ABSTRACT
The television police series is a durable and flexible ingredient of the television schedule, one which can be transformed in a variety of ways to suit changing institutional, cultural and historical contexts. The generic constants of the police series – its narrative configuration of police officers, criminals and ‘community’, its historically variant crimes, its technologies of detection – are sufficiently familiar to provide ground for both innovation and imitation. The police series can answer particular demands at specific historical moments in different broadcasting contexts, while always, at the same time, at some level, articulating something about living as a citizen there and then. For example, in Britain, there is a very long tradition of the police series being used to satisfy demands that television should represent the regions of the United Kingdom. Police series such as Heartbeat (Yorkshire, YTV, 1992-2011), Wycliffe (Devon, HTV, 1994-98) and The Chief (East Anglia, ATV, 1990-95) have contributed significantly to the place images of their settings, and some – like Taggart (Glasgow, STV, 1983-2010) – have been so successful that the franchise continued after the 1994 death of Mark McManus, the actor who played DI Taggart. In a rather different way, a show like Dick Wolf’s Law and Order (NBC, 1990-2010) can multiply its revenues by franchising the format for customised production in different national contexts, providing a ‘glocal’ variant, sensitive to local settings, policing and legal conventions, while also still exporting the US version.
