As a genre, the television crime drama has long been a constant of the television landscape since it first migrated from film and radio onto the small screen in the 1950s. Since then, from Dixon of Dock Green to The Wire, from Minder to The Sopranos or Cracker to Dexter and The Killing, it has continued to attract large audiences even as the depiction of the crime, the perpetrators and the investigators may have changed. In order to track these changes, this book provides an historical analysis of the TV crime series as a genre by paying close attention not only to the nature of TV dramas...

As a genre, the television crime drama has long been a constant of the television landscape since it first migrated from film and radio onto the small screen in the 1950s. Since then, from Dixon of Dock Green to The Wire, from Minder to The Sopranos or Cracker to Dexter and The Killing, it has continued to attract large audiences even as the depiction of the crime, the perpetrators and the investigators may have changed. In order to track these changes, this book provides an historical analysis of the TV crime series as a genre by paying close attention not only to the nature of TV dramas...