American TV Detective Dramas Serial Investigations

by Jenner, Mareike

• ISBN13: 9781137425652
• ISBN10: 1137425652
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-11-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

American detective dramas are a common and familiar fixture on televisions everywhere – from Dragnet to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, from Columbo to Twin Peaks. This book explores the genre and its rich history from 1950s television onwards, focusing on the question of how detectives access and attain 'truth'. In this, American TV Detective Dramas takes the reader through the rich history of the genre, its narrative structures, its position in changing industrial and aesthetic contexts and its function in a broader political and social field. Detective dramas and methods of detection are, thus, not just viewed as a genre convention, but as representatives of ideological tendencies.

Author Biography

Mareike Jenner is an Independent Scholar based in Berlin, Germany. She received her PhD in Film and Television Studies from Aberystwyth University, UK, in 2013. She has published on issues of gender and heteronormativity, the detective, teen and hospital genre and Video-on-Demand.

Table of Contents

1.Introduction
2.Investigating Detection: Methods of Detection in American Detective Dramas
3.Defining Detection: The Detective Genre
4.Telling Detection: The Narrative Structures of American TV Detective Dramas
5.Stabilising Detection: Protecting and Serving the Status Quo from 1950-1968
6.Reforming Detection: Social Change and Political Corruption from 1968-1980
7.Diversifying Detection: Proliferation of Channels and Television Cycles from 1980-2000
8.Disillusioned Detection: DNA and 9/11 from 2000-2010
9.Rethinking Detection: Alternative Methods of Detection
10.Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index