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3 books match the query 'Television cop shows'

cover of Black and Blue TV: Industry Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Black and Blue TV

Industry Responses to the Black Lives Matter Movement

Laurena Bernabo

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Black and Blue TV explores the ways television productions have responded to the Black Lives Matter movement. Television programs’ engagement with BLM was common before George Floyd’s murder sparked international protests in the summer of 2020, at which point it became nearly unavoidable for many series. Images of police using violence against Black Americans fueled criticisms of the role of television—especially cop shows—in perpetuating “copaganda,” highlighting the fact that television’s cops are nearly always the good guys, even when they break the law and use excessive force. Black and Blue TV identifies trends and anomalies in television’s engagement with BLM but also investigates the people who influence what those representations look like. Pairing textual criticism with interviews with television creatives, executives, and media activists, author Laurena Bernabo traces shifts in how these individuals understand their role in televisual culture and the cultural forum of narratives that are produced and distributed as a result.

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cover of Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect

Justice Provocateur

Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect

Gray Cavender and Nancy C. Jurik

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Justice Provocateur focuses on Prime Suspect, a popular British television film series starring Oscar and Emmy award-winning actress Helen Mirren as fictional London policewoman Jane Tennison. Gray Cavender and Nancy C. Jurik examine the media constructions of justice, gender, and police work in the show, exploring its progressive treatment of contemporary social problems in which women are central protagonists. They argue that the show acts as a vehicle for progressive moral fiction--fiction that gives voice to victim experiences, locates those experiences within a larger social context, transcends traditional legal definitions of justice for victims, and offers insights into ways that individuals might challenge oppressive social and organizational arrangements.
 
Although Prime Suspect is often seen as a uniquely progressive, feminist-inspired example within the typically more conservative, male-dominated crime genre, Cavender and Jurik also address the complexity of the films' gender politics. Consistent with some significant criticisms of the films, they identify key moments in the series when Tennison's character appears to move from a successful woman who has it all to a post-feminist stereotype of a lonely, aging career woman with no strong family or friendship ties. Shrewdly interpreting the show as an illustration of the tensions and contradictions of women's experiences and their various relations to power, Justice Provocateur provides a framework for interrogating the meanings and implications of justice, gender, and social transformation both on and off the screen.
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cover of Only the Names Have Been Changed: Dragnet, the Police Procedural, and Postwar Culture

Only the Names Have Been Changed

Dragnet, the Police Procedural, and Postwar Culture

Claudia Calhoun

University of Texas Press, 2022

Winner of the 2022 Peter C. Rollins Book Prize, Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA)

In the postwar era, the police procedural series Dragnet informed Americans on the workings of the criminal justice system and instructed them in their responsibilities as citizens.

Among shifting politics, tastes, and technology in television history, one genre has been remarkably persistent: the cop show. Claudia Calhoun returns to Dragnet, the pioneering police procedural and an early transmedia franchise, appearing on radio in 1949, on TV and in film in the 1950s, and in later revivals. More than a popular entertainment, Dragnet was a signifier of America’s postwar confidence in government institutions—and a publicity vehicle for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Only the Names Have Been Changed shows how Dragnet’s “realistic” storytelling resonated across postwar culture. Calhoun traces Dragnet’s “semi-documentary” predecessors, and shows how Jack Webb, Dragnet’s creator, worked directly with the LAPD as he produced a series that would likewise inspire public trust by presenting day-to-day procedural justice, rather than shootouts and wild capers. Yet this realism also set aside the seething racial tensions of Los Angeles as it was. Dragnet emerges as a foundational text, one that taught audiences to see police as everyday heroes not only on TV but also in daily life, a lesson that has come under scrutiny as Americans increasingly seek to redefine the relationship between policing and public safety.

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