Representations of Corpses in Contemporary Television

Abstract

Before the twenty-first century, crime shows tended to show victims only at the crime scene. With the rise of TV shows like CSI and Six Feet Under, the dead body became a central actor in the plot. Dead bodies were not only at the crime scene now, but also in the morgue, the embalming room and most often in the pathology lab. The dead body — especially when represented in visual media — is now indeed ‘treated as a highly spectacular object, and the dead body at autopsy becomes the most spectacular’ (Klaver, 2006, p. 140). Before the turn of the century there was only one show on TV (Quincy, M.E.) that presented corpses in the pathology lab. These first representations of corpses stand in contrast to the representations in TV shows from 2000 to 2010. This contrast is marked by a shift towards a greater visibility of corpses, which are now far less often obscured. The increasing visibility of corpses on TV is interesting as mass media are to be regarded as key spheres of meaning making, reproducing as well as shaping more encompassing societal conceptions of death. Given that most people have never been within a pathology department or attended autopsies, media images from crime TV shows create a visual experience from which they were previously excluded.