Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect

6. Prime Suspect and Progressive Moral Fiction

chapter 6 Prime Suspect and Progressive Moral Fiction As we noted in the Introduction, critics and scholars disagree about Prime Suspect’s success in transforming the sexist, racist, and conservative nature of most crime genre productions. In this, our concluding chapter of the book, we utilize our ideal type model of progressive moral fiction to conduct our own assessment of the transformation-containment debate surrounding Prime Suspect and to consider its impact on crime genre conventions and television programming. We conclude that despite its weaknesses, Prime Suspect has had a transformative effect on the television police crime drama. Certainly, the series enhanced the standards of the procedural ’s televisual sense of realism, especially forensic realism. Even more importantly, Prime Suspect created a space for women in television police crime drama, a subgenre that formerly tended to exclude them. We argue that Prime Suspect provides an example of a television series that exhibits elements of our model of progressive moral fiction. It attends to the lived experiences of socially marginalized victims and their families, connects those experiences to societal-level inequalities, challenges narrow law-andorder solutions to crime, and reveals disjunctures in the ruling apparatus of society so that viewers might see a space and hope for social change. In the sections that follow, we will present justifications for our conclusions about the series’ transformative effects but also identify ways in which Prime Suspect falls short in these areas. Despite their contextualization of crime and victimization within a larger social context, Prime Suspect episodes are ultimately concentrated on solving individual cases rather than addressing solutions to societal problems. Tennison has no Cav_Jur RevPgs.indd 109 5/18/12 3:41 PM consistent ties to either a community of friends or collective change efforts . We also apply our model of progressive moral fiction to several other contemporary police dramas, in particular The Closer and The Wire, and compare those programs with Prime Suspect. The resulting analysis will illustrate both the impact of Prime Suspect on the television crime genre and the utility of our model of progressive moral fiction for media analysis and teaching pedagogy. Replication or Innovation? Some scholars have commented that Prime Suspect incorporates many of the conventions of the television crime genre and that its adherence to these conventions weakens any transformative effect. Of course, common, often formulaic elements are what define a genre. Because Prime Suspect is a police drama, we expect some standard elements: a story line in which cops capture criminals, the details of the pursuit that focus on police routines , police culture, and jargon. The criminal’s capture symbolizes the end of a threat to social order and a restoration of the status quo. Such symbolism validates important values, for example, that crime does not pay or at least that it should not pay. Successful genre productions are more creative than others; they incorporate some conventions but in ways that are fresh and interesting. John Cawleti (1976) suggests that the crime genre presents culturally relevant images, symbols, and themes that incorporate change even within familiar, standardized formats. Charlotte Brunsdon (2000) sees the crime genre as a vehicle for addressing concerns such as women’s changing positions in society, social inequalities, and the changing role of police in society (see also Reiner 1994). Still, the most creative and path-defining productions subvert conventions, add new elements, and sometimes cross-fertilize with features from other genres. We argue that to a greater extent than any other prior procedurals, Prime Suspect explicitly and implicitly decenters male dominance of the genre. Moreover, most of its episodes move well beyond the limited law-and-order focus of other procedurals. Although Prime Suspect is neither the first nor the last series to do so, it explores the conditions of social inequality that promote social marginalization, crime, and victimization in ways reminiscent of the social realism tradition. 110 chapter 6 Cav_Jur RevPgs.indd 110 5/18/12 3:41 PM Social Context and Social Justice Doing justice in Prime Suspect is never as simple as identifying the culprit and extracting a confession. As discussed in Chapter 4, the series has altered the crime genre by occasions in which it interrogates the meaning of law and order, challenges the police organization, and engages in debates about the role of policing in society. These broader, almost philosophical issues are addressed in story line, in dialogue, and in action. In several episodes Tennison...