ABSTRACT
While a great deal of critical attention has been given to US forensic crime drama, and especially to CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000-), there is relatively little on its British equivalents. CSI has proved influential in several fields of inquiry, from its industrial and network settings (Kirby, 2013), through the technical innovations it has pioneered (Weissmann, 2007; Pierson, 2010) to the legal contexts in which it has been controversial (Cole and Dioso-Villa, 2006-07; DiFonzo, 2007). However, British forensic crime dramas should be of greater interest because of their primacy in presenting forensic science on television and their greater attention to its complexity. What is most interesting, and the focus in this chapter, is the relationships between forensic science and medicine and the human stories in which they intervene. British forensic crime dramas stage what I shall call forensic humanism: the dramatisation of interconnections between science and society where conflict is to be found not in the traditional battle between criminals and their pursuers but in the clash of scientific and human stories.
