In "The Shadow Of Shadows": Television Reality Crime Programming

Abstract

This chapter addresses a contemporary television phenomenon: television reality crime programming. Reality programming broadcasts crime dramatizations or film footage of police and other emergency personnel at work as regular television series. The chapter examines the reality programs as cultural objects. It analyses the content of America's Most Wanted (AMW) and Unsolved Mysteries (UM) vignettes. The chapter considers their symbols, ideology, and reality claim. It considers AMW's and UM's symbolic use of malaise and resolution. In research protocol, symbols included references to crime as a threat to the social order and to the resolution of that threat. Accordingly, to understand AMW and UM, the chapter also considers their appropriation of crime control ideology, and the language and consciousness that reinforce it. It examines AMW's and UM's reality claim in relation to the crime genre's realism, and the notion of television's visual images as an unmediated reality. Reality programs are designed to draw the audience into the reality.