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Abstract
This article explores the interface between crime television and action television, arguing that action/crime is a significant mode which has typically been overlooked in studies of the genre. It engages with the history of action/crime and its most prominent formal features, discussing in more detail NCIS (2003–present) and The Blacklist (2013–present), and foregrounding the sensational elements of violence and physical movement through space as well as the flows of data and dynamic rendering of analysis typical of forensic crime television. Action/crime is framed as one of several modes which can be seen to organise and inflect crime content; in this way the piece suggests that textual approaches are most productive when premised on an understanding of the fluid, modal aspects of television genre.
Notes
1. See Mittell (Citation2004, 153–160) on genre mixing, a term he prefers to hybridity given the latter’s connotations of fixed categories that are brought together rather than a fluid model of television genre. It is in part the very extent of crime television as a category, as I suggest later in this piece, that poses particular challenges for models of genre and the crime/action interface more particularly.
2. See, for example, Fishman and Cavender’s Entertaining Crime (Citation1998); and Quinn (Citation2002).
3. For example, Cuklanz and Moorti (Citation2006) locate their discussion of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit as intervening in, and yet framed by, what they regard as ‘the traditionally masculine genre of detective fiction’ (Citation2006, 303).
4. See, for example, Rapping (Citation2003); Lee (Citation2003).
5. ‘Crime in a Post-CSI Mediascape’ symposium, held at Oxford Brookes University, 14 September 2013. See http://arts.brookes.ac.uk/events/items/140,913-crime-drama-symposium.html (accessed 1 February 2016).
6. Amongst others, see Steven Cohan’s analysis of CSI’s visual strategies (Citation2008). An interest in visual style underpins the identification of ‘Nordic noir’ in recent critical commentary.
7. For example, the shifting rhetoric from that of a ‘war on drugs’ to that of a ‘war on terror’ impacts crime television significantly in the post-9/11 era.
8. Undoubtedly, my approach is primarily textual since I wish to highlight textual qualities that have, in my view, been unhelpfully overlooked. This is not to argue against the importance of the cultural model that Mittell so influentially outlines. Indeed the management of sensational content via discourses of responsibility, realism and authenticity is a key institutional aspect of the history of crime television in the United States as Mittell’s analysis of Dragnet demonstrates (Citation2004). I explore some of these issues in an earlier short essay (Tasker Citation2010).
9. Georges Sadoul writes of Daring Daylight Burglary that ‘it presents at least ten scenes linked together by the presence of the thief or of his pursuers. Here we see how montage in natural settings brought about the birth of the ‘chase sequence’, discovered by the English about 1900’. Sadoul remarks the shift from the comic chase to the dramatic although not the importance of crime (Citation1946, 255).
10. Butler is not dealing specifically with crime as a genre here, referring to ‘visually sophisticated programs such as Miami Vice, ER, and single-camera sitcoms’ (Citation2010, 14).
11. Although the title sequence varied across seasons the characteristics I draw attention to in my discussion are remarkably consistent. See the title sequence at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VFciCh8d6 g (accessed 31 October 2015).
12. Villarejo (Citation2010) effectively develops this queer framing of Starsky & Hutch in the broader context of a 1970s television in which ‘relevance’ was a vital component.
13. To some extent this accords with Osgerby and Gough-Yates’s account of action television as a genre, the modern detective series displacing the television western. See also Buscombe and Pearson (Citation1998). Mittell notes and problematises the relationship between the developing forms of television crime and the variant of crime cinema that was retrospectively termed film noir (Citation2004, 129).
14. In the UK, Starsky & Hutch was one of the shows objected to by campaigner Mary Whitehouse.
15. Storylines occasionally reach back as far as the Second World War as in ‘Call of Silence’ (S02EP07) in which Gibbs and the team help a veteran of Iwo Jima who believes that he murdered a fellow soldier to reconstruct events he is unable to fully recall.
16. See, for example, The Dukes of Hazzard (CBS, 1979–1985).
17. Surveillance technology also generates humour on occasion, as when the comic interactions of NCIS’s DiNozzo and Bishop going undercover in a couples’ intimacy class causes embarrassment.