1. Cop Shop
November 1977 July 1984On air: 6 years 8 monthsEpisodes: 582 Cop Shop owed a lot to its predecessor Homicide, which had set the benchmark in Australian police drama over nearly thirteen years on air and had only finished at the beginning of 1977. Other police dramas had come and gone in the meantime but the mold had still been cut by Homicide which outlasted them all. Cop Shop had certainly been cut from that same mold. The show was basically a scaled down version of Homicide, trading the Russell St police headquarters for the fictional Riverside police station, the plain clothes detectives for uniformed police and the unmarked cars for updated ones with flashing blue lights and full Victoria Police colours. As is generally the case with dramas set on a limited stage, in the midst of all the crime-fighting there was something slightly incestuous about the interpersonal goings on between the officers. Then again, there are only so many people you can hook up with when you work in a small police station. As many unknown actors as established ones were featured over the eight seasons of Cop Shop and it featured a remarkably stable main cast, with no less than nine actors remaining in their roles for between six and eight seasons. Australians' love affair with police drama had all-but dried up by the time the last episode of Cop Shop aired in 1984. In fact it was one of the last locally-made prime time police dramas on Australian TV until the love affair was rekindled in the mid-90s.