TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS Alexanderplatz (1980), Ingmar Bergman’s Bildmakana (2000), or

90 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS Alexanderplatz (1980), Ingmar Bergman’s Bildmakana (2000), or

Fernando Meirelles’ Cidade dos Homens (2002–5) – testimonies to the creative largesse offered by high- budget, high- prestige, auteur TV drama, whether from the UK, Germany, Sweden, or Brazil. Cable networks in the US have always had much lower budgets than their network competitors. The top cable stations are now enjoying huge ratings increases through investing much more in drama than before, beyond the percentage changes for the networks – since 2005, up

8.5 percent for cable and 1.5 percent for network (Stutzman 2008). In the UK, reduced advertising revenue and the desire to extricate themselves from public- service obligations saw ITV and Channel 4 racing away from drama and toward reality in 2009; or specifically, giving up on drama series and investing in one- off or mini- series events (McLean 2009).

A decade after Twin Peaks, the CSI franchise arrived. It is noted for various technical investments – shot on 16 and 35 mm film then transferred to digital video, with helicopter shots abounding, ani- mators creating scenes inside dead bodies through computing, and editors cutting as never before (there are a thousand shots per episode). This provides a rich look that cheaper series cannot match, because they are bounded by studio sets and video- taping. The original CSI was sold to 177 countries, and CSI: Miami was the most popular drama worldwide in 2006. In the US, the last CSI of 2004–5, directed by Quentin Tarantino, drew an audience of over forty million, and it has been a popular legally downloaded or -streamed text since 2006. A British spin- off began in 2009 (Gomery 2008: 342–4; Lury 2005: 45–6; Cohan 2008: 3; Hale 2008; Lotz 2008: 84).

Piety and technology merge in the CSI franchise. During the Presidency of George W. Bush, a regime characterized, inter alia, by

a loathing of secular positivism and inquiry, these immensely popular programs indexed just such forms of knowledge, as induc- tive and deductive processes and criminological norms were applied to new and old technologies to solve problems on a rational basis. Inspired by expert exculpatory testimony in O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, the franchise placed great faith in the possibility of objective truth delivering reliable outcomes through police proce- dures. Attorney- novelist Andew Vachss bemoans that “Jurors think CSI is a documentary.” Criminologists are perturbed by the series’

CONTENT 91

cavalier attitude to the norms of video surveillance, eyewitness testi- mony, and forensic reliability and their impact on the viewing public. Nevertheless, they and science educators love the fact that student applications to forensic- science programs have skyrocketed due to CSI’s influence, which is extended thanks to official websites that inform visitors about forensics. Manufacturers of equipment for crime laboratories shower the shows with product placements to keep their mises- en-scènes up- to-date because they are effective as secret commercials, and the National Science Foundation sponsored

a CSI “forensic web adventure” to accompany a traveling museum exhibit (Mooney 2005; Ott 2007: 166; Turow and Gans- Boriskin 2007: 278; Turow 2004; Goode 2007: 124; Jones and Bangert 2006; Caswell 2008; Vachss 2006: 132; O’Donnell 2007: 215–16, 218; Desmarais et al. 2008; Miller et al. 2008).

24, one of the longest- running spy Yanqui shows, is also screened around the world. In 2009, 100 million people watch it across 236 channels. 24 began in the fateful fall of 2001, right after airplane missiles had struck the north- east of the US. The program binds together two senses of realism in a classical dual verisimilitude that draws both on faithfulness to a genre (espionage) and on narra- tive cues, images, sounds, and editing associated with documenta- ries or news programs. This is in keeping with its central conceit of

a season’s action taking place over the twenty- four hours it takes to watch each set of episodes. 24 has been welcomed as a return of high- quality drama that runs counter to the hegemony of reality television, and even celebrated as a grand piece of existential philo- sophy – the solitary figure against an array of untrustworthy institu- tions. Yet it clearly borrows devices and story- lines from more critically derided genres, such as soap opera, reality, and vigilante action adventure, thanks to its cliffhanger episodic stories and

macho violence – in addition to drawing on the avant garde, cour- tesy of fractured story- lines and points of view. Of course, this is all underwritten by corporate messages; the first episode in 2003 began and ended with a six- minute film promoting a Ford car. And 24’s uniqueness became a formula in 2009, when CBS announced Harper’s Island, an overtly self- destructing series in which it is guaranteed that a central character will die in each of thirteen weeks (Aitkenhead 2009; McPherson 2008; McMahon 2008; Attallah 2006; Miklos 2008; Lotz 2008: 173; Steinberg