What's with all the crime shows?

Has anyone noticed an absolute glut of crime shows on TV recently? Perhaps it has been this way for a while, but since I moved out of a uni house (HDMI and Netflix only, to avoid paying for a TV licence) to a house of TV-watchers (my parents), I’ve noticed an almost ridiculous amount of crime dramas on every channel. Hence my ‘what’s with’. Maybe this should be a new blog series; when I notice that something has become a significant part of our culture, I can't help but wonder how it reflects our current societal mood.

It might help to start by thinking about what that mood is. To me, it is one currently characterised by insecurity and uncertainty. This exerts itself in a practical sense, in terms of the economic and social uncertainty brought about by the pandemic, and a new appreciation for anything that helps us to feel safe and secure in our physical and emotional lives.

I've also seen expressions of insecurity in reaction to newly mainstream conversations around inequality, race, gender, and sexuality. A lot of people seem to feel threatened by these new conversations, which threaten to upset the status quo. Furthermore, movements like #MeToo and revelations about the brute power and prejudice of the police have disrupted many people’s ideas of who counts as a ‘good’ person, and of who we can place our trust in.

My theory is that perhaps these crime shows are a way of dealing with this time of insecurity, and I think they operate in a few ways:

1. They reinforce our binary sense of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.

2. They create neat solutions to societal problems.

3. They create an ‘it could be worse’ sense of escapism in a time that is, objectively, pretty bad for most people.

I’ll go into these in more detail below.

First: the good and bad binary. Most crime shows operate around this common trope: the ‘good’ detectives and the ‘bad’ criminals. A couple of these shows, like Line of Duty, subvert this dualism slightly by including detectives and police officers as criminals. But nevertheless, the line between moral and immoral characters is clear in the end.

I have to of course admit that this trope isn’t limited to crime shows; literature, film, and TV plots have used the bad guys vs good guys conflict to drive their narratives for hundreds if not thousands of years. But I think crime dramas take this to the next level. Bad guys are not simply bad, but criminal: the ultimate definition of immorality.

I think the comfort that we find in these shows is a reflection of our need for neat binaries, and our knowledge of where we sit in them. If bad people are criminals, and we are not criminals (at least not in the way that they are represented on crime dramas, as murderers and large-scale thieves), then we must be good.

Life in society is increasingly telling us that we can no longer know who is good and bad. Women are coming forward to reveal that much-celebrated and revered male celebrities, and even male family members, are not who they seem. Western politics reeks of corruption and privilege. The historically-celebrated British Empire has lost its magic, becoming a dark and violent remnant lurking in our national history. Even the police have been victims of this new conversation around morality and prejudice. But with crime shows we know where we’re at. We know who to root for.

But while it provides comfort in uncertain times, this good/bad narrative holds us captive. Binaries are harmful when they wield too much power. Criminals become dehumanised; they morph from being human people in desperate situations, to ‘criminals’, an inhuman symbol of immorality. It’s an ‘us’ and ‘them’ situation, and we know that these always serve the needs of the ‘us’ at the expense of ‘them’. This harmful othering of people who commit crime leads into my next point.

My second theory is about how crime shows give us neat solutions to the ‘problem’ of crime. They rarely investigate the socioeconomic, mental, or psychological conditions that lead to crime, and they even more rarely explore the socioeconomic, mental, or psychological consequences of a person being incarcerated. In most crime dramas, the ‘beginning’ is a crime being committed, and the ‘end’ is the person who committed the crime being locked up. The ‘middle’, then, is the exciting part of the narrative where this neat ending is dangled in front of us. It might be a winding road to get there, but ultimately the bad guys are rounded up and taken away.

This others people who commit crimes, presenting the ultimate 'solution' as these people being away and out of sight. The solution is not to examine what brings people to commit crime, but that they are sent away. The focus is not on where these people end up, but just that it is not ‘here’, not with the good people. It’s a narratively satisfying outcome that makes us not question the times when we see it take place in real life. If these 'other' people are no longer physically around us, then they are no longer our concern.

In a messy, complex, and insecure society, these neat solutions become very appealing. And it’s completely understandable to feel this need. But I think it’s also important to investigate the potential effects of these narratives.

And finally, probably the simplest of my theories: our fascination with tragedy. There is escapism in the form of an imagined haven away from societal troubles, and then there is escapism to a world where there are only societal troubles. If we can sit and watch the lives of fictional people who are being put through a whole lot more trauma than ourselves, then we feel safer. My life might be a bit stressful right now, but at least I’m not being murdered/shot at/imprisoned. Negative escapism. I think it’s why we as a nation lap up soap operas like EastEnders, where the characters’ lives are almost inconceivably dramatic. It feels we need that sense of ‘it could be worse’ to put our own struggles in perspective.

I love the occasional crime drama. I love that ‘ah-ha!’ moment where they figure it all out. I love being carried along by the drama and intensity of the narrative, by the impressive intellect of the detectives and forensic investigators. But I’m also curious about how these shows, as powerful artefacts of pop culture, create and reinforce real-world prejudices and insecurities.

These shows allow us to explore the darkest corners of our imagination, to theoretically test the limits of our humanity. But, in the end, they comfort us with their neat solutions, our knowledge of where we sit in the binary of morality that they present us with. They are reflections of a society that feels a need to know what is ‘right’ at a time when it seems like nothing is, and a society that uses the othering of certain groups to feel secure in its own identity.