Crime TV Series

Giancarlo De Cataldo’s novel Romanzo criminale (2002) has been turned into a film, Romanzo criminale (directed by Michele Placido, 2005), and subsequently a TV series, Romanzo criminale La serie 1 e 2 (directed by Stefano Sollima, 2008-2010). Like the novel, the film and the TV series are inspired by the story of the Banda della Magliana, a criminal gang that terrorised Rome in the 1970s and 1980s, and frame the crime story in the political and social context of the time. This article concentrates on the representation of the 1980 terrorist attack known as la strage di Bologna that features in both. I argue that, following Placido’s controversial graphic representation of the strage and its victims, Sollima consciously avoided creating the possibility for what Burgoyne calls a “prosthetic” experience (2009: 139) by which the audience might understand and remediate this traumatic event through the emotions of one character. The series (in which graphic violence is frequent and functi...

In den vergangenen Jahren hat sich die wissenschaftliche Forschung dem noch recht jungen Phänomen der Second-Screen-Nutzung bereits intensiv gewidmet. Die Frage nach den konkreten Praktiken der Second-Screen-Nutzung, also wie mit den zwei Bildschirmen tatsächlich umgegangen wird, ist dabei bisher noch nicht näher untersucht worden. Für eine solche Forschungsperspektive wirbt dieser Beitrag und bietet einen konzeptionellen Rahmen für eine differenzierte Beobachtung und Beschreibung solcher Praktiken an. Dazu wird auf der Grundlage der bisher vorhandenen Literatur zunächst eine Arbeitsdefinition für Second-Screen-Nutzung entwickelt und aus verschiedenen Ansätzen der Mediennutzungs- und Rezeptionsforschung zentrale Aspekte für dessen Untersuchung herausgearbeitet. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden schließlich verschiedene Praktiken der Second-Screen-Nutzung anhand von Beobachtungen aus einer Studie zur Twitter-Nutzung während der ARD-Krimiserie „Tatort“ beispielhaft beschrieben und Vorschläge für deren weitere Untersuchung unterbreitet.

Appendice della tesi di laurea magistrale "Il nuovo mondo-Metodo di studio per le serie tv" di Andrea Martina (Università del Salento).

Com'è nata Breaking Bad? Perché oggi è considerato uno dei titoli fondamentali delle narrazioni seriali?
L'analisi delle serie creata da Vince Gillian usando il modello di studio di "LOST- L'Osservatorio delle Serie Televisive" dell'Università del Salento: dati generali, contenuti, struttura episodi, personaggi, lingua e linguaggio

Il capitolo analizza le action heroines, figure femminili al centro di narrative action, che, a partire dagli anni '80, fanno la loro comparsa – e mietono successi - in generi e prodotti tradizionalmente connotati come maschili (fantascienza, horror, thriller, avventura, western), nelle diverse ri-mediazioni che hanno conosciuto nel tempo, tra fumetti e videogiochi. L’ipotesi sostenuta è che il repertorio dei generi action si sia nel tempo dotato di anticorpi, ovvero di dispositivi che hanno l’effetto di stemperare, a volte persino neutralizzare, la carica potenzialmente sovversiva delle loro protagoniste. Si compie dunque una ricognizione di tali dispositivi attraverso esempi tratti dalla tradizione cinematografica Hollywoodiana, dalla TV statunitense e soprattutto dalla fiction televisiva poliziesca, straniera e italiana: la vocazione generalista, l’ambientazione nella realtà sociale contemporanea e la relativa novità della presenza femminile tra le forze dell’ordine fanno del crime drama un terreno particolarmente fertile per analizzare la politica di rappresentazione di genere. L'apparato teorico-concettuale utilizzato per l’analisi proviene dalle due principali tradizioni all'interno dei Feminist Media Studies: la Feminist Film Theory e il Feminist Culturalist Television Criticism, che, pur nella diversità di impostazione, sono accomunate da una prospettiva costruttivista e forniscono utili strumenti per analizzare le costruzioni discorsive del femminile e del maschile proposte dai media.

Mediale Angebote bieten den Menschen symbolisches Material zur Aushandlung von gemeinschaftlich geteilten Bedeutungen sowie zur Entwicklung eigener Sichtweisen und Einstellungen gegenüber Migranten und Migration. Dies gilt nicht nur für die aktuelle Berichterstattung in Presse und Fernsehen, sondern auch für Unterhaltungsangebote und fiktionale Sendungen. Am Beispiel der Krimireihe Tatort wird im Folgenden gezeigt, wie Serien und Filme die Auseinandersetzung mit Migration fördern und damit zu Integration beitragen können.

This book has three main aims: (I) to determine the usefulness of English phrasal verbs for L2 learners based on their frequency of occurrence; (II) to offer a comparative exploration of the most common phrasal verbs between spoken American and British English across the subgenre of television crime dramas, and (III) to show the crucial role that adverbial particles play in decoding the meaning of phrasal verbs.

German (scroll down for English): Unter Berücksichtigung der Bedingungen für Integration und der Merkmale fiktionaler Fernsehinhalte fragt der Beitrag nach Möglichkeiten von Serien und Filmen, positiv auf den Integrationsprozess zu wirken. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird mit Hilfe eines Überblicks über sämtliche Tatort-Folgen zum Thema Migration sowie durch qualitative Inhaltsanalysen ausgewählter Episoden die Thematisierung von Migration in der Krimireihe Tatort beleuchtet.
Dabei lässt sich feststellen, dass Einwanderung insbesondere seit Ende der 80er Jahre erhebliche Bedeutung zukommt. Eine wesentliche Rolle spielen dabei die Sendeanstalten WDR, NDR und BR. Die fünf analysierten Tatort-Filme beleuchten das Thema Migration vielseitig, distanzieren sich deutlich von Ausländerfeindlichkeit und zeigen Beispiele für konfliktfreies Zusammenlebens auf. Vereinzelt werden auch Kriterien für gesellschaftliche Zugehörigkeit hinterfragt. Obwohl Migrantenfiguren durchweg eher positive Eigenschaften aufweisen, werden stereotype Vorstellungen zum Teil bestärkt; darüber hinaus dominieren die deutschen Figuren maßgeblich die Erzählperspektive.

English: Considering the conditions for integration as well as the characteristics of fictional television contents this article asks for potentials of films and series to take a positive effect on the integration process. Against this background the representation of migration in the serial Tatort is explored by means of an overview of all Tatort productions on this topic and a qualitative content analyse of selected episodes.
The results show that migration is of big importance for Tatort, especially since the end of the 80s. Thereby the broadcasting stations WDR, NDR and BR play a prominent role. The five selected Tatort films illustrate the topic multifarious, criticise xenophobic attitudes and behaviour and present examples for amicable ways of interacting with each other. Criteria for national and social affiliation are questioned in two films. Although migrants are mostly characterised in a positive manner, they still assure stereotype images to some extent; moreover German characters dominate the perspective of the films.

Following the deregulation of the Greek television sector in 1989, as well as its influence on the production of new television series and serials during the next decade, television crime fiction appeared in the scheduling agenda of the newborn private stations. Tmima Ithon/Vice Squad (1992-1995, ΑΝΤ1) was an early example of such a trend, introducing a fresh perspective on how law enforcement and marginalized subjectivities could be represented onscreen. By examining the series’ place within the genre of television crime fiction along with its historical and social context, this article offers a space of reconsideration of the role and function of the genre in Greece. Furthermore, through quantitative and qualitative analysis, it explores the way social outcasts are represented, in relation to general perceptions of social categories and the rapidly shifting sociocultural environment of the 1990s, when postmodern forces were attempting a reconstruction of what was until then perceived as solid and stable.

This chapter analyzes the TV series La Piovra, allowing for the exploration of the ways in which Italian crime drama on television has changed as a result of the influence of US programs. The original concept of the program is illustrated, showing how social realism and the aesthetic values of Neotelevisione coexisted in it.  It is then argued that, as the series progressed, it increasingly departed from ‘social melodrama’  - as it was labeled – and drew closer to the U.S. serials. At first sight, the main outcomes were the portray of Italian society becoming more superficial and apolitical; storylines being stuffed with spectacular actions and a great component of romance; civic values being replaced by private concerns as the ultimate reasons for the protagonist's heroism and involvement in the struggle against Mafia. The main element of originality of this work consists in the attempt to analyze the transformation process of La Piovra using the analytical categories provided by studies on globalization and cultural adaptations of media contents. In particularly, I used the notion of ‘transculturalization’ Chan and Ma, 2002) to claim that La Piovra’s borrowings from US police series, far from being simply transplanted, were actively recontextualized in a way that they could appeal to the national audience. Recontextualizing meant turning the tough and unscrupulous ‘lonely avenger’ found in US action and police series in a tragic hero, like Cattani, conscious of being a looser but still determined.  The reason for such an adaptation was to provide a portray of the struggle between the forces of the law and Mafia likely to exorcise the audience’s fears without giving up the program’s claim for social realism.

Il lavoro indaga l’articolazione del rapporto fra valori della sfera pubblica e valori della sfera privata nelle narrative della fiction poliziesca italiana. L’ipotesi di ricerca è che l’accento sulle relazioni interpersonali e familiari, tratto distintivo delle produzioni italiane, umanizzando i tutori della legge e avvicinandoli al cittadino/spettatore può costituire un importante strumento per promuovere valori civili, legalità, senso delle istituzioni. La cornice teorica di riferimento è rappresentata dagli studi sulla ‘sfera pubblica culturale’ (McGuigan 2005) e più in genere dalle elaborazioni che in anni recenti hanno individuato nell'attenzione alle responsabilità sociali e culturali della comunicazione la via per rinnovare e ri-politicizzare il progetto dei Cultural Studies (Hermes, Dahlgren 2006). Il corpus della ricerca è costituito da cinque serie televisive poliziesche (Distretto di Polizia, Canale 5; RIS Delitti imperfetti, Canale 5; La Squadra, Raitre; La Omicidi, Raidue, Il Capitano, Raidue), di cui sono stati esaminati gli episodi della stagione 2006-07 attraverso gli strumenti dell’analisi del discorso (Fairclough 1995). I risultati dell’analisi smentiscono l’ipotesi di partenza e mostrano che l’universo morale delle serie esaminate è pervaso da una sorta di familismo ‘amorale’: il loro discorso si regge sulla sistematica ‘privatizzazione’ dell’etica, dei valori e delle pratiche professionali dei protagonisti, simili a giustizieri privati più che a rappresentanti delle istituzioni.

Brief summary in English: This article provides a detailed analysis and interpretation of the fourth episode of the BBC series Life on Mars (2006-2007). It examines how, on the one hand, certain visuals in the episode refer to the episode's theme - the dichotomy of good and evil - and tie into the series' tendency to utilise nostalgia to naturalise dichotomies such as masculine versus feminine. On the other hand, visual/aural clues are shown to also ultimately hint at these supposed dichotomies being, in fact, blurred.

My contribution illustrates the results of a research carried on on 5 TV crime series produced and broadcast by the Italian TV over the last 9 years (3 series were created by Silvio Berlusconi's private-owned network Mediaset, and 2 by the public-owned broadcast RAI). All of them obtained very high rating figures and some were seen to built up a cult-following. The specific object of my analysis is the articulation, within the selected programmes' symbolic order, of values and issues pertaining, respectively, to the public and private sphere.
The public/private relationship is at the heart of the concept of a “cultural public sphere” (McGuigan 2005), which was developed in response to the critics, made since the '90s onwards, to the the failure of Cultural Studies as a political project originally intended to analyse the relationship between culture and power (see Morris 1992; Bennett 1992; Golding, Ferguson 1997). In order for Cultural and Media Studies to succeed as politically relevant fields of inquiry, it is argued, great attention should be payed to the social and cultural responsibility of communication, and to its relationship to public sphere, citizens participation and democracy (Dahlgren 1995; Hard 1997; Livingstone 1998; Hermes, Dahlgren 2006). 
My research hypothesis is that Italian TV crime drama offers a privileged terrain in order to explore the public/private interplay and, therefore, the functioning of the cultural public sphere, because: a) in general, crime series' narrative universe is likely to articulate issues and values of the public sphere; b) compared to US and other European countries' “cop shows”, Italian crime series, traditionally, are characterized by the great attention payed to the representation of the characters' private and family life. According to Milly Buonanno (2002), this can be understood as a discoursive strategy intended to humanize police officers, to draw them closer to the spectators/citizens and to socially legitimate the function of institutions.
By means of discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995; Thornham 2005) and narrative analysis (Allrath, Gymnich 2006) of all the episodes from the latest series (2006-07, 2007-08) of each programme in my corpus, I came up with different conclusions: these series, too, are characterized by the emphasis on private life/values/issues as major thematic preoccupations; though, such an emphasis can no longer be considered as instrumental to the production of a discourse prompting civic/public values. The very positive image of institutions that the 5 series attempt to draw is weakened, almost invalidated, by their narrative and ideological working, which can be described as the privatisation of professional culture, values and practices. This 'privatisation' is particularly stressed in the 3 series created by Mediaset: more than acting in the name of justice, their policemen and detectives appear to thirst for personal revenge; also, their efficient team-work seems to derive more from the ethos of (Edward Banfield's) “familism” than from a shared professional ethics and sense of institutions. No conflict of interest, therefore, in Italian TV crime series: the defense of the social interest (justice, social order, safety etc.) simply coincides with that of particularistic, even idiosyncratic interests.
In conclusion, the cultural public sphere produced in and through these programmes is not a viable one: it still grounds on the public/private hierarchical relation criticized about the classic, Habermasian public sphere (Fraser 1992), but with a significant difference: here the hierarchy appears to be reversed, with the private dimension as the major/exclusive site of investment, at the expenses of the professional - and therefore public - one.

This article examines the complex relationship between Sherlock (BBC, 2010–present) and the forensic crime drama genre category. Tracing the televisual genre linkages that Sherlock articulates to previous programmes such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–2015), Bones (Fox, 2005–present) and Numb3rs (CBS, 2005–2010), it specifically studies the show’s need to distinguish itself within a television landscape oversaturated with forensic scientists. Discussing Sherlock’s construction of the deductive method of investigation and genre subversive portrayal of the figure of the modern forensic expert, as well as its figuration of the consulting detective as an establishment watchdog, I conclude that this is a ‘post-CSI’ crime drama that stages a nostalgic resurrection of a pre-forensics cerebral gentleman detective.

ABSTRACT ITA: Nelle serie televisive tradizionali il paesaggio ha la funzione di uno sfondo generico per i personaggi, ma in serie più recenti, in quella che è stata definita una complessa struttura narrativa, spazio e paesaggio, o più tecnicamente, “location”, hanno un ruolo attivo nella narrazione delle storie televisive. Recentemente, sia nei film studies sia nei TV studies, è cresciuto  un  interesse maggiore  per  questo  problema  e  sono  nati  studi  sulle  location (Waade-Lynch  2017).  I  luoghi  sono  diventati  fondamentali  per  comprendere  la narrazione  stessa,  possono  essere  considerati  elementi  attivi  che  possono  cambiare  lo sviluppo  di  storie  ed  eventi,  masoprattutto,  essi  possono  cambiare  la  percezione  della narrazione  della  storia  da  parte  del  pubblico.  Il  New  Jersey  di The  Sopranos,  la  città  di Baltimora  in The  Wire,  Albuquerque  per BreakingBad,  sono  elementi  centrali  per  la comprensione  di  queste  serie.  Questi  paesaggi  sono  più  che  sfondi,  ci  dicono  qualcosa sulla  storia.  Come  succede?  In  che  modo  i  luoghi  interagiscono  con  le  azioni  dei personaggi,  la  trama  narrativa  e  i  temi  principali  presentati  al  punto  di  cambiare  i  loro significati?

ABSTRACT ENG: In  traditional  TV  series  landscape  has  the  function  of  a  generic  background for characters, but in more recent series, in what has been defined as a complex narrative structure,  space  and  landscape,  or  more  technically,  location,  have  an  active  role  in  thenarration of TV stories. Recently both in Film Studies and TV Studies a major interest for this  issue  has  grown  and  location  studies  have  born  (Waade-Lynch  2017).  Place  have become  fundamental  to  understand  narration  itself,  they  can  be  considered  as  active elements which can change the development of stories and events, but above all, places can  change  the  audience’s  perception  of  the  story’s  narration.  The  New  Jersey  of  The Sopranos,  the  city  of  Baltimora  in  The  Wire,  Albuquerque  for  Breaking  Bad,  are  central elements  for  the  understanding  of  these  series.  These  landscapes  are  more  than backgrounds,  they  tell  us  something  about  the  story.  How  does  this  happen?  How  do places  interact  with  characters’  actions,  the  narrative  plot  and  the  main  themes presented to the point of changing their meanings?

PAROLE CHIAVE: narratologia; serie televisive; location studies; cronotopo.

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its sixth conference, which will be held in Italy. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous five successful conferences, Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre incorporates elements of real-life cases and, in turn, influences society by conveying thought-provoking ideas of deviance, criminal activity, investigation and punishment. Since its inception, the genre has drawn inspiration from sensational crime reports. In early nineteenth-century Britain, for example, Newgate novels largely drew on the biographies of famous bandits, while penny dreadfuls popularized the exploits of criminals and detectives to appeal the taste for horror and transgression of their target audience. In similar ways, notorious cases widely reported in the mid-Victorian press, such as the Road Murder (1860) or the Madeleine Smith trial (1857), exerted a significant influence on the imagination of mid-to late-Victorian novelists, including early practitioners of the sensation genre who laid the premises for the creation of detective fiction. In other cases, criminal actions were triggered by literary texts or turned into appealing fictions by journalists. Suffice it to consider the sensation created by Jack the Ripper's murders in late-Victorian Britain or the twentieth-century recent cases of murders committed by imitators of criminals and serial killers featured in novels like A ClockWork Orange (1962), The Collector (1963), Rage (1977), and American Psycho (1991). In more recent times, the interaction between reality and other media (TV series, films, computer games, websites, chats, etc.) has raised the question of how crime continues to glamorize perturbing, blood-chilling stories of law-breaking and law-enforcement. In addition to exploring these complex relations between facts and fictions, the conference will focus on the metamorphoses of crime across media, as well as cultural and critical boundaries. Speakers are invited to explore the crossing of forms and themes, and to ascertain the extent to which canonized definitions suit the extreme volatility of a genre that challenges categorization. From an ideological viewpoint, moreover, crime fiction has proved to be highly metamorphic, as it has been variously used to challenge, reinforce or simply interrogate ideas of 'law and order'. The enduring appeal of the genre is also due to its openness to historical and cultural movements – such as feminism, gender studies, queer politics, postmodernism – as well as to concepts drawn from specific fields of knowledge, such as sociology and psychology. Similarly relevant to the 'metamorphoses of crime' are cultural exchanges among remote areas of the world, which add new perspectives to the genre's representation of customs and ethnical issues. Scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing are invited to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime, from the early modern to the present day. Topics may include, but are not restricted to: • True Crime, Fictional Crime

This paper presents the first results of a work in progress on violence, gender
identity and media representations. The research takes two assumptions as its starting
points: 1) “our understanding of violence and gender are absolutely interlinked” (Boyle
2005), and 2) the media contribute to shape both notions. The representations of violence
found in TV series, advertising, movies, etc. draw on and at the same time reinforce
precise visions of femininity and masculinity; vice versa, the gender role models diffused
by the media contain precise ‘prescriptions’ on how men and women should relate to
violence.
The object of the paper is the depiction of violent women – both criminals and police
officers - in contemporary television series that are produced in different countries and
are based on strong female leads. Contributions developed in the framework of Feminist
Film Theory and Feminist Culturalist Criticism have highlighted the wide range of
textual strategies deployed by popular culture’s narratives in order to mitigate the impact
of female violence – and of female deviance more in general – on the symbolic order (to
name but a few: Brown 2015; Schubart, 2007; Neroni, 2005; Inness, 2004).
My concern here is with sexuality: I aim to show that it plays a key role in the discursive
production, the stigmatization (and, often, symbolic neutralization) of violent women.
Sexuality is the domain in which: 1) the (anti)heroine’s deviant nature is first established
(she has a non-normative sexual orientation; she violates traditional rules of sexual
conduct for women, etc.); 2) the reason behind her violence/her choice to be a cop is
motivated (for example, the rape-revenge motive); 3) she is either normalized (e.g. by
emphasizing her sexual appeal; by means of pregnancy or other strategies re-locating her
with an essentialist vision of womanhood) or punished.
I will show that all these tropes are well-entrenched in TV storytelling and are able to
‘migrate’ across genres and countries: by means of discourse analysis, I will first
highlight their presence and analyze their ideological functioning in the context of U.S.
TV series (Veronica Mars, 2004-2007; Weeds, 2005-2012; Orange is the New Black,
2013-; True Detective, 2014-); subsequently, I will take European productions into
account: the use of sexuality as a means of containing the subversive potential of female
violence is prominent in Italian crime dramas; however, ‘traces’ of this device can also be
found in the construction of the innovative cops and mob leaders of recent French and
UK TV series (e. g. Engrenages (Spiral), 2005-; Mafiosa, 2006-2014; The Fall, 2013-),
and even in Nordic noirs’ anticonventional female detectives (e. g. The Killing, 2007-
2012; The Bridge, 2011-). German and Spain productions are currently under analysis.
My conclusive remarks will concern two aspects of the politics of representation of
violent women that informs most TV series: the implication of this politics in terms of
gender identity construction and 2) the way this politics is reconfigured according to
different geographical, social, cultural and political contexts.

Christina Ortner hat untersucht, welche Spuren Migranten in Tatort-Folgen hinterlassen. Dabei erstaunt nicht nur die seit 1991 deutlich steigende Quantität, sondern vor allem die Vielfalt der angesprochenen Aspekte und die sehr unterschiedliche Herangehensweise an die Problematik. Sie bietet die Möglichkeit, den Integrationsprozess insgesamt zu befördern.

Eigentlich will Bengi sich nur um ihre kleine Schwester kümmern. Illegal kehrt die ausgewiesene Türkin deshalb nach Deutschland zurück. Zufällig erwischt sie jedoch einen Mörder auf frischer Tat. Als die Polizeifahnder im Trüben fischen, hilft ihnen die Illegale und muss zum Dank endgültig das Land verlassen…Menschen, Schicksale, Missstände: im Tatort der ARD werden sie wie in der Episode „In der Falle“ immer wieder aufgegriffen. Auch Migranten und ihre Lebenssituation spielen zunehmend eine Rolle in fiktionalen TV-Formaten. Schließlich leben mehr als sieben Millionen Menschen ohne deutschen Pass in Deutschland. Zukünftig werden noch mehr kommen.Da gerade Kriminalfilme möglichst realitätsnah an der Gegenwart und der Alltagssituation der Zuschauer bleiben wollen, wird in ihnen Migration mit all ihren Facetten vermehrt aufgegriffen. Damit spiegeln die Programme ebenso das Bild der Gesellschaft, wie sie andererseits Meinungsbilder prägen. Flaggschiff der Kriminalreihen ist der Tatort, den sonntags oft 10 Millionen Menschen sehen.

This article intends to understand the significance of depicting the Ottoman past in Turkish TV dramas by focusing on Filinta [Flintlock] (2014–2016), a hybrid of historical drama and police procedural that is set in the second half of the 19th century in the Ottoman Empire. On the one hand, the article examines the influence of the Ottoman heritage in localising the police procedural genre in Filinta by exploring various kinds of local, cultural and historical connections. On the other hand, it investigates the appeal of using the Ottoman markers in increasing the popularity of the series in the global television market.

This paper is situated at the crossroad of Critical Television Studies and Feminist Media Studies and explores the representation of violence in popular female-led crime shows that have been produced in different countries over the last ten years. The shows considered here are Forbrydelsen/The Killing (Denmark, DR1, 2007-2012), The Fall (UK/Ireland, BBC, 2013-2016), Non Uccidere/Do not Kill (Italy, RAI3, 2015-2018) and True Detective 2 (USA, HBO, 2015).
I contend that these programmes are paradigmatic of the new politics of representation of gendered violence which is increasingly found in contemporary ‘peak TV’ series (Lotz, 2018). Such novelty has its kernel in the relationship between violence and pleasure and concerns both male violence against women and female violence against men.
All the programmes in the corpus, examined through discourse analysis, set themselves at a distance from the fetishising aesthetic (defined as ‘fleshography’, Pinedo 1997; ‘autoptic vision’, Tait 2006; ‘cadaverization’, Clarke Dillman 2014) that has been made pervasive in contemporary crime series as well as in most popular culture forms, by the speeding up of various media flows (Parikka 2015). In these series, specific formal devices are used in order to ‘deny’ scopophiliac pleasure, avoiding any exploitation of violence against women without sanitizing or worse, merely removing it (which would compromise the necessary visibility of gender violence as a public issue, Higgin, Silver 1991).
The representation of the heroines’ violent acting is ground-breaking too: instead of aligning to that commonly found in liberal narratives of equality and female empowerment (Shepherd 2012), it appears to be moulded to the radical feminism perspective. Three out of four of the series rework the widely criticized ‘victim-turned-avenger’ trope (Clover 1992) in a way that prevents the normalisation of female violence. At the same time, its discoursive and narrative framing enables a complex aesthetic experience: far from being a ‘guilty pleasure’ (O’Neill, Seal 2012), what is offered to the viewers potentially represents a weapon against rape culture and an experience of ‘physical feminism’ (De Welde 2012).

This article examines discourses on identity and bodily plasticity in the forensic crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–). It argues that CSI engages with the same cultural debates as makeover reality TV, but in ways that articulate a number of oppositional perspectives on self-transformation practices governed by the programme' s investment in an essentialist and determinist understanding of genetics. The article traces CSI's reconfi guration of the motif of disguise and inverted use of generic tropes from makeover reality TV, as well as its tendency to worry about the increased possibilities for biomedical alterations of our bodies. It concludes that the programme problematises selftransformation practices as a new type of' identity crime' .