ABSTRACT
We have come to the end of our journey where we can now conclude that any television representation of crime is the result of a particular assemblage of logics, people, creative ideas, commercial interests, legal requirements, and programming strategies during a program’s production. In travelling along the local roads of television production, we have encountered how the collaborative assembly of television representations – these unique aesthetic-legal-commercial hybrids – is not self-evident, because it cannot be predicted at the outset neither can it be accurately inferred by only watching the television program in its final form. The formation of television representations of crime cannot be retraced after the fact. Instead, we must patiently document the ways in which knowledge and representation come together through actor-networks found within and beyond the television writers’ room. By tracing these actor-networks, the primary task of this book has been to document the making of popular criminology – specifically, the way in which entertainment television fictions are assembled through the knowledge and storytelling practices implicated in the production of North American crime dramas. If popular criminology is an influential way of knowing about crime and criminality, how does it know?
