ABSTRACT
The media coverage of the police shooting of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri established narrative elements that would play out again and again in other locations throughout the United States in the following months. A white police officer, pursuing a suspect for a petty crime, confronted an unarmed black man with deadly force. Public protests followed, and fears about widescale social unrest circulated. Surveillance videos were scrutinized in attempts to reconstruct the events prior to the shooting. After local and sometimes federal investigations, the police officer (or officers) involved would not be indicted on charges of homicide or manslaughter. With minor variations, this narrative has played out as national media outlets focused on the role of race and police use of force in the deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Samuel Debose, and twelve-year-old Tamir Rice. This chapter examines how two scripted prime-time serials, The Good Wife
(CBS, 2009-2016) and Scandal (ABC, 2012-present), approach the politics of race and policing in episodes that aired as the above media narratives were unfolding. The Good Wife aired “The Debate” on January 11, 2015 (Season 6), preceded by a notification to the audience that it was written and filmed prior to the grand jury decisions in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. Scandal aired “The Lawn Chair” (Season 4) on March 5, 2015, one day after the Department of Justice announced that no civil rights charges would be filed in relation to the death of Michael Brown, and one day before an AfricanAmerican teenager, Tony Robinson, was shot and killed by a white police officer in Madison, Wisconsin. Both of these broadcast network series have previously presented fictionalized versions of stories pulled from current headlines, weaving these “cases of the week” into their ongoing narratives. Although the two shows share a similar structure, these episodes dealt with the politics of race and policing in markedly different ways. The Good Wife moved allegations of institutionalized racism and police brutality into the background of a narrative about the central character’s political ambitions. Scandal largely ignored the series’ continuing elements in order to foreground a fictionalized version of the Michael Brown case, and to imagine a far more clear-cut outcome. This chapter analyzes each of these episodes in relation to the form of the prime-time serial and their critical reception.
