Mavericks: The Rules Were Not Made To Be Broken

Spoiler Warning - Major spoilers for The Shield, L.A. Confidential
Minor spoilers for House, Hot Fuzz

In one episode of House a mean hospital administrator guy tried to get House kicked out of the hospital. It was made clear with camera angles and emotive music that he was most definitely the bad guy. And before the hospital board he put forward his case - House was a drug addict, House not only broke ethical guidelines he broke the law, he refused to do things that were his job, he insulted other staff and patients and I quickly found myself agreeing with him; House should be fired. There were others on the board who tried to put forward a case for House, stating that he was singularly brilliant and did things no one else could do but they had a pretty weak case. Ultimately though House was impervious to this, because he was a maverick, and television loves mavericks. House is a genius who doesn't play by the rules! As with most jobs, but especially medicine, the rules are there for a very good reason and while people idolise mavericks on television I think most people would be uncomfortable if they had a maverick GP who didn't play by the rules.

Mavericks are a very common trope in films and television, they are exciting, unpredictable characters, who do things their real-life counterparts couldn't do (often this is for very good reasons). Many mavericks are abrasive and rude and have poor people skills, they have substance abuse problems and have problems dealing with authority, despite often working in areas with very rigid authority structures.  The Fast Show played with this trope with adverts for a new programme called Monkfish which constantly showed a tough, uncompromising, belligerent maverick who morphed from police officer to doctor to vet in each new version of the show

Medicine is a curious field to want mavericks, given the years they spend learning the rules and procedures, but it is a fictional phenomenon that extends to many other careers. The most obvious is with the police and just about every fictional police officer from Dirty Harry to DCI John Luther were a law unto themselves and their films and shows make the argument that as they are on the side of righteousness, it's okay to break the law.

• Harry Callahan, Dirty Harry one of the earliest examples and often cited as the classic example of the maverick cop. The careful and considerate Sarah Lund, the main police officer in The Killing who doesn't even carry her gun is a million miles from Callahan, who goaded criminals into using their guns so he could kill them.
• Bud White, L.A. Confidential, uses violence and intimidation to get what he considers justice and is then used by the corrupt police chief to beat up his criminal competitors.
• Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle, The French Connection, was far more dangerous to members of the public than many criminals by his insane car chases.

• Gene Hunt, Life On Mars, the stereotypical 1970s policeman, very happy to frame people he doesn't like and no time for any woolly liberal ideas. Hunt is an odd case as he is only a maverick in  comparison with John Simm's modern Sam Tyler.
• Axel Foley, Beverley Hills Cop, does not take police work at all seriously.
• Martin Riggs, Lethal Weapon, a loose cannon with a deathwish.
• Vic Mackay, The Shield, in the first episode he murdered in cold blood another police officer so his side business of being a drug kingpin wasn't uncovered.

Some of these films and shows do criticise the maverick cops - Vic Mackay in The Shield is shown as absolutely corrupt and every season he seems to get into even murkier water, Gene Hunt is the exemplar throwback to dodgy police officers of the past whose reckless ways lead to innocent people ending up in prison and Bud White's tendency to ignore the rules made him easy prey for  a manipulative superior.

Mavericks in the military seem to be rarer and often depictions of soldiers etc. punish the idea of a maverick, you wouldn't want to be the maverick in the training part of Full Metal Jacket. However, in Top Gun Tom Cruise's character had the call-sign of "Maverick" to really emphasis his unpredictable maverick credentials. I definitely don't want a maverick in charge of a multi-million dollar flying killing machine. If we're going to have flying killing machines at all then I want level headed unadventurous types at the controls. That said, virtually the entire cast of Top Gun shouldn't be allowed near weapons, so obsessed with proving their superiority over  others and treating the whole thing like a very fun game.

The completely unreliable pilots of Top Gun

I've never really identified with maverick characters as usually I could see why the rules existed. They are few and far between but I much prefer anti-mavericks, these are people who can follow rules, work in teams, have good manners but are also very good at their jobs. When an anti-maverick appears in fiction there dedication to  doing their job properly is made into an interesting character quirk, rather than what you would expect. There are two perfect examples of these anti-mavericks.  The first is my favourite fictional depiction of a police officer, Nicolas Angel played by Simon Pegg in Hot Fuzz and he is the quintessential anti-maverick.

 Angel was a brilliant police officer; intelligent, dedicated, incorruptible, who trained and studied hard, who understood both the letter and the intent of a law. He did his paperwork and he understood the importance of paperwork. He was not a maverick. He didn't break the rules. At one point in the film when giving a speech to schoolchildren he cited the importance of procedural correctness when enforcing the law. Angel was the perfect police officer. Angel's partner, Danny Butterman, was more interested in the over the top antics of maverick police officers in films like Bad Boys where any arrest those two actually made would be challenged by any lawyer for the litany of things they did wrong. In films police officers see themselves as being the one "who cleans the garbage off the streets" whereas Angel is commended for building positive links with the community. Best of all, Angel is a police officer who while trained to use guns, and has used them, does not like them. He is a very un-macho example of a police officer.

The other brilliant example of an anti-maverick is Amy Poehler's character Leslie Knope in Parks & Recreation. She actually had many of the same problems as Hot Fuzz's Nicolas Angel - fantastically good at her job, liked following the rules and struggled to coexist with colleagues who didn't share her level of commitment and brilliance. The idea of making Leslie brilliant at her job, and actually brilliant at most things she set her mind to, wasn't apparent at the beginning of the show and at first she was just weirdly obsessed about her job and her burgeoning greatness made the character make far more sense. It also changed Knope from somebody who could be pitied into someone who was impressive.

Sadly, I don't think my anti-mavericks will take off in quite the same way as their more rule averse colleagues as without the brilliant writers and actors behind Hot Fuzz and Parks and Recreation they could be a little boring.