NCIS: bureaucrats with guns: if Americans really hate government, why do they love watching TV shows about it?

• Author: Rosenberg, Alyssa

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It's a running joke that the most popular show on television is one that no one will admit to watching. On February 1, 22.8 million people tuned in to NCIS, CBS's procedural about a team of naval investigators, and it vies back and forth with the ubiquitous American Idol for the title of most-watched show in the country. That success hasn't saved the show from being the butt of jokes by audiences who fancy themselves too sophisticated for it. When Liz Lemon, the main character on NBC's hip sitcom 30 Rock, confesses to knowing the name of NCIS's main character, Leroy Jethro Gibbs, her boss decides it's time for an intervention.

The phenomenal success of NCIS is part of a little-noticed fact about contemporary American culture. Though the rise of the Tea Party supposedly means that Americans these days hate government, they can't seem to stop watching shows about government. Week to week, nearly half of today's highest-rated network TV shows are set in government agencies, be they federal (NCIS, Bones) state (The Mentalist), or local (Law & Order, CSI), or in quasi-public institutions like hospitals (House, Grey's Anatomy) and private law firms that deal directly with the government (The Good Wile). Even Glee is set in a public high school. On cable, the USA Network has built its brand almost entirely around quirky shows about public servants and their sidekicks, ranging from Burn Notice, which follows a CIA agent washed up in Miami, to In Plain Sight, about U.S. marshals who work in the witness-protection program.

Public institutions may be easy targets for populist Republicans, but they're God's gift to serial television. The state enjoys, as Max Weber famously said, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If you need a gun to fire by the third act of a drama, one of the most convenient ways to get it on stage in the first act is on the hip of a federal agent. Hospitals are similarly rich terrain for life-and-death scenarios, with scalpels and syringes replacing firearms and handcuffs. And like the elaborate institutional mousetraps that they are, bureaucratic settings reliably present characters with frustrating obstacles and petty turf wars, even as they struggle to do their duty and save the day.

Curiously, no one ever thinks about programs like NCIS as being about government. Certainly no one turns them on in order to get a civics lesson. Yet just as comedies like The Daily Show with don Stewart and The Colbert...