Tribunali e giustizia nelle narrazioni seriali del prime-time statunitense

Courtrooms and juridical issues represent widely explored places and themes in the contemporary audiovisual landscape. In particular, within the serial production, legal drama is one of the most popular and successful genres. In this paper, we analysed the narrative structure of four US prime-time television series (Boston Legal, Abc 2004-2008; The Good Wife, Cbs 2009-2016; Suits, Usa Network 2011-2019; For the People, Abc 2018-2019) to understand how distinctive traits of the genre were articulated: courts, legal cases and professional dynamics. Through the identification of the narrative lines that define the genre (professional plot, sentimental plot, and legal case plot), we applied the methodology of quantitative content analysis to almost 300 hours of videos and it has allowed to outline three narrative formulas: the ethical-social formula, the anthology formula, and the status-centric formula.