“The Harder I Swim, the Faster I Sink”

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-101
Author(s):  
Alison Wielgus
Keyword(s):  
Network Television ◽  
Crime Drama ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Shipping Containers ◽  
Female Detective ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Typical Treatment

This essay considers the role that Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (BBC/SundanceTV, 2013) and Top of the Lake: China Girl (BBC/SundanceTV, 2017) play in the post-network television landscape. Situating the series among the globalized genre of serialized post-network crime shows that feature female detectives, this essay argues that Campion reworks the genre’s fascination with victimized women from her auteurist and Antipodean perspective. While the characterization and actions of the female detective resonate with other programs’ protagonists, Campion challenges dominant discourses of victimized women by intervening in the global circulation of women’s bodies on television. By drawing on Zoë Sofia’s work on female bodies and container technologies, this essay argues that Campion’s use of pregnant victims and her exploration of a female detective’s history as a survivor of sexual assault allow her to interrogate the typical treatment of female corpses within crime television. Through circuitous investigations that leave enough narrative space for detours like the settling of Paradise, where women transform shipping containers into domestic spaces for struggling women, Campion provides a countermodel to crime television focused on forensic progress through a case. Campion similarly takes the container of serialized crime drama that circulates the globe in a post-network television landscape and creates space for women’s stories from the Antipodes. Pausing the narrative to indict the treatment of female victims, Campion also unearths the melodramatic underpinnings of serialized crime dramas that resonate with her own filmography.

Televisual waiting: Images of time and waiting in CSI

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-294
Author(s):  
Anita Lam
Keyword(s):  
Crime Scene ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Forensic Evidence ◽  
Network Television ◽  
Crime Scene Investigation ◽  
Crime Drama ◽  
Scene Investigation ◽  
Forensic Scientists ◽  
And Performance

As a massively popular crime drama, Crime Scene Investigation has circulated influential images and narratives that suggest that the processing and analysis of forensic evidence can be done in a swift and timely manner. The claim of such a CSI effect is based on the relative absence of waiting scenes within the series. This article examines the series’ multiple representations of time and waiting, linking the absence of waiting to the construction of forensic scientists as powerful figures of moral authority. In the episode Grave Danger, however, waiting is notably imagined as something that must be experienced and endured as a result of conviction. It is made analogous to death, and embodied through horizontality as well as by feminized waiters. Because the feminization of waiters also characterizes the representation of television viewers, I end by examining how the role of waiting in Crime Scene Investigation is intertwined with the viewer’s experience of watching the planned flow of network television. Ultimately, this article argues that the study of televisual waiting requires a recognition that images and narratives on network television emerge out of and depend on waiting as representation, experience, and performance.

Masculinity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Young
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Hegemonic Masculinity ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Men And Masculinity

Since the 1980s masculinity, more specifically ‘hegemonic masculinity’ has been a focal point of gender and sexuality discourses. The short story writings of Mantel, Hislop, and most particularly, Tremain, reflect, critique and problematize such understandings of masculinity. This chapter is shaped around three key areas that are often seen as defining masculinity: work, sexuality and the differences between male and female bodies. As with the historical strand of chapter three, in this chapter there will be a focus on history and one particularly significant historical moment for men and masculinity: the 1980s. It is through this analysis that questions will be addressed about how and why masculinity is a part of contemporary feminist discourses and, through the work of Judith Halberstam, will consider the ways in which queer theory and postmodern feminism have informed such debates. The momentary nature of the short story will be explored in greater depth too, in order to understand how the contemporary and historical moments interact in this narrative space.

Gateway Bodies: Serial Form, Genre, and White Femininity in Imported Crime TV

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 515-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Klinger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transnational Crime ◽  
White Female ◽  
Female Victims ◽  
Police Investigations ◽  
White Femininity ◽  
Serial Crime ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The U.S

In this article, I study transnational crime TV through a key recurring textual element—serial narrative—to understand how it creates terms of transnational legibility in a major import market, the United States. These programs’ serial form both suits the ecology of the U.S. post-network era and articulates aesthetic and ideological norms recognizable to U.S. audiences. Imported serial crime TV is tied to multiple genres and familiar tropes of gender and race, often relying on the discovery of white female victims to galvanize police investigations, serve as gothic spectacles, and animate family melodramas. DR’s Forbrydelsen exemplifies such complexly layered and “translatable” serial form. I argue that the aesthetics of this and other programs foreground raced female bodies to deterritorialize them, in the process creating a transnational lingua franca in crime TV. In repeatedly pairing such victims and female detectives, these shows ultimately also illuminate the place feminism itself occupies in transnational flow.

scholarly journals Silk blouses and fedoras: The female detective, contemporary TV crime drama and the predicaments of postfeminism

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Jermyn
Keyword(s):  
Violence Against Women ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
The State ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Crime Drama ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Female Detective ◽  
The One

This article examines the markedly contrasting fates of two recent female protagonist led police series, the dismally received Prime Suspect USA (NBC, 2011) and widely celebrated The Fall (BBC, 2013– ), asking what the reception of each suggests about the state of play for women in TV crime drama in today’s postfeminist culture. What do women cops need to do to make the cut in an era in which, on the one hand, it seems they are more prevalent and have more opportunities than ever before (Gerrard, 2014); but also, on the flip side of this, in which they must somehow offer something ‘extra’ to survive in an era where the presence of a female detective in itself is no longer an innovation or novelty? In an era in which, to adopt Angela McRobbie’s much-cited phrase, ‘feminism has been taken into account’ (2007: 255), how can these series’ invocation of feminism or ‘feminist issues’ be understood as fundamental to their respective demise and triumph? I argue that, crucially, Prime Suspect USA’s account of sexist bullying in the NYPD was greeted as hackneyed and overblown, where The Fall spoke adroitly to a media culture in which ratings can be won via a superficial but glossily packaged nod to the female detective’s postfeminist ‘progress’, while relishing misogynistic violence. Hence the article also asks, what implications does an inquiry of the kind undertaken here – where interrogation of the genre combines comparative text-based analysis with critical reflection on the author’s own perturbed response to the eroticisation of violence against women in The Fall – have for future models of feminist criticism of TV crime drama?

Network television writers and the ‘race problems’ of 1968

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caryn Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Network Television ◽  
Crime Drama ◽  
National Advisory Commission ◽  
Crime Dramas ◽  
Advisory Commission ◽  
Socially Relevant ◽  
Martin Luther King

This article examines the development of television scripts in the crime drama genre within the context of US commercial broadcasting in the network era. In 1968, public discourse around race relations, civil rights and violence reached a height following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, and the release of a government study on urban uprisings by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Ironside (1967‐75, NBC) and N.Y.P.D. (1967‐69, ABC) are two crime dramas that drew on recent events related to black militants and white supremacy in order to appeal to viewers with socially relevant entertainment during this time. The archival records of screenwriters Sy Salkowitz and Lonne Elder make it possible to trace the development of one episode from each series over the course of multiple drafts. This analysis of the script development process explores the relationship between public discourse, industrial context, commercial agendas and creative priorities. Ironside and N.Y.P.D. are both crime dramas, but an examination of both series yields points of divergence which help to illustrate the norms of the network system in terms of act structure, genre tropes, and the oversight of standards and practices.

‘Terrible things happen’: Peter Bowker's Occupation and the Representation of the Iraq War in British Television Drama

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 206-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Harper
Keyword(s):  
Public Service ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Public Service Broadcasting ◽  
Military Involvement ◽  
British Military ◽  
Discursive Strategy ◽  
Historically Situated ◽  
Invasion Of Iraq

Peter Bowker and Laurie Borg's three-part television drama Occupation (2009) chronicles the experiences of three British soldiers involved in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By means of an historically situated textual analysis, this article assesses how far the drama succeeds in presenting a progressive critique of the British military involvement in Iraq. It is argued that although Occupation devotes some narrative space to subaltern perspectives on Britain's military involvement in Iraq, the production – in contrast to some other British television dramas about the Iraq war – tends to privilege pro-war perspectives, elide Iraqi experiences of suffering, and, through the discursive strategy of ‘de-agentification’, obfuscate the extent of Western responsibility for the damage the war inflicted on Iraq and its population. Appearing six years after the beginning of a war whose prosecution provoked widespread public dissent, Occupation's political silences perhaps illustrate the BBC's difficulty in creating contestatory drama in what some have argued to be the conservative moment of post-Hutton public service broadcasting.

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