CHICAGO — In a TV season boasting at least half a dozen underappreciated comedies (“The Middle,” “Raising Hope” and “Enlightened” among them), it is far rarer to see a quality drama fall through the cracks. But if ever a series deserved the kind of intense viewer attention normally reserved for a Sunday night on HBO, it would be “Southland,” which began its fifth season in February on TNT.

You don’t see cop shows like this on TV anymore. Stark. Naturalistic. Unafraid to let small moments count just as much as the big ones, sometimes even more.

When “Southland” premiered in 2009 on NBC, it was (and remains) an outlier in a television landscape preoccupied with forensics, elite crime-fighting units and a tunnel-vision narrative recognizable only in Hollywood terms, where there exists a seemingly endless supply of technology, databases and the capacity for deductive reasoning.