| Summary: | In order to describe narrative and visual conventions regarding minorities and their relation to crime and the justice system, 139 episodes of various American TV series broadcast for the first time between 1950 and 1977, all of which dealing generally with capital punishment or, quite often, specifically with legal execution, have been analyzed for this study. This corpus was studied within its historical context, with the help of archives documenting the story development of different episodes (notably scripts and interviews given by scriptwriters and producers working during the period). In a context of major social and political changes in the United States, this topic was controversial and might have repelled viewers or sponsors. Indeed, the racial tensions in American society, as well as interracial violence, were rarely staged on the small screen. In most fiction at the time, racial minorities seemed protected from discrimination by a commendably colorblind justice system. If it were not the case, then racism was condemned on the program. This form of “affirmative” action was also at play in the rare mise-en-scène of the legal executions of non-white death-row prisoners (often with the actual executions staged off-screen). Furthermore, minority extras appeared more and more often as actors within the justice system, rather than just victims of it. The archival documents show the reluctance of networks and sponsors toward addressing the topic, and the strategies used to accommodate it, which can allow for several interpretations of the same episode, involving the choice of historical and/or geographical setting and of the oppressed minority for the scene, and the often “balanced” representation of different sides of the issue. As a result, the episodes could potentially satisfy audiences with diverse and opposite views.
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