An investigation was designed to test the proposition that people who are apprehensive about crime will exhibit a greater preference for crime drama that features the restoration of justice than will those people who are less apprehensive about crime. Undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory mass communications course served as subjects. Subjects' initial apprehension about crime was manipulated via exposure either to a specially edited crime documentary or to a control film. They were then given an opportunity to select films to be viewed from a list. This list contained film descriptions that varied (according to a pretest) in the degree to which they featured victimization and justice restoration. Analysis of the victimization scores of the films selected showed that apprehensive subjects (those exposed to the crime documentary) chose films with less victimization than their counterparts in the control group. Analysis of the justice restoration scores indicated that apprehensive subjects chose films that featured more justice than did their counterparts in the control group. The findings are incompatible with the notion that exposure to crime drama "cultivates" fear of crime but are consistent with several selective exposure rationales for the well-documented relationship between exposure to television--and crime drama in particular--and fear of crime. (HOD)