Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast

221 Pages·2013·1.44 MB·English

by  Anita Lam

Making Crime Television
This book employs actor–network theory in order to examine how representations
of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. As a unique
examination of the production of crime dramas, particularly their writing process,
Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television
Broadcastexamines not only the semiotic relations between ideas about crime, but
the material conditions under which those meanings are formulated.
Using ethnographic and interview data, Anita Lam considers how textual
representations of crime are assembled by various people (including writers,
directors, technical consultants, and network executives), technologies (screen-
writing software and whiteboards), and texts (newspaper articles and rival crime
dramas). The emerging analysis does not project but instead concretely examines
what and how television writers and producers know about crime, law and policing.
An adequate understanding of the representation of crime, it is maintained,
cannot be limited to a content analysis that treats the representation as a final
product. Rather, a television representation of crime must be seen as the result
of a particular assemblage of logics, people, creative ideas, commercial interests,
legal requirements, and broadcasting networks. A fascinating investigation into
the relationship between television production, crime and law, this book is an
accessible and well-researched resource for students and scholars of Law, Media,
and Criminology.
Anita Lam is an Assistant Professor of criminology in the Department of Social
Science at York University, Canada.
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Making Crime Television
Producing Entertaining
Representations of Crime for
Television Broadcast
Anita Lam
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
A GlassHouse Book
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Anita Lam
The right of Anita Lam to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by her 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
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-415-63288-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-40544-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Baskerville by
Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon
Contents
Figures vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
1 Setting the stage: a literature review and analysis 11
2 On method: trail-sniffing ants and breadcrumbs of reflexivity 35
3 Breaking The Bridge: documenting the heterogeneous
knowledge inputs into the laboratory of the writers’ room 60
4 The case of the missing ‘bad apples’: transforming ‘Injured
Cop’ into the ‘Unguarded Moment’ 97
5 Showcasing Hamilton: how place becomes relevant in the
making of Canadian crime dramas 133
Conclusion 169
Bibliography 179
Index 197
Figures
3.1 The writers’ room of The Bridge 63
4.1 Summary of story revisions 126
5.1 The number of scripted pilots commissioned and aired by major
North American broadcasters between fall 2009 and spring 2010 147
5.2 Gorky’s Medical Rehabilitation Centre (formerly known as Porky’s
Strip Bar) 155
5.3 Screenshot of Hamilton as illustrated in Lawyers, Guns and Money’s
opening title sequence 163
Acknowledgements
Once upon a time, this book was more than just words, pages and binding. These
pages were alive, packed with the dramatic collision of people, texts, and things.
For the book to exist as it does, I cannot thank enough the television producers,
writers, directors, and other production personnel who had not only allowed me
access to their television productions, but also expressed their ideas and experiences
with such candour and humour.
I am indebted to Mariana Valverde for the profound ways in which she shaped
not only my research, but also my sense of being a scholar. I am grateful to Shyon
Baumann, Dru Jeffries, Ron Levi, and Desmond Manderson for their helpful
comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Many thanks are also due to
the Routledge team – Colin Perrin, Rebekah Jenkins, Jack Webb, and Thomas
Lodge –for their assistance in preparing this book.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my family. Here’s to you for all of the important
ways in which you have reassured, strengthened, encouraged, and inspired me.
This research was partially funded through a doctoral fellowship from the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council. Permission has also been secured to
include portions of material that have appeared in the following previously
published material: ‘Making “Bad Apples” on The Bridge:A Production Study of
the Making of a Police Drama’, in Peter Robson and Jessica Silbey (eds), Law and
Justice on the Small Screen (2012). Oxford: Hart Publishing, pp. 63–86.
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Introduction
The year that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was born, the most popular1television
drama in North America was a medical procedural named ER. Inside a season
of its airing in 2000, CSI – a fictional crime drama that follows a team of Las
Vegas forensic scientists and police detectives as they solve criminal cases and
determine an individual’s guilt through the use of presumably infallible forensic
evidence – became the tenth most highly watched television program by (North)
American viewers, although it was still over-shadowed by the novelty of a reality
TV program that placed ordinary people on an island where they battled for
survival. The year CSI turned two, it became the second most-watched television
series in North America, eclipsed only by a situational comedy about a group of
six coffee-loving friends living in New York City. In its third season, CSI was not
only named the most highly watched television program in North America, but
also able to spawn its first spin-off series CSI: Miami. In 2012 CSI received the
International Television Audience Award in honour of being named the most-
watched television drama series in 2011 across five continents. As crime dramas
have come and gone in the last decade, CSIis notable for its staying power as an
exemplar of popular television in the twenty-first century, especially since audience
fragmentation has turned popularity into an increasingly ambiguous concept
(Kompare 2010).
Despite being a surprise hit for American broadcaster CBS and a Canadian
co-production in its first season,2 CSI’s popularity has been explained by
criminological scholars as though it were inevitable all along.3For example, Byers
and Johnson (2009) explain that CSIwas immediately popular because it managed
to reproduce familiar socio-political discourses in dramatic form. Specifically, the
show’s initial success was a result of its synchronicity with the events of 9/11 and
the social dominance of American neoliberal and neoconservative discourses
on criminality and justice. Similarly, Rapping (2003: 27) describes CSI as an
immediate hit because television producers were able to plug into successful
programming trends and spin them in slightly new ways. Cavender and Deutsch
(2007) explain CSI’s popularity through the popularity of the genre of crime dramas.
Crime dramas attract a large audience because their plots are situated within
dominant socio-political ideologies, and provide an understanding of crime and