Bethany Ogdon mentioned an unpublished essay by an "O'Neill" on police 'reality' television. If this O'Neill is the same one, then it was indeed published, and the reference is as follows: Edward R. O'Neill. "The Seen of the Crime: Violence, Anxiety and the Domestic in Police Reality Programming." _Cineaction: Radical Film Criticism and Theory_. Special issue, "Murder in America," No. 38 (September 1995). The author argues: (1) that the ostentatiously self-reflexive visual style of programs such as _Cops_ and _America's Most Wanted_ does not produce the 'Brechtian' distanciation that film scholars associate with such devices but rather hyperbolically increases the ideological authority of the works; (2) that such programs imply a complication of the historical shift identified by Foucault from a spectacularly visible punishment to a less visible discipline: namely, the crime and the criminal's apprehension are made spectacularly legible, but the spectator is put in the position of the panoptic disciplinary authority; (3) that these programs can be interpreted as a continuation of the construction of the domestic sphere also operative in the genre of melodrama insofar as in that genre the domestic sphere is made transparent to the spectator's gaze, and in police 'reality' programming a similar transparency is also operative. Whether these claims can ultimately be supported, however, is a matter open to doubt. Sincerely, Edward R. O'Neill UCLA Dept. of Sociology/General Education Program ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu