Alright, let me preface this by saying that I've seldom seen a smart person watch these shows, but they're wildly popular, and people just eat them up. Why? The show is bland, you know who did the crime in the first five minutes of any given episode, each episode is almost exactly the fucking same, and the plot for each could win an Olympic gold medal in Mental Gymnastics. The main investigatory characters skirt, or outright break the law, or their protocol, in nearly every episode, to catch the bad guy, and you bet your tight, supple asshole that they always catch the bad guy.

I think these shows, not unlike Zero Dark Thirty, and that Benghazi movie, drive this narrative that the U.S. Government/Law Enforcement is always on the moral high ground, always catches the bad guy, and enforces an unrealistic, optimistic, ideal, of what a Cop/Fed/MP/CIA officer is. I think these shows affect certain (read: stupid) people, and make them believe that the fuzz are infallible fucking superheroes.

On top of that, I think it also feeds into the cult behavior surrounding government trust/patriotism/nationalism in some small way. Cultists have a certain specific list of odd behaviors and attributes, that they must all have, in order to be classed as such. Miss one, and it's something else that isn't a cult. Why is this relevant? Because the aforementioned pro-state people fit the bill precisely for what can be scientifically classified as a cult.