With Labor Day squarely in the rear view mirror and autumn unofficially underway, millions of Americans will settle back into a familiar routine of cultural consumption: the NFL season and a crop of new and refreshed network and streaming television shows.
Among the latter, there will no doubt be a not insignificant population devoted to police and crime procedurals as well as the odd espionage series thrown in for good measure. Together they are a dialectic, the reconciliation of which is the detective show whose protagonist is often drawn from either a law enforcement or intelligence services background. In the commercial marketplace, the intersection of these two is a trade commonly referred to by its practitioners as “business intelligence,” or investigations.
The neat architecture of detective, villain and victim isn’t really, for the most part, found in the commercial marketplace. The geometry of this triad, however, has birthed a transcendent, if not threadbare, pop-culture symbol: the evidence board.
The shopworn evidence board is now culturally ubiquitous and found in any and every lingua franca where it serves as something akin to a symbol of devotion and contemplation, a secular iconostasis bringing together disparate data that if only unlocked or connected in the right pattern would transport its curator to a dimension of truth and discovery.
The accoutrements of the evidence board hardly need tallying: mug shots or photographs, post-it notes, frayed newspaper articles, makeshift timelines, and, of course, push pins, string or yarn tying nodes in the mosaic together.
Since we are fun people (or so we think) at 221B Partners and think what we do is (sometimes) fun, we thought we’d kick off our autumn blog run with an homage to the evidence board. We will be publishing in descending order a countdown of five in the taxonomy of our favorite species to have passed across television and movie theater screens, regardless of genre. Look for more to come!
But for now: in that selfsame spirit of fun, we are starting the countdown with everyone’s favorite fumble forward family patriarch, Homer Simpson.
No. 5
In the Habeas Tortoise episode, Homer is publicly humiliated at a town meeting, ashamed that people think he is dumb. To make him feel better, Marge takes him on a trip to the zoo where he is excited to see a tortoise named Slow Leonard, only to find that the tortoise is missing.
Determined to solve the mystery and to prove his intelligence, Homer reviews pictures from the trip and finds dolly tracks near Leonard's habitat, suspecting that he was stolen. To sort through the possibilities and players involved in the disappearance, he mocks up an evidence board.
Image credit: 20th Television Animation