Female Detectives on Post-Network Television: Mother, Maiden, Cop

Building on contemporary scholarship on post-network television, feminism, melodrama, and crime television, Alison Wielgus analyzes post-network female detective television through the lenses of genre, industry, and discourses of police abolition to argue for a radicalization of crime television that incorporates discourses of restorative justice and a feminist ethics of care.

This book positions post-network female detective television as a primary site to examine the intersections of cultural discourses like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, analyzing the roles of several components of the genre including serialization, circulation, family trauma, transnational victimhood, and discourses of police abolition, among others. Drawing on narrative and genre theory, this book argues that a melodrama/crime television dialectic undergirds post-network detective television, allowing the female detective to emerge as a contested figure representative of larger cultural tensions between gender and policing.

While changing industrial measures have allowed for niche programing to evolve and more rigorously interrogate gender norms, Wielgus finds that this disruption rarely extends to the institution of policing itself. #MeToo's imperatives and precursors have worked toward deepening and complicating depictions of sexual assault and femicide with narrative nuance, but there remains an uneasy relationship between Black Lives Matter and policing discourses and the desire to position female detectives as heroic saviors in the production of copaganda narratives. Ultimately, this book identifies a central problem of crime television in the limitations the genre places on the construction and representation of the structural and societal functions of policing, even amid other strides in progressive representation.