ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the significance of cars in British and American police dramas, using brief examples from the 1960s to the present, to show how attention to this topic can link and reconfigure critical approaches to stylistic, formal and institutional aspects of the genre. The chapter cuts into familiar debates in new ways, and is a call for further, more detailed analysis to follow up this provocation. Cars offer a way into the stylistic and generic specificity of police dramas because in different ways the protagonists’ surveillance and investigation of the fictional world, and their ability to enforce the law, depend on being able to move in and between places and spaces. These abilities have been increasingly dependent on the use of the car rather than patrolling on foot. Thus, the space of policing is connected with modernity and its associations with mobility and the technologies, like the car and television, which extend mobility in real or virtual space (Morse, 1990). Moreover, television representations of policing adopt a scopic regime to apprehend and control the real. In order to identify crime and to impose justice, television police officers and detectives observe and interpret, attempting (usually successfully) to unveil a truth and put things right (Bignell, 2009). This takes place against an historical background of changing production circumstances for television, which can be summarised as a shift from studio-based programmes to location-based shooting. There are also important distinctions in dramatic tone and emphasis across the genre, such as between character-focused dramas and action-focused ones. These, and other aspects of genre, narrative form, style and historical significance, affect choices of cars in police drama and are expressed in part by them. Cars do some of the work of storytelling, and they are objects whose properties are often deployed very distinctively and effectively.
