Nov 24, 2016

Contextual studies - Crime Drama


The Bill
- Longest-running UK crime drama (1983-2010)
- Set in fictional London police station
- Originally 12x60min episodes
- From 1988-2005, became year-round twice-weekly serial.
- Change from being a series to a soap and then back to series.
- Peak audiences of 11m viewers in 2005 rivalled Coronation Street 

What is the crime drama genre?
- Evolved from literary detective fiction
- In TV often police procedural sub-genre - 'realistic' investigation of a crime by law enforcement teams.

Technical conventions 
- Editing: chase scenes, montage, flashbacks
- Usually single camera, but can also be shot on multi-camera
- Camera movement - either handheld mockumentary style or Steadicam, dollies, cranes

Visual devices:
- ECUs (extreme close up) for tension or reveal
- Tilted, low and high angles
- Slow motion
- CG recreation (CSI)
- Graphical text (Sherlock)

Narrative conventions
- Episodic series format - typically 60 minutes. Usually self-contained closed narratives.
- Repetition - relies on returning central cast (team) and location (police station). Conflicts in policing methods often intrinsic to the drama.
- Resolution  the very nature of detective/crime genre demands crime is resolved by setting up a mystery. (Film and TV guidelines demanded that 'crime must not pay')

Symbolic conventions
- Lightning - low-key. Many crime dramas use light-dark contrasts in costume, setting and lightning (e.g., use of flashlights)
- Authenticity - props, costume, settings
- New conventions - detection via computer. Lighting and exposition.

Character, archetypes
- 'The rebel' (hero/anti-hero): Detective or senior cop. Usually male, jaded. Doesn't always play by rules. Sometimes corrupt.
- 'The king' (authority figure): Commanding officer or station sergeant.
- 'The innocent' (rookie): Audience surrogate and empathy.
- 'The sage': Elderly, wise. If not senior figure, often doctor or scientist. The person who gives advice and such.
- 'The villain'

Many crime dramas utilize binary opposition: light and dark, good and evil, law & order. But often the investigator has their moral boundaries challenged.
Many also use classic Freudian triangles: Hero (anti-hero) as id. Authority as super-hero, Rookie as ego that tries to balance the oppositional.

Critical approach to crime drama as a genre
- Realism - British crime dramas are often in social realist mode; many popular US crime dramas more escapist and may involve breaking with realist conventions.
- Representation - gender and diversity; issues of 'political correctness' vs empirical fact.
- Psychoanalysis - genre characters as Freudian archetypes; criminal pathology (the monster/the uncanny); crossover with horror genre ('return of the repressed').




//All images from Google.com\\
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