Female Detectives on Post-Network Television

Mother, Maiden, Cop

Alison Wielgus

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216266457
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

In this book, Alison Wielgus analyzes post-network female detective television through the lenses of genre, industry, and discourses of police abolition to argue for a radicalization of crime television that incorporates discourses of restorative justice and a feminist ethics of care.

Wielgus positions the genre as a primary site to examine the intersections of cultural discourses like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, considering the roles of several components of the genre, including serialization, circulation, family trauma, transnational victimhood, and discourses of police abolition, among others. Drawing on narrative and genre theory, the book argues that a melodrama/crime television dialectic undergirds post-network detective television, allowing the female detective to emerge as a contested figure representative of larger cultural tensions between gender and policing.

While changing industrial measures have allowed for niche programming to evolve and more rigorously interrogate gender norms, Wielgus finds that this disruption rarely extends to the institution of policing itself. Ultimately, this book identifies a central problem of crime television in the limitations the genre places on the construction and representation of the structural and societal functions of policing, even amid other strides in progressive representation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Content
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: True Detectives
• Chapter 1: “I Keep on Piling on Bodies, on Bodies, on Bodies”: The Post-Network Television Female Detective’s Prerogatives and Progenitors
• Chapter 2: “A Terrible Mother, A Great Mother”: Maternal Melodrama and the Female Detective
• Chapter 3: Unhappy Families: Networks of Trauma and Culpability in Post-Network Female Detective Television
• Chapter 4: Traffic in Bodies: Transnational Victims
• Chapter 5: “Neither Tarnished Nor Afraid”: True Crime and the Female Detective
• Chapter 6: Return to the Scene of the Crime: Radicalizing the Female Detective
• Conclusion: “Who Will Find Us, If the Girl Detective Does Not?”
• Bibliography
• Appendix: List of Post-Network Television Shows Featuring Female Detectives
• Index