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Here's a sophisticated, against-the-grain study of the politics of popular TV by Elayne Rapping. The essays in this work focus on a particular genre: the made-for-TV movie, which is usually dismissed as schmaltzy, low-brow, vacuous, apolitical fare by contemptuous critics. But Rapping takes on this prevailing elitist attitude; she defends many of these movies for being public events that wrestle with urgent social issues, and she argues that they often carry progressive, even subversive, messages, albeit in a contradictory way

The author examines how defense attorneys have been portrayed on American TV from the 1950s until the present. She finds that the liberal defense attorney-hero dominated TV's early years but was replaced by more conservative champions of the law during the Reagan-Bush era. She compares the social & political implications of two contemporary TV series, The Practice & Law & Order. Despite the liberal trappings of The Practice, the series & the sentiments of its heroes are very much in keeping with today's conservative, law-&-order tenor. Moreover, due to the series' generic conventions, it is in many ways more politically problematic than Law & Order, which presents the institutional & ideological positions of its attorney-heroes in a straight-forward manner. Law & Order employs the stylistic techniques & ideological assumptions of film noir, while The Practice is pure melodrama. Because of the choice of generic conventions in The Practice & the unusual ways in which they are employed, its lawyer-heroes seem more liberal & humane than they really are. 23 References. A. Funderburg