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Abstract: This article explores the migration of themes of homeland security and political violence from sensational action formats to procedural crime dramas. It argues that, although the latter have typically developed distinctive strategies and relatively complex narratives, there are commonalities across the broad category of crime television. Themes explored include racial profiling, motive and political violence, coercion, and the ethics of interrogation within crime television.
In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, US crime drama has increasingly drawn on themes of political violence and homeland security, developing narratives that deal with actual, threatened, and suspected terrorist acts. Crime dramas as varied as Law & Order (NBC, 1990-2010), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (NBC, 2001-2011), Bones (Fox, 2005-), Without a Trace (CBS, 2002-2009), Numb3rs (CBS, 2005-2010), and Lie to Me (Fox, 2009-2011) have all featured episodes dealing with political violence linked to Islam, to Arab nationals residing in the United States, and/or to Americans of Middle Eastern descent. In doing so, these shows make use of the genre's long-established strategies for the understanding and dramatization of deviance and criminality; mobilizing tropes of otherness, they pick up on the military inflections of the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and the "war on terror." They also avail themselves of tropes which are central to a more sensational mode of representing the policing of political violence and threats to national security, a mode associated with thrilling, actionoriented television. It is my argument that crime drama has developed a distinct set of conventions for dealing with political violence and the figure of the terrorist as national and/or cultural "other," staging these concerns within the particular terms of the procedural narrative.
It is not my intention to argue that, post-9/11, crime drama suddenly became dominated by narratives foregrounding political violence; this is not the case. Rather, I suggest that there is an intriguing exchange between those action-oriented shows which most directly deal with these issues and more familiar procedural crime formats. As themes of national security and the necessity of combating terror-on occasion via unpalatable techniques-migrate from action formats, whether crime or espionage, they are effectively normalized. In exploring the connection between crime and terror on television, I take my cue in part from...