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In Mother, Maiden, Cop, Alison Wielgus examines the role of female detectives on post-network television in an array of shows, including Happy Valley, Top of the Lake, Mare of Easttown, Collateral, Veronica Mars, Broadchurch, Forbrydelsen, The Bridge, Mindhunter, Unbelievable, Russian Doll, and I May Destroy You. Building on contemporary scholarship on post-network television, feminism, melodrama, and crime television, Mother, Maiden, Cop analyzes post-network female detective television through the lenses of genre, industry, and discourses of police abolition.

Wielgus positions post-network female detective television as a primary site to examine the intersection of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter discourses. While #MeToo’s imperatives (and precursors) have helped deepen the depictions of sexual assault, femicide, and trauma on television, finding narrative nuance rather than splashy spectacle, Black Lives Matter and discourses of policing have an uneasy relationship with the desire to position female detectives heroically and copaganda. Changing industrial measures have allowed for niche programming to emerge that more rigorously interrogates gender norms, but this interrogation rarely extends to the institution of policing.

Wielgus draws on narrative and genre theory to argue that a melodrama/crime television dialectic undergirds post-network detective television, allowing the female detective to emerge as a contested figure representative of larger cultural tensions of gender and policing. By analyzing the roles of serialization, circulation, maternality, family trauma, transnational victimhood, true crime adaptation, and discourses of police abolition in post-network female detective television, Wielgus concludes that a central problem for crime television is the limitations the genre places on representing the structural and societal functions of the police, even as post-network female television has integrated feminist perspectives on trauma and sexual assault.