TV crime drama: what's the fascination?

Our fascination with TV crime series and how they reflect ideas about normality, difference and morality is explored by University of Auckland criminologist Dr Ronald Kramer in a new book.

Ableism, Now Streaming: Disability and Cultural Representations of Crime (Palgrave Studies in Crime Media and Culture, 2026) is about “our collective consumption of crime narratives,” says Kramer.

“I’ve long been a crime storytelling junkie, and of course it’s all over Netflix, Hulu, TVNZ, and I was thinking, what's the fascination? We must be getting something out of this obsession with serial killers and these extreme forms of deviance.

“It’s got to be appealing to more than just morbid interests, and that got me thinking about disability, often cognitive or behavioural in this case, and ‘ableism’.”

He started to notice that whenever a serial killer is portrayed, for example, their disability, often some sort of psychosis, is never far from the surface.

“With figures like American serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, abnormality is central. Audiences experience a mix of similarity (‘he’s human like me’) and difference (‘but I’m not like that’).”
 

Through various characters in series like the US versions of The Bridge and The Killing, The Outsider, Bones, The Good Doctor, and Extraordinary Attorney Woo, all of which feature neurodivergent characters, Kramer unpicks some stereotypes and the ideas behind them.

The ‘usefulness requirement’, for example, is about characters being valued if their talents serve society.

Then there’s the ‘normal champion’, someone paired with the disabled character to support or ‘redeem’ them.

Also a regular feature is the ‘competent at work, disaster in life’ character, the neurodivergent person who excels professionally at being a detective, lawyer or surgeon, but is hopeless in their social, romantic or family lives, like Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) from The Killing.

Another common archetype, says Kramer, is the ‘sacred good’ disabled character, which draws on ideas from French sociologist Émile Durkheim, where a character’s difference is regarded as morally or spiritually special, and therefore admired, but who is still presented as outside normal society.

This trope is embodied by characters such as Jim Fitzgerald (Sam Worthington) in Manhunt: Unabomber and Holly Gibney (Cynthia Erivo) from The Outsider.
 

The book highlights cultural hierarchies of bodies and abilities, the divide between the ‘hyper-normate,’ idealised bodies of perfect strength and independence, “think anything featuring 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger”, says Kramer, ‘normate’, ordinary bodies under pressure to conform, and ‘abject’, socially undesirable bodies (and minds).

Kramer also links ableism to other forms of oppression, including racism, sexism and classism.

The book is written in an accessible way with minimal jargon and intended to be “somewhat irreverent,” says Kramer, and is likely to appeal to anyone interested in media, crime, disability studies, criminology or sociology.

“I think with the advent of AI, academics simply can’t write just for ourselves, people simply won’t read it,” he says. “AI, which I’m in no way interested in helping, is forcing us to make our work more engaging and accessible to a wider audience, which we should be doing anyway.”

In summary, the book turns the expected conclusion that we should be doing better at ‘normalising’ disabled people in TV crime dramas, and in life in general, on its head.

Instead, as a person with an autism diagnosis himself, Kramer wonders what would happen if society itself adapted to diverse bodies and minds rather than the reverse.

“Looking back, all my work comes out of a concern with normalisation,” he says. “By unpacking these cultural narratives, I hope we can rethink difference, ability, and belonging in contemporary society.”

Ableism, Now Streaming: Disability and Cultural Representations of Crime is available as an eBook and in hardback.