The Thin Blue Line (original) (raw)

The Thin Blue Line is a British sitcom set in a police station in London.

The main theme is the competition between the uniformed squad, led by Inspector Fowler (Rowan Atkinson) and the plain clothes detectives, led by Inspector Grim (David Haig).

The two-season series was written by Ben Elton; the profanities (often inadvertently caused by the made up English of Inspector Grim) abound, yet otherwise it is a fairly gentle comedy. Mina Anwar was particularly notable for her portrayal of Maggie Habib, an unintentional (from the point of view of her character) sex symbol.

The Thin Blue Line was first aired by the BBC from 1995 to 1997.

The Thin Blue Line is a documentary film concerning the murder of a Texas police officer who had stopped a car for a routine traffic citation. The police are presented with two suspects, one a local underaged boy with a criminal record (David Harris, a boy who returned to his hometown boasting that he had murdered a policeman) and the other a 38-year-old taciturn drifter with no criminal record whatsoever (Randall Dale Adams). The documentary presents testimony suggesting that the police altered, fabricated, and suppressed evidence to convict the man they wanted to be guilty, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

The film was directed by Errol Morris, (who had, incidentally, spent some years before the filming as a private investigator), and cost over $1 million U.S. to make. It was entered into evidence in the federal appeal but, since it was marketed as a "nonfiction" film rather than a documentary, it was not entered into evidence in the case itself. For the same reason, the film was disqualified from the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Nonetheless, Adams was finally granted a retrial and released after eleven years in prison. (Shortly after his release, he sued Morris, claiming that Morris had gotten rich off the film--which proved to be untrue).

The film's title comes from the prosecutor's comment to the trial judge that the police are the "thin blue line" separating society from anarchy.

In December 2001, the United States' National Film Preservation Foundation declared the film "culturally significant" and announced that it would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, bringing the total at the time to 325.