TVPD: The Generational Diegetics of the Police Procedural on American Television

Abstract

This paper examines the crime fiction genre known as the police procedural and traces its evolution from televisual inception to the present. The police procedural in the context of American network television is generally divisible into three canonical periods—the Golden Age, the Gilded Age, and the Dark Age—with the series populating these eras serving not only as social dramas that calibrate public sentiments about the police, but more importantly as historical texts that reflect how the police perceive their role as workers in American society: a self-assessment based primarily on their relationship to technology. As policing has undergone tremendous technological change in concert with the popularization of the police procedural, having largely evolved, technologically speaking, into an automated industry, the TV cop has similarly devolved into a composite figure alienated from both work and American society at large.