Module overview
Crime detection is prolific on television; a topic discussed across news and current affairs programming, documentaries, reality TV and, not the least, numerous crime dramas. This module examines different type of crime investigation narratives on television, providing you with tools for analysing the dynamic and contested cultural roles of crime TV. We will engage with diverse theoretical approaches to the relationship between crime detection and television, enabling your active participation in both popular and academic debates on this topic. In order to unpick the diverse cultural meanings that saturate and circulate different programmes, we will study their wider socio-historical contexts as well as cultural reception. Doing so, we pay particular attention to the specific aesthetic forms, narrative structures, figures, settings and themes that characterises televisual portrayals of different crime investigation practices, but we also consider genre linkages to literature, radio, cinema, and digital culture. Approaching the study of crime TV from the unique perspectives of film and television studies, this module will also highlight television’s contributions to the wider discursive construction of moving-image creation as a key technology of detection in modern culture.