The pioneering, incisive, lavishly illustrated survey of noir on television—the first of its kind Noir—as a style, movement, or sensibility—has its roots in hardboiled detective fiction by writers like Chandler and Hammett, and films adapted from their novels were among the first called “film noir” by French cineÌ?astes. But film isn’t the only medium with a taste for a dark story. Hundreds of noir dramas have been produced for television, featuring detectives and femmes fatales, gangsters, and dark deeds, continuing week after week, with a new disruption of the social order. In TV Noir, television historian Allen Glover presents the first complete study of the subject. Deconstructing its key elements with astute analysis, from NBC’s adaptation of Woolrich’s The Black Angel to the anthology programs of the ’40s and ’50s, from the classic period of Dragnet, M Squad, and 77 Sunset Strip to neo-noirs of the ’60s and ’70s including The Fugitive, Kolchak, and Harry O., this is the essential volume on TV noir.

Film noir reflects the fatalistic themes and visual style of hard-boiled novelists and many émigré filmmakers in 1940s and 1950s America, emphasizing crime, alienation, and moral ambiguity. In The Philosophy of TV Noir, Steven M. Sanders and Aeon J. Skoble argue that the legacy of film noir classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Sleep is also found in episodic television from the mid-1950s to the present. In this first-of-its-kind collection, contributors from philosophy, film studies, and literature raise fundamental questions about the human predicament, giving this unique volume its moral resonance and demonstrating why television noir deserves our attention. The introduction traces the development of TV noir and provides an overview and evaluation of the book's thirteen essays, each of which discusses an exemplary TV noir series. Realism, relativism, and integrity are discussed in essays on Dragnet, Naked City, The Fugitive, and Secret Agent. Existentialist themes of authenticity, nihilism, and the search for life's meaning are addressed in essays on Miami Vice, The Sopranos, Carnivale, and 24. The methods of crime scene investigation in The X-Files and CSI are examined, followed by an exploration of autonomy, selfhood, and interpretation in The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Millennium. With this focus on the philosophical dimensions of crime, espionage, and science fiction series, The Philosophy of TV Noir draws out the full implications of film noir and establishes TV noir as an art form in its own right.

This book provides an historical analysis of the TV crime series as a genre, paying close attention not only to the nature of TV dramas themselves, but also to the context of production and reception.

A comprehensive and sustained analysis of the development of storytelling for television Over the past two decades, new technologies, changing viewer practices, and the proliferation of genres and channels has transformed American television. One of the most notable impacts of these shifts is the emergence of highly complex and elaborate forms of serial narrative, resulting in a robust period of formal experimentation and risky programming rarely seen in a medium that is typically viewed as formulaic and convention bound. Complex TV offers a sustained analysis of the poetics of television narrative, focusing on how storytelling has changed in recent years and how viewers make sense of these innovations. Through close analyses of key programs, including The Wire, Lost, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Mad Men the book traces the emergence of this narrative mode, focusing on issues such as viewer comprehension, transmedia storytelling, serial authorship, character change, and cultural evaluation. Developing a television-specific set of narrative theories, Complex TV argues that television is the most vital and important storytelling medium of our time.

Includes six short stories written by masters of mystery and crime fiction, along with a screen adaptation of each story

This book is the first to focus on the role of European television crime drama on the international market. As a genre, the television crime drama has enjoyed a long and successful career, routinely serving as a prism from which to observe the local, national and even transnational issues that are prevalent in society. This extensive volume explores a wide range of countries, from the US to European countries such as Spain, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, Germany, England and Wales, in order to reveal the very currencies that are at work in the global production and circulation of the TV crime drama. The chapters, all written by leading television and crime fiction scholars, provide readings of crime dramas such as the Swedish-Danish The Bridge, the Welsh Hinterland, the Spanish Under Suspicion, the Italian Gomorrah, the German Tatort and the Turkish Cinayet. By examining both European texts and the ‘European-ness’ of various international dramas, this book ultimately demonstrates that transnationalism is at the very core of TV crime drama in Europe and beyond.

This work indexes books, dissertations and journal articles that mention television shows. Memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, and some popular works meant for fans are also indexed. The major focus is on service to researchers in the history of television. Listings are keyed to an annotated bibliography. Appendices include a list of websites; an index of groups or classes of people on television; and a list of programs by genre. Changes from the second edition include more than 300 new shows, airing on a wider variety of networks; 2000-plus references (more than double the second edition); and a large increase in scholarly articles. The book provides access to materials on almost 2300 shows, including groundbreaking ones like All in the Family (almost 200 entries); cult favorites like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (200-plus entries); and a classic franchise, Star Trek (more than 400 entries for all the shows). The shows covered range from the late 1940s to 2010 (The Walking Dead). References range from 1956 to 2013.