Abstract
Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television by Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance provides a timely and compelling analysis of the array of reality TV crime dramas that have come to saturate American media in the 21st century. Throughout the book’s various chapters, the authors take pains to demonstrate how “crimesploitation”–a genre that combines true crime’s dramatization of real criminal cases with the voyeuristic pleasures of “exploitation” films–both emerged out of and reinforced two historical developments in the late 20th century: the rise of a “law and order” politics and the neoliberal transformation of the economy (5).
In this respect, the authors follow a well-trodden path in neoliberalism studies in linking the ascendancy of neoliberalism, as an ideological and governmental practice mandating the “freedom” of markets and the unraveling of social protection schemes, to increasingly punitive and repressive approaches to crime control and criminal justice. What sets Kaplan and LaChance’s analysis apart from other scholarship on these developments, however, is their attention to the parallel history of the neoliberal carceral state in American popular culture.
The book is organized around two central arguments about the cultural work that crimesploitation texts perform. First, Kaplan and LaChance argue that crimesploitation programs reflect a neoliberal status quo in which crime is severed from its roots in political, economic, and social inequalities and rearticulated as a problem of individual and cultural pathology. Second, they argue that in an era of increasing economic insecurity and punitiveness, crimesploitation programs reinforce the legitimacy of the neoliberal carceral state by appealing to viewers’ desires for various types of freedom: “freedom as control over enemies, freedom as transgression of boundaries, freedom as release from responsibility, [and] freedom as disidentification with the ‘unfree’” (15).
Along these lines, Chapter 1 focuses on the way that crimesploitation programs invite viewers to participate in the detection of crime and the doling out of punishment against “failed citizens” and dangerous predators through an analysis of three well-known TV series: America’s Most Wanted (1988-2011, 2021-), Cops (1989-), and To Catch a Predator (2004-2008). In addition to privileging the perspectives of police officers and vigilantes, the authors argue that all three of these shows create distance between viewers and criminal suspects by tapping into the nation’s racially charged history of vigilantism and exploiting theories of black cultural pathology. When viewers vicariously partake in the thrills of chasing “perps” and “taking down” criminals, Kaplan and LaChance go on to suggest, they not only “emotionally validate the state’s neoliberal, punitive response to crime” (13), but they also gain a sense of control over the landscapes of poverty and insecurity that increasingly define life in America.
However, Kaplan and LaChance are not only concerned with the authoritarian dimensions of crimesploitation texts. More provocatively, they seek to demonstrate that even when the primary appeal of these programs comes from the subversive pleasures they offer for vicarious participation in deviant or illicit behavior, crimesploitation remains ideologically bound to the neoliberal notion that personal responsibility and punishment, rather than social change, are the appropriate solutions to criminal dysfunction. In this respect, Chapter 2 reconsiders To Catch a Predator alongside A&E’s Intervention (2005-), arguing that both programs encourage viewers to safely fantasize about the pleasures–and pains–of liberating oneself from neoliberalism’s pervasive norms of individual-responsibility, self-control, and risk management. By presenting transgressive behavior as an all-or-nothing game that ends in either death, imprisonment, or abstinence-based treatment in a private facility, however, Kaplan and LaChance demonstrate how both programs work to maintain viewers’ continued acquiescence to the status quo.
Building on this analysis, Chapter 3 explores the contradictory representations of incarcerated individuals in Lockup (2005-2017), Lockdown (2006-2007), and Dog the Bounty Hunter (2004-2012). Despite sometimes embracing the ideal of rehabilitation, Kaplan and LaChance argue that the optimistic stories of incarcerated people that appear on these shows ultimately bolster the agenda of the neoliberal carceral state by presenting private, personal interventions, rather than structural change, as the solution to social problems like crime and drug addiction (78). In this respect, they claim that contemporary scholarship has neglected the role of penal optimism in justifying the harsh treatment of criminals in America. As Kaplan and LaChance note, the notion that punishment can be a generative, compassionate act has helped maintain an image of the prison as a potential site for positive social change. Such optimism, the authors suggest, may be required to make harsh punishments palatable to the public (87).
Chapter 4 marks a turning point in the book, as the authors move to consider the newfound popularity of “middlebrow” crimesploitation through close readings of Making a Murderer (2015-2018), Don’t F*ck With Cats (2019) and How to Fix a Drug Scandal (2020). While Kaplan and LaChance touch on the pseudo-vigilante pleasures excited by these media, their main focus in the chapter is on narrow constructions of criminal-justice reform advanced by these texts. Specifically, they emphasize the way that these productions embrace “the liberal-legal American model of law,” in which law is imagined as an adequate bulwark against the abuse of power by state actors (93). This approach to law holds sacred the presumption of innocence and the right to due process, but, as Kaplan and LaChance point out, it does nothing to rein in the state’s use of violence against the legally and factually guilty (102). Furthermore, they argue that by privileging innocence over constitutional rights per se, viewers are encouraged to redirect their punitive impulses to the violation of due process by individual police officers, prosecutors, and forensic scientists (104).
In terms of the analyses Kaplan and LaChance provide of the crimesploitation programs they discuss, there is very little to disagree with. However, their interrogation of crimesploitation might strike contemporary readers as somewhat anachronistic given that the majority of the book is devoted to series that began airing on cable TV networks in the late 20th century. The authors reserve, for example, a discussion of the crimesploitation podcast industry to the epilogue of the book, and they only briefly touch on the role of the internet in disrupting traditional “crimesploitation” narratives.
As a result, some of their more interesting questions and insights about the future of the genre get raised at the last moment and are not addressed by the book as a whole. As Kaplan and LaChance point out, crimesploitation always runs the risk of undermining the authority it outwardly aims to legitimize because it depicts scenes of civic disorder and lawlessness and appeals to viewers’ vigilante impulses and fantasies of escape. What might become of crimesploitation as new actors and narratives enter into the crime-and-media sphere? What role, if any, will public representations of criminal violence, policing, and criminal justice have on the neoliberal carceral state? As the authors note, corporate crimesploitation programs monopolized the market for video of police-civilian interactions in the 1990s, but now anyone can record and broadcast these interactions to potentially millions of viewers. While Kaplan and LaChance argue that these videos are unlikely to challenge the status quo owing to conservative counter-mobilization efforts, they do not elaborate on this argument, leaving readers longing for a more in-depth analysis of the contemporary crimesploitation landscape. An analysis of the new crimesploitation texts emerging in podcasting, youtube, and tiktok is all the more pressing for crime and media scholars given the ideological diversity of these productions and the influence that these platforms are already having on mainstream, televised crimesploitation programs.
Nevertheless, Kaplan and LaChance provide excellent and easily digestible accounts of the politics of reality TV crimesploitation, and their emphasis on connecting media representations of crime and punishment to existing social, political, and economic inequalities in the neoliberal era will provide political scientists, sociologists, and media scholars with abundant resources to continue exploring the relationship between popular culture and the practices and ideologies of policing in America.