Telling Detection: The Narrative Structures of American TV Detective Dramas

Abstract

Methods of detection are inextricably linked with specific narrative structures, which carry ideological implications. For the purposes of this chapter, the detective genre is understood as a vast network of texts that tend to either copy existing structures or react against them. These narrative structures are rooted in the literary traditions of the whodunit in Golden Age fiction, which has proven to be a dominant mode of storytelling for US network television. Other structures tend to consciously react against this familiar mode. Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, discussing the police procedural or police series, explains that

more ‘traditional’ police series typically follow a closed episodic structure in which all major narrative threads (usually one particular case and a secondary narrative) are resolved by the end of each episode. These series tend to rely heavily on one of two primary formulas of the detective genre. The first we might call ‘swift justice’ model in which the perpetrator is known from the outset and the job of the police is to apprehend him or her. This form typically relies on heightened action sequences, especially car chases, fistfights, and gun battles, to bring closure to the narrative. The second structure is simply the ‘whodunit’ model in which the criminal is unknown and the role of the police detective, using his or her superior sleuthing abilities, is to solve the mystery. Because these series rely so heavily on these recognizable structures and tend toward closure, they are often dismissed as trite and predictable escapism, sensationalist exploitation or, in the worst cases, politically reactionary dogma not to be taken seriously. (Nichols-Pethick 2012, 7)