Making Crime Television

Anita Lam

"Making Crime Television employs actor-network theory in order to examine how representations of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. The first study to examine the production of contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, this book 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, it considers how textual representations of crime are assembled by various people (e.g., writers, directors, producers, researchers, technical consultants, and network executives), technologies (e.g. screenwriting software and whiteboards), and texts (e.g. newspaper articles, rival crime dramas, etc.). The emerging analysis does not project, but concretely examines, what television writers and producers know about crime,...