren: Antics. Yeah, everyone loves antics.
Bunny: They have to have antics; they’ve got to deal with crazy aliens. In Toy Story, Woody and Buzz are forced together because they get abandoned together essentially, and they have to deal with the mutant toys and catching up with the truck and stuff like that and playing trains and automobiles. They’ll need to deal with cars catching on fire, delays, breakdowns, and all the worst parts of travel. When The Emperor’s New Groove, Kuzco and Pacha have to escape crocodiles and outsmart the bumbling antagonists and get back to the palace. It’s always antics.
Chris: Yes, certainly dropping the duo in trouble together is a good alternative to putting them on the case together where we just drop them in the middle of dangerous territory and have to make it back or what have you.
Bunny: It can’t just be danger, it has to be antics, Chris. Antics.
[chuckles]I mean, your danger sounds a lot like antics. That’s what I’m going to say.
[laughs]Oren: It was sad as I was looking up examples. Man, this is a sadly gendered trope. There is no reason you couldn’t have this arc for women. There are a couple with a woman and a man, but it’s really hard to find this for two women, at least in my experience.
I’m sure commenters can point us to some, but I was like– I was just digging through everything I’ve read or seen, and it’s, I don’t know, maybe Nancy and George from the Nancy Drew show. George is a girl in that version, and they started off not liking each other, but I don’t remember how much of an arc that was, or if they just got over it at some point.
Bunny: I think George was always a girl. I seem to remember in the original, she was a girl as well, but I could be wrong about that.
Oren: That’s very possible. I have not much experience with the original.
Chris: I almost wonder if for one thing, movies that do this would be women’s movies-
[chuckles]-and they might not get as much attention-
Bunny: Chick flicks.
Chris: -but I also, when I think about it, I think that relationship stories with women could have a bigger variety. So, there are some like Practical Magic, you can think of that as a story between two sisters. There’s also a romance in there, but the two sisters and their relationship is really important.
I’m thinking there’s less stories about mothers and daughters, about groups of women. Often their stories about a group of four women who are all friends, have been friends as childhood and get back together. Ugh, when I think about it, I almost feel like there’s a greater variety and that men are given this one template.
[chuckles]Oren: So, what you’re saying is we should let men have this one.
[laughs]Bunny: Problematic, Chris.
Oren: But what about the men?
[laughs]Chris: No, I think there should be more women buddy cops, but also, I think there should be both.
Bunny: It does seem hard to find this dynamic between female characters or just non men characters, which was probably a combination of bromance cop. This is the word that they come up with brom-coms because brom-coms, the target audience being male and then the fact that it’s cops, most cops being male and it has its roots in cops and then good old male default syndrome, probably a combination of those.
Chris: If we’re not keeping the comedy requirement then Mad Max: Fury Road, I would say definitely fits this template between Max and Furiosa. That one’s a little unusual because instead of contrasting with each other, they’re actually very similar characters.
Oren: And they hate it.
[laughs]Chris: Which maybe is less necessary if it doesn’t have a comedy element.
Bunny: I feel like, again depending on how narrowly we’re going to define it, I think the three elements that would make it most recognizable as a buddy cop dynamic, regardless of whether they are cops or not, is enemies to friends or coworkers with vastly different personalities with comparable skill levels bonding through antics. I think that is the most basic, “Does it have the buddy cop oof as those three things?”
Oren: Although you can branch it out a little bit and I think people will still recognize it, like you could have a mentor or student type vibe, like something from Men in Black for example. Where Agent K and Will Smith, Agent J, they’re not on the same level. K has been doing this a lot longer and is clearly more skilled, but he’s also teaching Jay despite Jay’s best efforts.
Bunny: That’s true. That one has a lot of the similar vibes.
Oren: So, if you’re trying to make it something that people will be like, “Oh hey, this is like Rush Hour.” Then I agree that those are specifically the things you want, but there is a kind of deeper arc at play here that can look different on the surface but still have the same dramatic elements.
Bunny: Yeah, no, definitely. I just mean if someone is looking at your story and you want them to go, “Oh, that is a buddy cop dynamic.” Those are like the three most recognizable things.
Generally, the arc tends to be, again we talked about this, forced together against their will, and then the characters usually have some sort of active animosity, like sometimes including trying to humiliate each other and there’s like friction between their approaches to life or their personalities or their skill sets. And then through antics, they begin to build a grudging respect, and then they bond, which might involve dancing to War (What is it good for).
[chuckles]Not to subtweet anything. And then eventually working together and playing to each other’s strength.
Oren: All right, well with that I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close. We’ve all clearly bonded and learned things from each other.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, support us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, he’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, he’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreants podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.