For 20 Years, a Pleasure So Guilty It's Criminal

"Cops" is a show about cops, of course, but the real stars -- the folks who make "Cops" a guilty pleasure for more than 5 million TV viewers a week -- are the perps. Even the show's famous theme song, a catchy reggae number by Inner Circle, is about the perps, not the cops:

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

The cops in "Cops" -- real police officers going about their rounds, accompanied by a camera crew -- are, generally speaking, friendly, courteous, kind, cheerful, brave, clean and reverent. The perps are -- not. The alleged perpetrators of various crimes are the kind of folks who sally forth for a night on the town and end up getting arrested, handcuffed, shoved into the back of a cop car and hauled off to jail and then willingly sign a release that permits " Cops " to broadcast their arrest on national television without paying them so much as a nickel.

This is not a demographic that tends to overlap much with, say, the mailing list of the Harvard Business School alumni association.

The kind of people who end up starring as alleged perpetrators in "Cops" are generally not folks who wear the latest haute couture. Perps tend to underdress. In fact, a surprisingly large number of the perps on "Cops" do not wear shirts. The plethora of shirtless perps has become a running gag for "Cops" fans. On the 20th-anniversary DVD, in the part where celebrities offer their learned analysis of the show, the comedian known as Larry the Cable Guy addresses this issue: "The more naked the guy is," he says, "the more guilty he is."

But why? Why do so many of the perps on "Cops" choose to eschew shirts?

"I'll tell you the secret of why so many people are shirtless," says John Langley, who is the show's founder, creator, mastermind and executive producer. He's on the phone from Los Angeles and he's eager to clear up this mystery. "We film most of the shows in the summer months because street crime is higher in the summer. In the winter, it's too cold to go out and do street crimes. But when it's hot and sultry and people are outside in these street crime areas, there are a lot of people going shirtless. That's the secret."

Now we know.

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"Cops" was born during a writers' strike.

"I had been trying to sell 'Cops' for seven years and nobody wanted to buy it," says Langley. "And then there was a writers' strike in 1988 and suddenly the idea of a show with no writers, no narrator, no actors and no script seemed more appealing."