The law and regulation – docudrama in the new millennium

Rethinking Docudrama and its Origins From Radio and Film to Streaming Media

“…While many radio dramatizations were episodic and intermixed with music, narration, verse and sound effects, some offered sustained narratives that drew large audiences and made the transition from radio to television (Cavalcade of America, Dragnet, Gang Busters, and You Are There). Radio docudramas also incorporated many formal elements that scholars have identified as critical to television docudrama, such as the use of audio captions to contextualize and shape the interpretation of events and the association of the drama with extra-textual settings familiar to the audience (Paget 2011). As filmed television took off in the 1960s, however, television docudrama increasingly followed new industrial and creative conventions, such as the seven-act structure of the made-for-television movie (Staiger and Newcomb 2004).…”

“…The show dramatized stories such as the take-down of a sophisticated counterfeiting operation and the loss and surprising recovery of a World War II bomber. With these hour-long dramatizations, scholars identify Armstrong Circle Theatre as the birth of a "pure docudrama form" (Hoffer and Nelson 1999, 67;Paget 2011).…”

“…These programs fit the hybrid docudrama form by recreating actual events using a combination 1 The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA of didactic, persuasive, documentary, and representational modes of communication (Paget 1990). Docudrama has been studied almost exclusively as a visual form and its history has been traced back to the intersection of film and television production in the 1960s and 1970s (Gomery 1999;Paget 2011). This investigation, however, argues that docudrama is a widespread media strategy or "mode of storytelling" that emerged in broadcasting and film in the 1930s as part of a broader documentary impulse that shaped literature, theater and other expressive forms in Interwar America (Lipkin 2011, 2;Stott 1986).…”