The term “copaganda” gets tossed around way too much when talking about films and television shows that center on the lives of law enforcement professionals. Series like “The Wire,” “The Shield,” “Justified,” and other all-time great TV crime dramas were, to differing degrees, nuanced in their portrayal of the good, bad, and utterly reprehensible behavior of the people tasked with keeping the peace in communities of all shapes, sizes, and demographics. They drove home the importance of getting collars and prioritizing closable cases. They showed how deeply ingrained the practice of racial profiling is in Black and brown neighborhoods. The characters who walked the razor-thin line of doing good and committing evil could frequently seduce us into laughing off their indiscretions like in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” but there was usually a price to be paid for these actions — or, at the very least, a lack of approval from the writers.

Because sometimes artists respect viewers enough to trust that they won’t take their depiction of complex, relatively likable characters behaving badly as an endorsement.

It’s important to make this distinction because there is “copaganda” out there. On television, for the last 14 seasons, there hasn’t been a series more dedicated to taking the side of the fuzz come hell or high water than CBS’ “Blue Bloods.” The cop series about the Reagans (ahem), a cop family that unapologetically does cop stuff because being cops is, as the title screams, branded in their genetic code. Starring Tom Selleck, Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, and Len Cariou, the show believes in the inherent decency of the people who carry a shield and a gun. (God forbid they ever have to use the latter.)

The show was a fairy tale, but there’s an audience out there that unabashedly cheers for cops, and, judging from the Nielsen ratings, “Blue Bloods” is their network fantasy of choice. So, why the heck did CBS, a non-ideological company obsessed solely with the bottom line, cancel the series when it was still going strong?