Love Hate as Lyrical Sociology: Mapping the Spaces of Urban Crime

This article considers the sociological function of television drama via the Irish television crime series Love Hate, which aired over five seasons between 2010 and 2014 on RTÉ, Irelands public service broadcaster. Drawing on Andrew Abbots concept of `lyrical sociology, it will examine how media discourse surrounding Love Hate consistently foregrounded the connection between its fictional events and real-life crime scenarios. Media coverage of Love Hate, as well as the content of the series itself, it will be argued, posed the problem of sympathy between audience and its violent protagonists in spatial terms, as a question of belonging or otherwise in a shared social space. In particular, the experiential quality of home as a space of belonging will be explored as a central organizing structure in the series, one which ambiguously connected the lived spaces of its domestic television audience to the highly gendered home and city spaces of Love Hates story world.