Abstract
Lam’s ethnography takes us through the thinking, writing, rewriting and re-rewriting involved in getting a crime show idea to script, then filmed for TV in North America. She rightly points out crucial legal, political and cultural differences between Canada and the USA and alludes to some in UK/Europe. That ranges from different regulatory regimes to different numbers and length, or even existence, of advertising breaks. The setting for, and partial funder, of the various series she examines is Canada; but for sound commercial reasons, including the Writers Guild of America strike 2007/8, Toronto often stands in for Anywhere/Anytime. One of the series briefly gets a showing on a US network.
Brooding over all this is the hydra-headed CSI franchise and skulking in the corner is The Wire. The latter is lauded by the critics and studied or referenced by academics (guilty) but is not a ratings success. CSI may be studied by academics for its effects but more still by networks seeking to replicate its success.
Lam makes something of the five (usually)-act structure of such shows and once even metaphorically presents her material as if she were a detective assembling the suspects in the drawing room but her book has an introduction, five chapters and conclusion. The introduction is materially substantial enough to warrant an act/chapter of its own, as is the conclusion, which she does not explicitly foreshadow in the introduction.
A literature review, ‘Setting the Stage’ takes up Chapter 1 but much can also be found in the introduction so that is where we start our tale. Lam claims that criminologists have not studied the production of fictional crime stories so I must introduce the work of Marianne Colbran, a former scriptwriter on The Bill, who now stars as a criminologist. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Watching the Cops’ (to be published shortly as Media Representations of Police and Crime: Shaping Television Drama) makes the same point about the paucity of production- or process-related research. And, synchronously but separately, they broadly conclude that the haphazard, contingent nature of TV writing, funding and production means that ideological, big-picture analyses are not appropriate.
For the skim reader, it is potentially confusing, as we are talking about TV dramas produced for network television, that she uses actor-network theory (ANT, cue puns). Much of Chapter 2 on method is given over to explication of the origins and scope of Bruno Latour’s work in developing ANT. It has the feeling of a necessary PhD requirement and gives an adequate account, but little critique. Moreover, it interrupts the narrative; and much of the explanation uses few examples from her own work and few mentions of ANT occur once we get into the story in later chapters. In the UK we might simply call this an ethnography and be hazier on the precise theoretical detail. For criminologists and media students, this chapter can be fast forwarded, just rely on the preview in the introduction.
In that introduction she names the programmes, all unknown to me, and explains her role in each. Thus she gets started as a paid researcher, pre-production, for the pilot and post-production on the associated website for a Canadian cable TV, CSI-like drama about an insurance investigator, Cra$h and Burn. This gave her access to the writer’s room for The Bridge – a Canadian/US co-production with no relation to the Swedish/Danish production of the same name. Based on that Scandinavian version, US TV now features a Mexico/US clash of jurisdictions/personalities show bearing that name! The UK version is called The Tunnel. The show on which she worked features a police union president’s attempt to clean up his force. The titular bridge acts as a metaphor for law enforcement. She was able to sit in and observe, access scripts and conduct follow-up interviews. And making use of the centrality of Toronto to English-speaking Canadian TV drama, she conducted in-depth interviews with a variety of writers and researchers for crime docudramas and visited the set of one.
In her opening chapter she decries the fashion for content analyses and media effects research by criminologists and rightly chides those who tend to talk of ‘the media’ as a singular entity or skip over differences between fictional and factual coverage. Here she might have mentioned Leishman and Mason (2003). She mentions cultural criminology in its subcultural and aesthetic modes and ‘popular’ and ‘news-making’ criminologies but is more convincing in locating her work in the tradition of legal studies of literature and film. She also has criticisms of attempts by criminology to ‘correct’ media misrepresentations of crime and criminal justice. Here she short-changes and elides differences between ‘public’ and ‘newsmaking’ criminologies. She tends to conflate fear of crime and criminal behaviour as ‘effects’ and oversimplifies the work of Adorno and Horkheimer in several places.
Lam specifically challenges criminology to engage with the media in terms of its own discourses, yet overlooks Wilson and Groombridge (2010) who review the making and the reception of a TV series that attempted to do just that. And finally, her contention about criminology tending to take media and cultural products as finished may have some merit; but those products themselves are now increasingly made and influenced by fan fiction which showrunner (yes, we do have them in the UK) Steven Moffatt incorporated into recent episodes of Sherlock. Moreover, ‘readings’ of those products don’t wait for the academic, or even media, now as they may be analysed live on Twitter and shortly after in blogs by viewers, stars and others involved too.
The remaining chapters offer fewer opinions or theory but a close observation of the actors, which in ANT include scripts, props, the scriptwriting software Final Draft and sets and settings as well as writers, producers and executives. These are very useful illustrations of the processes which she says are so important. Thus we find that a proposed story about high-level police corruption becomes a more muted affair not through the machinations of the powerful. A high-end city restaurant had been selected as the set where corrupt cops and politicians hang out. It was to robbed by drug-addicted ‘thugs’ who would then be shot by corrupt cops keen to protect the big fish from these little ones. But it was eventually decided the Italian setting was too stereotypical so a more ‘Mediterranean’ one was chosen. There, to add a woman to the plot, the manager now became a woman. It also reduced the cast and therefore cost as a male manager and a waitress had formerly featured. Eventually the restaurant became a diner and then clearly an out-of-town diner in day time. This made the whole shoot much cheaper but it was clear that the ‘brass wall’ would not dine there so it just became a drug addicts’ raid on a diner!
However, in her discussions of the economic reality and the timidity of the network, one can discern the hand of neo-liberalism and conservative ideologies that she seeks to downplay. The networks have financial power but feel constrained to maximize profits and fear offending audiences/advertisers. This is the bigger picture.
Much of her final chapter touches on specifically Canadian issues that have resonance even with those less under the shadow of the USA. It also touches on the extent to which crime dramas gain worldwide sales by being set Anywhere/Anytime. Thus one of her shows started out set in New York before ending up, after a change of name, clearly set in Hamilton, Ontario. The recent success of Nordic Noir makes some of this seem less relevant already but these European additions may be seen like the cable hits, The Wire then and Breaking Bad now, to escape some of the restrictions of prime-time networking. The rise of Netflix has also changed the economic ecology of screen media.
Her conclusion is a cliffhanger. Returning to her ANT theme she posits the book as an actor beginning its journey, ‘deferring the final word on its meaning and function’. Cervantes only wrote part 2 of Don Quixote after becoming fed up with the plagiarized and pastiched versions that filled the void after the success of part 1. For all my criticisms it should be clear that Lam ought to get to work on part 2 of a longer series. Were this a pilot I would greenlight it.