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‘Live PD’ & The Legal Perils of Uncancel Culture

A&E thought its Summer of Floyd decision to drop its top-earning police reality show was good governance. Then Mark Burnett and MGM started shopping a strikingly similar version.

In the copyright infringement case, A&E is preparing to argue that there was no final episode of “Live PD,” per se, because the show was never really “canceled” in the first place.
In the copyright infringement case, A&E is preparing to argue that there was no final episode of “Live PD,” per se, because the show was never really “canceled” in the first place. Photo: Bill Tompkins/Getty Images
Eriq Gardner
October 15, 2024

In the fervid summer of 2020, as the nation reckoned with police brutality after the murder of George Floyd, A&E made the gutsy decision to halt production of Live PD, the network’s cash cow, partly in response to a protest movement brewing against it. Hosted by legal commentator Dan Abrams, the reality show treated police arrests as a weekly sports-like spectacle, complete with whip-around coverage and color commentary, making it one of the highest-rated programs in primetime. Then, in a flash, it was gone. Some might look back at that moment as the epitome of Hollywood’s hasty capitulation to “woke” culture, but it was also a noteworthy business decision: an example of the entertainment industry nodding toward social consciousness, or at least appearing to do so, when several police-oriented shows were coming in for criticism over their treatment of race.