media magazine article

Partners in Crime: Collaboration in Television Crime Drama

Lucas Johnson considers the significance of the collaborative partnership in TV crime drama in terms of narrative structure, representations of social class and ideologies of law and order.

Collaboration has been a notable feature of crime drama narratives throughout the history of the genre. From American cop shows such as Starsky & Hutch, and Miami Vice, to British crime dramas such as Inspector Morse, Lewis, Dalziel and Pascoe, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, partnerships between investigators, sleuths, detectives or police officers have long been one of the genre's key conventions.

In many cases, there is an important narrative reason for this. For example, it is often suggested that sidekicks such as Dr. Watson, who acts as assistant to Sherlock Holmes, or Sergeant Lewis, who performs a similar role in Inspector Morse, effectively function as audience surrogates, asking questions that enable the methods and deductive reasoning of their investigative partners to be explained and revealed for the benefit of the audience.

However, this is not the only narrative function that the crime drama partnership performs; such partnerships also play an important role in the construction and exploration of binary oppositions. It is these oppositions, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss, that provide narratives with their meaning and cultural significance.

Exploring social difference

Whilst the binary opposition of crime/criminal versus law/investigator is perhaps the defining convention of crime drama, partnerships between detectives or investigators frequently enable other differences and oppositions to be explored. For example, alongside the crimes that are investigated at the diegetic level of the text by the detective-protagonists of Inspector Morse and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, these dramas also investigate issues of social and cultural difference, using the partnership between the DIs and their sergeants as the vehicle for these investigations. So, whilst Inspector Morse is constructed as an upper-middle-class, Oxford-educated opera-lover, and Inspector Lynley, as the Eighth Earl of Asherton, is a member of the British aristocracy, these characters are set in binary opposition to their working-class sergeants, Robbie Lewis and Barbara Havers.

These partnerships therefore serve to construct and articulate particular myths about social class. As Fiske (1987: 131-2) points out:

For Lévi-Strauss myth is an anxiety-reducing mechanism that deals with irresolvable contradictions in a culture and provides imaginative ways of living with them. These contradictions are usually expressed in terms of binary oppositions.

In this way, the partnerships between characters of different social classes that are at the heart of both Inspector Morse and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries can be seen as 'anxiety-reducing mechanisms' which, through the myths that they construct, provide imaginative ways of dealing with the complex nature of class relations in British society.

Gene, Sam and Alex - cultural contradictions

This use of the crime drama partnership as a means of negotiating certain cultural tensions or contradictions is also apparent in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. Here, the central conflict or opposition is between the cultural attitudes and policing methods of different eras. The construction of this binary opposition is facilitated by the time-travel narrative that the two programmes adopt, as DCI Sam Tyler is transported from the present-day back to the 1970s in Life on Mars, whilst DI Alex Drake finds herself back in the 1980s in Ashes to Ashes. Each character forges an unlikely partnership with DCI Gene Hunt, who, as a stereotypical old-style 'tough guy' cop, is the antithesis of the politically correct world from which Tyler and Drake have come. John Yorke, the BBC's Controller of Continuing Drama Series and Head of Independent Drama, highlights the significance of the binary oppositions that are played out through the partnerships in these crime dramas, as he discusses Life on Mars. According to Yorke:

The beauty of Life on Mars is that each week it concentrates on catching criminals through two completely opposing styles of policing. We put a modern DI bang in the world of the old school copper and so explore two totally foreign worlds. Sam's both repelled and fascinated by this prehistoric world, and the drama lies in how he tries to accommodate himself to life on a completely different planet.

The simultaneous repulsion and fascination that Sam feels is, in many respects, analogous to the way in which the audience is positioned in relation both to this 'prehistoric world' generally, and, more particularly, to the character who is its very embodiment - Gene Hunt. Whilst Hunt's brutality and political incorrectness do not sit comfortably with today's dominant social values, he is clearly constructed as a highly charismatic and appealing character. Indeed, for all the corruption and inefficiency that is shown to characterise the 1970s world that Sam finds himself in, it is consistently represented as a more attractive world than that of the present-day. This is carefully emphasised through the mise-en-scène, which sets the bureaucratic and clinical nature of the modern-day police station in clear binary opposition to the 1970s police station - a station which, with its dartboard and trophies, more closely resembles a pub saloon. The cigarette smoke which hangs over the workspace that Hunt and his team of officers occupy effectively establishes a nostalgic haze through which the audience is invited to view this 'other' world. Here the crime drama partnership can again be seen as a way of dealing with irresolvable cultural contradictions, negotiating between duty and desire, simultaneously acknowledging the need to follow procedure, as well as the attraction of breaking the rules, and mediating between the politically correct and the politically incorrect. Sam's journey thus assumes the significance of cultural myth, as, whilst recognising the suspect nature of Gene Hunt's ideological values, he is ultimately able to accommodate himself to the 'other' world he finds himself in. In so doing, he provides a useful point of identification for the audience, enabling us to play out our own conflicting desires for the two different worlds that these characters represent.

Negotiating past and present

The negotiations between past and present that are played out through Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes are also a significant feature of the recent BBC series, Sherlock, written by Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss. Whereas the protagonists of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes are dispatched from the present back into the past, Sherlock takes Conan Doyle's Victorian detective on the opposite journey, re-imagining him as a modern-day character. Therefore, whilst Sam Tyler has to accommodate himself to a world without the sophisticated technology that he has been accustomed to as a modern-day detective, Moffatt and Gatiss' Sherlock fully embraces the 21st-century world of text-messaging and Google, whilst retaining the propensity for brilliant deductive reasoning that has traditionally been the character's trademark. The programme itself also makes use of an array of innovative and unconventional devices to narrate the stories. At one point, when Holmes is studying a crime scene, a series of captions appears on the screen, revealing what he is thinking. Whilst Watson is still used to some degree as a means of revealing to the audience the inner workings of Holmes' mind, his function within the partnership is therefore not limited to this role as it has been in some previous adaptations. This shift in the dynamic of the partnership enables the personal relationship between Holmes and Watson to be more fully developed and explored, sometimes for comic effect, as in the scenes in which Holmes and Watson are mistaken for a couple, first by their landlady and later on by a waiter. However, whilst these scenes are clearly intended to be humorous, the significance of the humour lies in the way in which the meaning of Conan-Doyle's precursor text has been changed or subverted in the process of adaptation. Again, what we are seeing in these scenes is a negotiation between past and present - a negotiation between the cultural norms and values of different eras. The playful and highly reflexive way in which Moffatt and Gatiss update Conan-Doyle's detective fiction would seem to align them with a postmodern aesthetic, in the same way that the parodic intertextual references to seventies and eighties crime dramas in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes can be seen as a postmodern strategy for dealing with a cliché-riddled genre. Whilst the conventional crime drama has often solicited the active participation of the audience by inviting them to try to solve the crime before the investigator within the text, postmodern crime dramas such as Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes and Sherlock also invite the audience to collaborate in the meaning of the text on another narrative level. In recognising and taking pleasure in the intertextuality of these texts, and their parodying and subversion of source materials, the audience too becomes a 'partner in crime'. It is this ability to make the audience active participants in the production of textual meaning that gives the contemporary crime drama its continuing cultural power.

My points:

This article states that partnerships are a regular element in crime dramas, which can create the opportunity for binary opposites to be explored within the narrative, such as social differences or opposing working morals. The partnership can also be developed into a personal relationship, sometimes for comic effect, like in 'Sherlock', but also welcomes the audience in to feel apart of the narrative.