It’s hard to image the 1950s producing a show as morally ambiguous as Breaking Bad, for example, but it’s equally hard to imagine the 2000s producing a version of the Sweeney that a hadn’t been put through a modern-day lens, even if it’s period set like Life on Mars.
Each generation produces a slew of crime-based television that reflects the narratives prevalent in that society at that time, but how accurate are they in terms of portraying personal experience, systems and processes or the wider context of the criminal justice system?
To seek the answer to this, and to celebrate the latest run of our course Crime, Justice and Society, we turned to the School of Law and made our academics binge a box set or two as they hunted for that most elusive of television goals - authenticity.
When it comes to crime shows with scope and ambition, few would argue against David Simon’s The Wire being the mack-daddy of them all. Across five seasons and six years, the Wire explored all hierarchies of the criminal justice system in Baltimore. From dime-bag dealers to the highest echelons of political office, the Wire told the deeply personal stories of those living within the shadow of law enforcement but also managed to look at how the city operates as a whole.
In this video, Dr Matthew Bacon and Dr Tara Lai Quinlan take a fresh look at what the show can teach us in 2017.