but it also refl ects social change. Over the past 50 years television crime drama has shifted
from story-lines in which private detectives or criminal defense lawyers protected their
innocent clients, to programs in which police offi cers apprehend the guilty (Cavender, 2004).
Today, the police are the heroes and lawyers are the villains who impede their quest for justice
(Rapping, 2003).
To a signifi cant degree, the frameworks of understanding that the crime genre circulates
go unnoticed. There are several reasons for this. First, because the producers of television
crime dramas seek to attract a large audience, they tend to offer programs that refl ect
the cultural beliefs and sentiments about crime shared by the audience (Rapping, 2003).
Similarly, crime genre plots are comfortably situated within dominant socio-political
ideologies (Cavender, 2004). Finally, crime dramas provide an understanding of crime and
criminals that is consistent with the criminological theories that are in vogue (Rafter, 2006).
The frameworks of understanding about crime are unnoticed then, because they refl ect
dominant, taken-for-granted assumptions, but they, in turn, perpetuate those assumptions
and, in so doing, perpetuate cultural views about crime and criminals.The crime genre
also circulates cultural images of gender. These images go largely unnoticed because
they also conform to cultural assumptions (Roberts and Inderman, 2005). These cultural
ideals about gender infl uence notions of heroism (Rafter, 2006). In the earlier crime
dramas, the hero was a man, usually macho, and likely to be an iconoclastic loner. Thus,
gendered identity, the nature of work, and the hero’s moral authority were stitched nicely
into the narratives of television crime dramas. But times change and so do the narratives.
Today, women are featured more in crime dramas, and notions of the ideal cop focus less
on macho displays of strength and more on technical competence, what Messerschmidt
(1993) calls techno-masculinity. The hero is less likely to be a loner and more likely to work
in the police organization. These genre changes refl ect larger cultural changes such as
changes in the nature of masculinity (Messerschmidt, 1993), what it means to be a hero
(Cavender, 1999), or the fact that there are more women in the criminal justice workplace
(Martin and Jurik, 2006