Ruth McElroy - Contemporary British Television Crime Drama

Contemporary British Television Crime Drama examines one of the mediums most popular genres and places it within its historical and industrial context. The television crime drama has proved itself capable of numerous generic reinventions and continues to enjoy some of the highest viewing figures. Crime drama offers audiences stories of right and wrong, moral authority asserted and resisted, and professionals and criminals, doing so in ways that are often highly entertaining, innovative, and thought provoking. In examining the appeal of this highly dynamic genre, this volume explores how it responds not only to changing social debates on crime and policing, but also to processes of hybridization within the television industry itself. Contributors, many of whom are leading figures in UK television studies, analyse popular series such as Broadchurch, Between the Lines, Foyles War, Poirot, Prime Suspect, Sherlock and Wallander. Chapters examine the main characteristics of television crime drama production, including the nature of trans-Atlantic franchises and literary and transnational adaptations. Adopting a range of feminist, historical, aesthetic and industrial approaches, they offer incisive interrogations that provide readers with a rich understanding of the allure of crime drama to both viewers and commissioners.

Ruth McElroy is a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of South Wales, United Kingdom. She is editor, with Stephen Lacey, of Life on Mars: From Manchester to New York, (2012), University of Wales Press. She currently leads an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded international network on Television in Small Nations.

5 Appreciating the Art of Television
A Philosophical Perspective
Ted Nannicelli

6 Politics and Politicians in Contemporary US Television
Washington as Fiction
Betty Kaklamanidou and Margaret J. Tally

7 Contemporary British Television Crime Drama
Cops on the Box
Edited by Ruth McElroy

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

2017 selection and editorial matter, Ruth McElroy; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McElroy, Ruth editor.
Title: Contemporary British television crime drama: cops on the box / edited by Ruth McElroy.
Description: New York; London: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge advances in television studies; 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025061
Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery television programsGreat BritainHistory and criticism. | Television cop showsGreat BritainHistory and criticism. | Crime on television.
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.D48 C66 2016 | DDC 791.45/6556dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025061

ISBN: 978-1-4724-54935 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-57379-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra

The crime drama has been a staple of television across the globe for about as long as there has been television. The reason is obvious: stories about crime and detection are natural fits for a medium that requires a constant supply of drama. The police (like doctors and lawyers) make life and death decisions and the movement from crime to punishment from order to disorder and back again is tailor-made for the narrative needs of any medium.

And yet, the television crime drama hasnt always enjoyed the kind of critical reflection and attention that such a tradition might warrant. Writing about the police drama, for instance, has been, over the years, reserved largely for either proclamations of quality (read as realism or a certain novelistic or cinematic aesthetic), or critical considerations of ideological power working in one direction: the hegemonic pull of consensus and a law-and-order status quo. At their worst, crime series have been seen as ultimately condoning conservative social policies and offering pernicious views of marginalized citizens. In this view, representations of the daily work of policing and detection, enacted by a beleaguered force of men and women charged with maintaining some semblance of social order in the face of constant transgression, offers temporary (and troubling) solace for a society under threat. At their best, some of these series have simply been seen as aesthetic accomplishments, well-meaning if ultimately too tied to the genres preoccupations with justice to really do anything but hint at the possibilities of a critically progressive text. These early approaches to the crime series, while resulting in a great deal of excellent work, imposed a somewhat rigid critical apparatus on the genre.

One particular exception to this trend is Julie DAccis groundbreaking 1994 book, Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey. Bringing together astute textual analysis, with grounded institutional analysis and audience research, DAcci set the stage for understanding how the crime series could be understood as a complex product of political ambition tempered by social and institutional pressures. And these products change over time under different sets of pressures. Writing in 1998, Charlotte Brunsdon pointed to a structure of anxiety that set British police series of the 1980s and 1990s apart from their predecessors of the 1960s and 1970s. This critical perspective highlighted the ways in which the police series as a generic concern could be seen as what Jason Mittell would later call a cultural category. Cultural categories are flexible and necessarily accommodate changes in structure and meaning. They are categories that are forged (always temporarily) under pressure. DAccis, Brunsdons and Mittells work (as just three among many examples from this time) underscored the discursive structures of genres rather than purely textual issues the idea that our understanding of a genre is tied more to larger social and institutional relationships than to anything necessarily inherent in the text. Of course, there are textual features (police series need police, though the degree to which they are central to the narrative might be a point of differentiation among series), but a discursive approach highlights contextual determinants of textual meanings.