Rethinking Detection: Alternative Methods of Detection

Abstract

Coming out of the forensic drama cycle and the ‘quality TV’ of the early 2000s, a small number of dramas are developing new ways to think about the problem of how to access ‘truth’. This does not necessarily mean that they offer suggestions for alternative methods of detection — a factor that may be related to their indebtedness to a postmodern tradition, which denies singular ‘grand narratives’. But they offer up new ways of how to think about ‘truth-finding’. At the centre of this lies the deconstruction of one of the last remaining binaries of the detective genre: the oppositional construction of rational-scientific and irrational-subjective methods of detection. A range of examples of this have already been considered in Chapter 2 while discussing dramas featuring two-person detective teams of opposite genders. The focus here lies on the different ways of deconstructing this binary enough to enable a new way of thinking about ways to access and attain ‘truth’. This may bring with it ways of resolving the problem with which the forensic drama cycle is equally concerned with as 24 and The Shield: what to do when postmodern deconstruction leaves us without a clearly outlined ‘code’. The forensic drama’s solution, to look backward, is anachronistic, but other dramas mostly seem to resign in the face of this uncertainty.