Television and film crime/cop drama is very popular with a wide audience. Crime dramas seek to anchor the representations of all types of police officers, criminals and victims as ‘believable’ characters, with ‘realistic’ plot lines, set in urban locations.The genre has been taken up in the US under the heading of American Quality Televsion (AQT) - see under heading AQT.
Codes and conventions
Crime dramas:
- are constructed realities
- depict constructed versions of reality that appeal to audiences
- encode hegemonic values and ideologies
- represent current societal responses to crime
- use formulas
- employ some stereotypical representations
- make iconic use of hand guns, police cars, banks, uniformed and ununiformed police, and explosions
Modern TV crime dramas put the reconstruction of realism at the forefront of their appeal to audiences, particularly in their use of media language – see further down.
Representations
Television crime dramas have ongoing characters who slowly evolve over time as in a soap opera. The audience develops a relationship with main characters like Morse, and Bergerac who change very little. For an audience a main part of the attraction of a crime drama is knowledge of a main character, the enigma of the plot and a sense of suburban comfort with the genre.
A typical television crime drama such as The...
