Television Crime Dram Has Been

Television crime dram has been one of the most fundamentally altered genres of the era of television. Early Black and white programs that featured aggrandized police officers like Perry Mason, are replaced by fictional characters often challenged by real law enforcement with regard to their ability to perform their jobs as well as the style in which they do so. (Arcuril, 1977) Even as far back as 1977 scholars were seeking to challenge reality based and purely fictional police drama/crime drama television by exploring the stark differences between reality and fiction. Yet in the modern era reality and reality-based television seems to have departed even more from real reality as the definitions and distinctions between the two blur. In the last decade the trend has been toward a blurring of reality even though reality is what the "new" genre is called and a new term came into use, i.e. infotainment.

Early television programming, for example, could easily be recognized and classified as news or entertainment, but recently, the line between news and entertainment had become blurred. Beginning in the late 1980s, contemporary infotainment programs like Geraldo or Unsolved Mysteries began to appear on television and the genre had increased steadily in popularity. Since the 1980s, it had become more difficult for television viewers and media consumers in general to identify what was news and what was entertainment. (Surette & Otto, 2002, p. 443)

According to Surette and Otto, it seems that real police officers' concerns from more than 30 years ago don't hold that much water as it has become increasingly difficult to separate crime television from the television news, as even the most fictional of programs often use story lines from real cases and a pinch of the real way in which these cases were and even are being investigated to build the plot of the story.

The challenge to viewers and especially very young viewers is then to dissect the real from the fiction, or in some cases determine if the information they are being given is information for information sake or infotainment and if either has any bearing on the way they live their lives or the way they should be living their lives today.

One aspect of the seriousness of this issue is the time frame issue. Though even Perry Mason solved his mysteries and had the perpetrator in court, likely confessing within an hour the real time and scrutiny it takes to investigate crime and potentially arrest and prosecute a crime can be as much as many years, as opposed to an hour, or dramatic representation of a few days or even in some cases a few months. (Fishman & Cavender, 1998) To some degree this, as well as the fictional license many "reality" and "reality based" programs take with technology applications put a great deal of pressure on real law enforcement and force public scrutiny that many find unwelcome. (Arcuril, 1977)

The challenge is then placed squarely on law enforcement as well as their support systems, like crime scene investigators (usually for legal reasons a completely separate entity), to resolve crime in hours rather than days, months or years. Most people who have been victims of crime are fundamentally aware that these images are functionally unrealistic, and yet they and others are still building a case, through viewership for the value and continued desire for such programming. The visual imagery, possible through technology has also challenged the public to learn to stomach, and even covet more and more Technicolor representations of "reality." Where Perry Mason utilized static almost still shot technology and music for most dramatic views, Modern television utilizes almost more than real visual imagery and standards, just short of three dimensional.