Watching Crime Drama and Embodying Cultural Capital in the Postnetwork Era

• In Event: Reading Race, Gender, Class, and Identity

Abstract

This article uses qualitative audience research to explore the ways in which American viewers have responded to television’s increasing cultural status. Based on in-depth interviews with thirty-one middle-class respondents, the findings indicate that significance of this television cultural legitimation varies with, but is not determined by, social location. Viewers with higher levels of educational attainment and occupational status frequently invoke the discourses of legitimation that connect television to legitimated cultural forms, celebrate textual features like narrative complexity, and appreciate the moral ambiguity of anti-heroic drama. Viewers with less education and lower occupational status frequently conceptualize television as a bad cultural object, evaluate drama through subjective frameworks, and do not find anti-heroic characters to be a source of conflicted moral allegiance. These findings support the growing body of literature arguing that the performance of distinction is increasingly identified with particular embodied practices rather than legitimated cultural objects.

Author

• Michael L. Wayne, Ben-Gurion U of the Negev