Moving Cities. Documenting Urban Space in American TV-Series

Abstract

This paper will focus on how some contemporary TV-Series reflect and re-examine several topics related to the modern city. We will take six complementary dramas and the corresponding urban environments they depict: The Sopranos (New Jersey), Dexter (Miami), The Shield (Los Angeles), CSI (Las Vegas), The Wire (Baltimore) and Rescue Me (New York). With that corpus of cities and shows, we will attempt to study the sociopolitical effects of revealing the landscapes of the centripetal industrial metropolis, the implications of filming in actual localities, the dramatic or ludic presence of what Augé termed “non-places”, and the image of the streets either as an urban jungle where danger lurks at every corner or as a kind idealized vision of America.