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

ISBN-13: 9781138915138 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 224 str.

Anita Lam

Opis

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 contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast examines 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 (screenwriting 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 the law, this book is an accessible and well-researched resource for students and scholars of Law, Media, and Criminology.

Spis treści

List of Figures  Introduction  Chapter 1. Setting the stage: A Literature Review and Analysis  Chapter 2. On Method: Trail-sniffing Ants and Bread Crumbs of Reflexivity  Chapter 3. Breaking The Bridge: Documenting the Heterogeneous Knowledge Inputs into the Laboratory of the Writers’ Room  Chapter 4. The Case of the Missing ‘Bad Apples’: Transforming ‘Injured Cop’ into ‘The Unguarded Moment’  Chapter 5. Showcasing Hamilton: How Place Becomes Relevant in the Making of Canadian Crime Dramas  Chapter 6. Conclusion  Bibliography

O autorze

Anita Lam is an Assistant Professor of Criminology in the Department of Social Science at York University, Canada.