Representation refers to how the media represent reality on TV. The media industry try to represent everyday life on TV by making us feel as if it is real life. One good way of doing this is using stereotypes this is because the audience can instantly relate and understand what the character roles are and therefore no huge setting or introduction of character is required. Common Stereotypes that cab be easy related to are; race, ethnicity, gender, class.
By looking at the two TV Drama’s ‘The Wire’ and ‘A Touch of Frost, it is evident that ‘law’ can be represented very differently in Crime/Detective Drama’s.
In TV Drama’s police offers and detectives are normally seen to be powerful figures that have a authoritative presence when seen. However in both touch of frost and the wire they are not seen as this.
In Touch of Frost the detective is almost as if in disguise, he is just an old man who wears nothing that scientifically indentifies his role. But it can be argued that the man is a detective and not a cop so this can be related to in everyday life because in order for the detectives to catch the murderers, robbers etc sometimes they are required to go undercover by going in disguise.
In The Wire the detective is just having a normal conversation with a friend of the person who died. At first it is even hard to realise that he is the detective. Here it shows law to be and the police force are not shown to be dominant and aggressive like some people belive.
On the other hand, in Touch of frost, despite the detective not wearing uniform, the police officers clearly where ‘police uniform’ and are seen to be very aggressive towards the two supposedly bad guys when they jump out from the van and are cuffing them.
In Wire the crime scene is different to the crime scenes in England. The body is left on the open road and then forensics used to look for clues.
In touch of frost we see a girl to be one of the main police officers as the detective goes straight to her when he arrives at the scene. This helps show the audience Law and how things have changed from the past and now girls can also now be head police officers.
In wire there are no girl officers seen however it is just the opening and hardly any characters are shown so it is not easy to say.
The intro of the wire seems to be rather destructive to the opening, showing several issues such as drugs, high murder rate, so here we able to see what Law really is like in America.
In touch of forst at end a huge number of police officers raid a place here it shows us the powerful police that we are usually used to, taking control of serious situations.
