But the subliminals are shifting. A generation ago, network crime dramas featured private detectives who were lone outsiders, like The Rockford Files’ Rockford, or For Hire’s Spenser. Post 9/11, audiences seem to prefer heroes with government authority. Federal agents based in secret facilities, elite crime-fighting units with extralegal powers, fantastical technology, and commando-team backup are everywhere on primetime.

The NCIS siblings take this one step further by placing the entire nation in jeopardy on a regular basis. The two shows have offered numerous plots involving weapons of mass destruction in the hands of lavishly financed Iranian, Pakistani, or Russian evildoers. (Odd that the shows don’t roll out Saudi evildoers, given most of the 9-11 mass murderers were Saudi nationals; though, in the NCIS universe, Romania is often depicted as a fountainhead of maniacal terrorists.) NCIS Los Angeles had an arc in which well-dressed bad guys with generic foreign accents seized three atomic bombs left over from the Cold War; another in which the deranged were racing through L.A. with a bioweapon that could “kill everyone west of the Mississippi in 48 hours.”

How are these calamities prevented? Electronic surveillance. A sinister Pakistani terrorist has an accomplice in Washington, D.C. A super-advanced surveillance device takes mere seconds to locate the accomplice and determine he is on the way to the Norfolk airport. (When he arrives, Washington-based NCIS agents are already present, disguised as airline employees—how they could get there first is never explained, but that’s a standard plot hole.) The well-dressed guys with the atomic bombs are tracked across Los Angeles by technology that apparently can detect fake accents from outer space. The woman with the bioweapon passes a closed-circuit security camera, and instantly the agents know her location.

On NCIS, info often comes from a particular tech staffer who can tap into any cell phone or video feed in mere seconds, never needing a password and never pausing for a judge’s permission. (She dresses Goth; she’s no Oliver North!) NCIS Los Angeles features two cool young techies who operate a never-explained super-computer that requires mere seconds to pinpoint any vaguely Middle Eastern-seeming person anywhere in the Golden State. Then the agents declare that if they have to stop to get a search warrant, the innocent will die.

In the setup of the shows, viewers have seen the bad guys doing something malicious, and so know they are guilty. Who cares about the rights of the guilty! But in reality, law-enforcement officers rarely are sure about guilt; nobody can be certain until a judge or jury speaks. By first showing the primetime audience an awful terrorist scheming to slaughter the innocent, then showing valorous agents who can stop the terrorist only by trampling the Bill of Rights, audiences are induced to think, “Listen in without a warrant! Break down the door! That’s justice!”