Basic Trope: An official in a rural, small town is corrupt and nasty.
- Straight: Cletus is a cop in Tropetown, a tiny, rural town. He gives favors to his friends and arrests people in petty revenge.
- Exaggerated:
- Every small town in the whole state has one of these.
- Cletus is the local sheriff, who also happens to be a brutal crime boss with total control over the town. He forces everyone to work for his drug-dealing operation or money-laundering businesses and kills anyone that gets in his way.
- Downplayed:
- Cletus is an overly brutal Cowboy Cop, but overall doesn't cross the line.
- Cletus is the friendly owner of the general store, who occasionally skims from the till and pockets merchandise.
- Justified: The decay of Tropetown drove Cletus to become cynical and selfish.
- Inverted:
- Cletus is an honest, heroic rural cop.
- Bob is a cop in the large Trope City, and he is totally in the pocket of gangs.
- Cletus is the only cop in the county not on the take of organized crime.
- Subverted: The heroes are suspicious Cletus may be corrupt, but he turns out to be innocent.
- Double Subverted: It turns out he planted the evidence he is innocent, and is really guilty.
- Parodied: Cletus's rule breaking consists of not polishing his badge and wearing socks and sandals with his uniform. People from the city react like he was committing horrendous crimes.
- Zig-Zagged: Cletus's is sometimes portrayed as corrupt and sometimes portrayed as honest.
- Averted: Cletus is not corrupt.
- Enforced:
- The producers want a Corrupt Cop to be a villain, but can't afford a large urban set.
- The producers assume that an explosive Roaring Rampage of Revenge makes more sense to happen uninterrupted and secretive deep in the boondocks than in the middle of a city. Hence, Cletus and his goons being tiny-town rednecks.
- The series is an homage to old-school adventure series like The A-Team, in which this type of villain of the week thrived.
- Lampshaded: "Why are rural cops always evil?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Corrupt cops are purged from the Tropetown police department.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Cletus' town devolves into a Wretched Hive thanks to his corruption, and he is eventually found out and arrested by the federal authorities.
- Reconstructed: After a fashion: Cletus may have been a stereotypical hillbilly tyrant, but he still held himself to some standards - as long as you bent the knee, he did the "protection" part of his protection racket efficiently and he only cared about green and no other color or creed. The Ruthless Foreign Gangsters that arrive to town after Cletus is arrested don't even bother to pretend it's a protection racket, and oh, boy, are they willing to kill for it.
- Implied: Cletus is mentioned to be a Corrupt Cop, and someone else complains about his accent.
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