Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series 3031418085, 9783031418082

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PALGRAVE EUROPEAN FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES

Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series Kim Toft Hansen · Valentina Re

Palgrave European Film and Media Studies Series Editors

Andrew Higson University of York York, UK Mette Hjort Dean of Arts office Hong Kong Baptist University Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong Tim Bergfelder Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Southampton Southampton, UK

Palgrave European Film and Media Studies is dedicated to historical and contemporary studies of film and media in a European context and to the study of the role of film and media in European societies and cultures. The series invite research done in both humanities and social sciences and invite scholars working with the role of film and other media in relation to the development of a European society, culture and identity. Books in the series can deal with both media content and media genres, with national and transnational aspects of film and media policy, with the sociology of media as institutions and with audiences and reception, and the impact of film and media on everyday life, culture and society. The series encourage books working with European integration or themes cutting across nation states in Europe and books working with Europe in a more global perspective. The series especially invite publications with a comparative, European perspective based on research outside a traditional nation state perspective. In an era of increased European integration and globalization there is a need to move away from the single nation study focus and the single discipline study of Europe.

Kim Toft Hansen • Valentina Re

Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series

Kim Toft Hansen Department of Culture and Learning Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark

Valentina Re Link Campus University Roma, Italy

ISSN 2634-615X     ISSN 2634-6168 (electronic) Palgrave European Film and Media Studies ISBN 978-3-031-41807-5    ISBN 978-3-031-41808-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Miemo Penttinen - miemo.net / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book was conceived as part of collaborative studies carried out from 2018 to 2021 in the research project DETECt—Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 770151). In the autumn of 2019, about a year and a half after the start of the project, Kim Toft Hansen organised the first DETECt international conference (Euronoir: Producers, Distributors and Audiences of European Crime Narratives, 30 September-2 October 2019) at Aalborg University, which brought together all the researchers of the consortium and scholars interested in the project’s topics and professionals from creative industries. On that occasion, Valentina Re proposed the idea of ‘peripheral locations’ applied to the production history of the Italian TV series La porta rossa (The Red Door, Rai 2017–2023), which in the development phase had the story’s setting moving first from Bologna to Turin, and then from Turin to Trieste. Above all, this initial provisional formulation of the concept was intended to express the intention of Italian producers and creatives to literally move away from Rome as a hegemonic production centre. However, the concept also indicated an aesthetic move away from certain canons and conventions in representation and visual style with the aim of gaining greater international appeal. From the outset, the peripherality of The Red Door had further potential. Indeed, Trieste is a Mediterranean port city situated on the Italian-Slovenian border and at the boundary between earth and sea, imbued by a mix of Latin, Slavic, and Germanic cultures. Although The Red Door does not directly address major geopolitical issues, v

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the border theme emerges through the mixture of fantasy and crime in a story featuring a ghost police officer investigating his own murder. Outside the borders was the main title of the paper given in Aalborg. This title served as an invitation to continue and expand the research and test the concept in relation to broader and more articulated European trends. The use of a location rarely seen on screen, coupled with ‘Nordic’ atmospheres uncommon in Italian productions, invited us to go beyond Italian borders to examine a series of correspondences in location strategies that seemed to unfold across the European continent. We started to notice remarkable stylistic and narrative similarities between unrelated productions from different territories, generating a new, transcultural visual imagery and revealing a shared cross-territorial inspiration. The first confirmation of this intuition was offered in the comparison between Danish and Italian screened peripheries provided in our article for the journal Cinéma & Cie, which is the original nucleus from which this book takes its life. Compared to the original formulation, the concept of peripheral locations has been considerably refined and articulated to account for a general, albeit multifaceted, trend that has characterised European crime dramas in the last decade and which does not seem to have come to an end. Peripheral locations are both distant locations (away from traditional production hubs) and locations peripheral to cultural, economic, and social ‘centres’ that may be located on very different scales—from the very local to the global. They imply the interplay of various organisations related to new funding policies and placemaking practices and combine a new translocal spatial sensibility with fresh audiovisual aesthetics to compete in an increasingly crowded audiovisual market. We hope that this book can offer a key to understanding how popular culture and TV series, even when not directly engaged with significant geopolitical issues (like migration and border control) and related more to intimate and private perspectives, may represent and negotiate marginalities, borderlands, and social anxieties, also providing a new affective and cognitive geography of the European continent. This book is only a first step into peripheral audiovisual territories, and we hope it will pave the way for further research beyond the crime genre and the time frame considered in this book. The authors have discussed and conceived the overall design and methodology of the research work in close collaboration, and both have substantially revised and critically reviewed every chapter of the book and share responsibility and accountability for the results. In detailing the

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writing process, Kim Toft Hansen drafted Chaps. 1–3 and 6–8, while Valentina Re drafted Chaps. 4 and 5. The book includes references to interviews, articles, data, and material in several languages. All citations from originally non-Anglophone material have been translated by the authors. The authors would like to thank all scholars and creatives involved in the DETECt project. In particular, we would like to express gratitude to project PI Monica Dall’Asta (University of Bologna) and Federico Pagello (G.  D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara) for their coordination of the research project. In addition, many ideas in this book could not have been conceived without close collaboration and deep discussions with Luca Barra (University of Bologna), Stefano Baschiera (Queen’s University Belfast), Massimiliano Coviello (Link Campus University), Anne Marit Waade and Cathrin Bengesser (Aarhus University), Janne Nygaard (TV 2 Denmark), Anna Keszeg (Babeş-Bolyai University), and Sándor Kálai (University of Debrecen). Your voices run deeply through the theories and analyses presented in the chapters of the book. We began the DETECt project unaware of the global situation that we soon after would find ourselves in during a troublesome pandemic, which had a severe impact on how we were able to approach border-crossing research practices and true scholarly collaboration. Coming out in good health at the other end, we sincerely hope that this book—and all its built-in references to research coming out of DETECt—is a clear sign of how well we all ended up doing, despite our challenged opportunities for transnational teamwork. We would also like to thank all the creatives and audiovisual professionals who dedicated time to our research and enriched it through interviews. Aalborg, Denmark Roma, Italy 

Kim Toft Hansen Valentina Re

Contents

1 European  Scenes of Crime: Peripheries at the Centre  1 Producing Peripheries for the Content Arms Race   3 Serialising Crimes for an Unfinished Continent   8 The Noirs of Europe: Overview of the Book  12 2 The  Double Marginality of Peripheral Locations 19 Peripherality and the Negotiation of Place  20 Desktop Production Studies and Practical Insights  22 Scenogeography and the Aesthetics of Peripherality  26 Peripheral Panoramas and Drone Aesthetics  28 Landscapes Iconographies and the Journey Narrative  32 Screened Liminality and European Borderscapes  37 Televisual Geography as Creative Placemaking  40 3 Nordic  Noir and Arctic Peripherality in Northern Europe 51 Trom and the Peripheries of the Danish Realm  58 Ivalo and the Wild East of Arctic Finland  65 Outlier and the Authenticity of Peripheral Policing  70 Arctic Noir from the Outside In and the Inside Out  75 4 Mediterranean  Noir and Nordic Peripheries in Southern Europe 81 O sabor das margaridas and Regional Noirs in Green Spain  90 “Things Are Going to Get Darker”: Non uccidere  96 ix

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A Journey from Barcelona to Genoa: Petra 104 Allowing Cross-Cultural Dialogue Through European Middle Lands 110 5 Country  Noir and Rural Peripheries in Western Europe117 Zone blanche and Peripheries at the Heart of the EU 125 Der Pass, or True Detective(s) in the Alps 132 Capitani and Rural Microperipherality 138 Rural Peripheries Left Behind 144 6 Eastern  Noir and the Borderscapes of Eastern Europe151 Wataha and Europe’s Eastern Frontier 160 Pustina and the Industrial Wastelands of Bohemia 165 Hackerville and the Digital Centre of the Romanian Periphery 170 Reaching HBO’s E-EU-TOPIA? 175 7 Brit  Noir and the Hinterlands of the British Isles183 Shetland and the Hinterland Heritage of Tartan Noir 191 Blood and Family Noir from the Irish Periphery 197 Stay Close and Challenging Northern English Marginality 201 Crime Series and Keeping the UK Together 207 8 Conclusion:  Negotiating European Peripheries in TV Crime Series215 Translocalism: The Particular and the Universal 218 Nordic Noir from Nordification to Avoidance 220 The Future of Peripheral Locations 223 References227 Index251

List of Images

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The self-reinforcing relationship between textual differentiation, practical collaboration, and paratextual placemaking as incentives for producing TV series at peripheral locations The above image represents EUROVOC’s subregional division of Europe (EUR-lex n.d.), which inspired the image below of the noirs of Europe in which the British Isles have been separated from Western Europe and the Baltic region included in Eastern Noir Map of the Nordic region with the Arctic Circle passing through the territory. The map contains the most relevant television crime series in settings above or close to the Arctic Circle, ranging from the early iteration in the British series Fortitude (Sky Atlantic 2013–18) to the latest titles such as Catch and Release (Altibox 2021). The outward ‘drift’ towards peripheral locations is much broader in the Nordic region, but this map emphasises the contemporary trends towards production and settings in and around the arctic territories (image made with MapChart/Visio) Hannis, the main character of Trom, standing on the literal edge of the Faeroes, underlining the meaningful relationship between place and character in the series In the final episode of Outlier, the protagonist finds herself having solved the case, but still she is found with a concerned and contemplative gaze into the open peripheral landscape

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Bitter Daisies presents the protagonist Rosa/Eva trying to localise a phone call from her disappeared sister, representing an in-depth scrutinisation of the series’ setting 96 Valeria Ferro (Miriam Leone) in the trailer for Thou Shalt Not Kill, highlighting the atmospheric use of lighting strategies in the series 100 In the series Petra, two recurring locations both represent the main characters’ traits and illustrate the location placement of the series 109 In journey crime narratives with characters entering a small mysterious town, the scene with a car passing the town sign has become one of the most common ways of establishing a sense of place at the same time as acknowledging the legacy of Twin Peaks. The image shows openings from Black Spot (above, right) alongside similar imagery from Twin Peaks (above, left). The below images show comparable opening shots from the two Swedish series Jordskott (below, left) and Ängelby (below, right). All four series are set in fictional small towns and narrate a murder story with a mysterious supernatural twist in which nature, in different ways, appears as a force of agency 129 Images from three series show a remarkable common iconography that balances the influence from True Detective and inspiration from pagan cultures: Black Spot (above, left), Pagan Peak (above, right), and True Detective (below) 137 The posters of Capitani and The Break compared 143 Three threshold regions viewed through the perspective of noir: Baltic, Central-European, and Balkan Noir 156 Refugees approaching the Ukrainian-Polish border in the opening sequence of the Polish HBO series The Border161 In the locative title sequence, the relationship between desolate landscapes, the personal distress of the protagonist, the local decay, and the grinding coal-mining industry is a significant paratextual code for the comprehension of the series Wasteland168 Hackerville’s title sequence is at once very local in its combined references to Timișoara and Frankfurt and very conspicuous in its digital metaphor that indicates digital closeness despite remote geographical distances 173

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The locative opening of the British-French TV series The Tunnel clearly encompasses frontier cultures, boundaries as unity and separation, and mobility across borders, stressing the Euro Tunnel as one of the quintessential liminal peripheries in Europe 184 The geographical proximity between the Shetland Isles and the Faeroe Isles is conspicuously present in similar title screens for the series, stressing a comparative island topography, but also signalling the translocal stylistic features of both crime series 196 Originally, Coben placed the setting of Stay Close in Atlantic City, but the Netflix adaptation of the story is partly located in Blackpool, including the city’s main tourist attraction Pleasure Beach (the above image from Stay Close). Not only is this a locative choice that holds a range of evident visual similarities between the two locations; the choice of location also gives Stay Close a locative and generic textuality that embraces an influence from the US crime series Boardwalk Empire (HBO 2010–14) that re-established the Atlantic City pier are through VFX (the below image from Boardwalk Empire)206

CHAPTER 1

European Scenes of Crime: Peripheries at the Centre

Writing at a time when a global pandemic has loosened its grip on the world, and where an imperial aggressor has disturbed a decade-long peace throughout the European continent, it appears very timely, almost too deliberate, to launch a book about states of peripherality and borderscapes within and beyond Europe. During two years of health crisis, the global pandemic showcased a situation where border control became an effectuated tool in attempts towards the prevention of the spread of the virus. On a global scale, the pandemic also made us realise that issues related to first world centrality and third world peripherality became a core concern in the distribution of wealth and international health regulation. As a biological object, the covid-19 virus quickly became a transnational phenomenon, carelessly trespassing borders, which paradoxically became a global situation where everyone was, at the same time, affected and somehow united by the same problem. Exiting the pandemic, the war in Ukraine rapidly emerged as a new common denominator for world societies’ attention, including international sanctions, new cross-European pursuits of its own military defence, and a new European refugee crisis. Once again, we find ourselves amid a paradoxical situation where a common adversary has become a uniting tool for a European Union and a European continent in a deep post-Brexit political crisis. Historically, the notion of Europe was defined as opposed to external enemies and cultures (in the Early Middle Ages, Europe was a designation separating the ‘civilised’ Western Christian © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2_1

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world from most predominantly the ‘heathen’ Islamic World), and now in the midst of a new European war, politicians, journalists, and other communicators stage European political alliances in the support of Ukraine against Russian aggression. With an almost too convenient etymology, Ukraine means ‘at the border/frontier’ (historically, it referred to lands located at the edge of the Polish Kingdom); in the 2022 debates about the war, Ukraine has become a common designation of the Eastern edge of Europe, a self-perception uniting European politics against an outdated imperial worldview of the Kremlin office. Effectively, these two all-­ pervading international circumstances illustrate how borders are effective tools in understanding and maintaining geopolitical unity and separation, but they also, simultaneously, highlight how porous and flexible our peripheral borderscapes really are. This book is about European peripheries and borderscapes seen through the lenses of European television crime series. At a time when too many people have perished from a permeating illness and a destructive war, it may seem odd to gauge European peripheries from the assertive distance of fiction, but as we illustrate throughout the book’s analyses, television series are powerful ‘seismographs’ or ‘litmus tests’ of the cultural environment surrounding the construction and negotiation of peripherality at both a local, national, and regional scale. Only two weeks before the Russian attack on Ukraine, the fourth season of Danish series Borgen (DR/Netflix 2011–22) premiered, after a nine-year hiatus, on Danish television and later Netflix, a series that was originally usurped in the global circulation of Nordic Noir titles during the 2010s. The recent plot revolves around the discovery of a large oil field in Greenland, narrating a story not only about the territorial quest for an independent, centralised Greenlandic national state, Greenland as the geopolitical periphery of the Danish Commonwealth, and the Danish state’s control over Greenland’s foreign policy. It is also a story about how central the debate about the peripheral status of the Arctic region has become during the past decades, due to global warming and the search for alternative, sustainable energy resources, involving an almost prophetic plotline about problematic economic and territorial collaboration with Russia. The first episode ends with the Danish Foreign Secretary acknowledging that, “we’re going to bed with the devil,” a reference to larger Russian economic forces behind the location of the oil field. On the one hand, this one-liner in the series’ cliffhanger for the second episode maintains a popular theme throughout many European television series with Russian crooks and gangsters as

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antagonists. On the other hand, bedding the devil may also be a self-ironic reference to the fact that the fourth season of Borgen is the first co-­ production between DR, the ‘traditional’ Danish public service provider, and the global streaming service Netflix, an institution that has among Danish broadcasters been referred to as a “frenemy” (Hansen 2020a). As an opening example, Borgen both represents the changing television landscape from broadcasting to streaming, and it displays how deeply influenced and rooted contemporary television series may be in disputes about territory, geographical perceptions, and discourses surrounding spatiality, places and their affiliation with broader geopolitical anxieties and regional configurations. For that reason, it appears crucial to assess a range of carefully selected series’ construction and negotiation of European territoriality.

Producing Peripheries for the Content Arms Race This book took shape during the H2020 research project DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives (2018–21), a project guided by the wide international exposure, breadth, and popularity of crime narratives across the European continent. For decades and across various media formats, the crime genre has been one of the most perseverant transnational genres, perhaps the most popular genre depending on definition, leaving the genre as a “quintessential product of European and global media industries,” according to Dall’Asta et  al. (2021, 6). The television crime genre is not only “the easiest one to co-­ produce”, as documented by Hansen (2020a, 91), or a facilitator for the international circulation of audiovisual productions (Re 2020); the crime genre is also often one with a deep narrative departure from distinct geographical sensibilities, including regional exposure (Levet 2020) and other specific broader locative tendencies (Hansen and Waade 2017). At the same time, the crime genre has been one of the most dominant genres produced/commissioned by new SVoD players on the market, including the exploitation of local generic subgenres as market penetration models for transnational players like Netflix, HBO, and Viaplay (Hansen 2020b). With a semantic focus on crimes committed and the syntactic suspense surrounding the investigation of it as essential and basic defining traits, crime narratives simultaneously provide universal appeal and local generic features and variation:

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On the one hand, as an expression of a transnational popular culture deeply rooted in the literary tradition, it provides a shared framework (the ‘universality’ of the plot) in which local specificities can be integrated in innovative and challenging ways. On the other hand, the genre has always benefitted from a localised dimension that stresses the topoi of suburbs and gated communities, where the tensions generated by the perpetration and investigation of crimes can be accelerated and exacerbated, with great emotional resonance. (Coviello and Re 2021, 64)

Along the same lines, “television crime series delve into all kinds of differences that not only produce crime, but from which also all kinds of identities emerge,” remarks Morsch and Re (2021, 96). As documented by the DETECt project, crime narratives’ popularity, co-production culture, generic universality and its local variations, its wider distribution and audience profile, and the genre’s attention towards socio-political issues have altogether situated the crime genre as a cultural platform suitable for deciphering broader public debates and sociocultural tendencies, including an increased attention towards peripheries, territoriality, and borderscapes across the European continent. In this book, we ask one general double question: Why was this specific European television crime series placed at this specific peripheral location, and what are the representative and ‘textual’ consequences of this placement strategy? Territoriality comes in many guises, and peripherality is just one of them. Understood as both the literal, territorial, and socio-economically marginal edges of a specific geographical area, peripheries have received considerable attention from various producers and television service providers during the past decade. Surely, using peripheral places as locations in television series is not a recent invention in television production, but regional and localisation policies as well as a saturated market situation have, respectively, both enhanced the opportunities for using peripheral locations in television series, and tweaked location placement strategies towards using lesser-used locations outside the traditional production hubs as means of differentiation. So-called peak TV arrived in 2015, through the concept coined by the FX Networks head John Landgraf, referring to the overexposure of original television series and a programming bubble indicating that producers, broadcasters, and streaming services distribute way more series than viewers have time to watch (Hayes 2015). In the book Portals (2017), Lotz voiced a similar concern about “too much TV” stressing that there is an abundance of material for

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audiences to watch, while she also emphasised a concern about the sustainability of such a model of production. Since Landgraf’s and Lotz’s early accounts of peak TV as signs of market saturation, international production rates have nevertheless increased even more. According to FX research, US productions took a dive in 2020 due to the pandemic, but over 550 seasons of American serial drama was released in 2021, the highest number of annual US series measured (Romanchick 2022). According to the European Audiovisual Observatory (Pumares 2020), the number of European TV fiction titles has also risen since 2015, surpassing 1100 European titles in 2019 with 3–13-episode high-end series as the increasingly most popular format during the period (over 600 series and almost 60% of the series may be regarded high-end material). Despite the general impact of the pandemic on audiovisual production, which in 2020 decreased by 4% in terms of hours produced, production of high-end series continued to grow from 665 titles in 2019 to 696 in 2020. In fact, the number of titles produced in 2020 continued the 2019-level, which strongly indicates a productional change of attention towards shorter high-end series with a higher cost per minute (Fontaine 2022). Overwhelmed by choice, viewers may in this way with regards to the consumption of TV series have reached what Doyle and Roda (2019, 2) have named “the era of attention scarcity”: “The multiplication of communication channels and platforms, caused by the digital transformation of our media systems, generates increasing demands on our attention, to the point that often we do not know which way to turn nor even how to spend the attention we do have given the quantity of communication channels available.” As researchers also overwhelmed by content abundance, we are, as a result, not adept to claim that the increased attention given to peripheries in screen production comes from simply an interest in the periphery in and for itself. On the one hand, new policy attention has clearly striven towards an amplified motivation for producing away from the central production hubs, but on the other hand, the increase in peripheral locations may just as well be a result of the general international increase in the production of TV series. In the end, the two causes must be combined, since the search for originality in the peak situation may also lead producers to seek out visual/narrative originality in the choice of location. As figuratively noted by McNutt (2021, 10) from a US perspective, “limited resources in traditional locations for television production push producers to new locales […] to compete in the ongoing “content arms

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race”,” which has also markedly impacted the shifted attention towards representing the periphery in television series. In what McNutt refers to as “the era of mobile production” where contemporary productions more often shift site of production, locations have become “spatial capital” bought and sold as an integrated part of placemaking activities rather than merely representing specific places. For McNutt, spatial capital is “a live entity, perpetually constructed and reconstructed at various stages within the process of television series being produced” (ibid., 9), and therefore it is essential to understand “how space and place operate within the television industry, as paratextual efforts by producers, distributors, actors, and filming locations take the textual spatial capital […] and leverage it as a form of cultural capital” (ibid., 121). In our case, then, attracting attention from producers willing to produce at specific peripheral locations becomes a commodification of place and a means of turning spatial capital into cultural capital through television production and, even in some cases, into local economic capital. At the same time, producers and television services seek differentiation at a time when the cost per minute for European television series has risen significantly, essentially lacking co-­ financing for television production, which means that there may also be built-in fiscal incentives increasingly motivating producers to produce at different local places, which includes tax incentives and direct local co-­ financing structures. The paradox that surfaces when we witness this noticeable increase in the number of titles produced per year (the “content arms race”) is how producers simultaneously seek originality in individual productions because the era of attention scarcity stimulates the search for ways to phatically stand out to attract at least some audience attention. The utilisation of new locales as production locations in TV series has, in this sense, become one of the markers of ‘textual’ originality alongside other fiscal and visual incentives to produce at peripheral, rural borderscapes across the European continent. As pointed out by McNutt, “the past decades have seen a dramatic shift in where television is produced, how television is distributed, and how we consume television that has forced negotiations of spatial capital to be intensely reactive” (ibid., 187)—and one of the reactions noticed by McNutt is, at first, a much more diverse distribution of locations across the US, but at the same time he acknowledges that “America’s spatial capital is not evenly distributed” in both locative and fiscal senses. Nevertheless, the wider and often peripheral distribution of television locations highlighted by McNutt stresses a situation, which

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shares quite a few similarities with the European situation where new locations have increasingly caught producers’ attention, but it has not been dispersed to the same degree across the European continent and within European subregions. Following McNutt’s idea of spatial capital, at least three deeply interconnected reasons for the surge in peripheral locations in European television series emerge (cf. Image 1.2): (a) market differentiation through new and fresh imagery, (b) increasing local financial, political, and productional collaboration, and (c) a series more active local placemaking activities based on paratextual exposure through screen production. Such respective textual, practical, and paratextual forces may even together perform self-reinforcingly, finally causing an increase in screen exposure of European peripheries. What may be the most compelling part of this differentiation process is that this peripheral ‘drift’ is happening simultaneously in the US and in Europe, which tends to establish a common, homogenous approach to screened peripheralities, that is, the production of a translocal spatial sensibility through the use of peripheral locations (we return to these theoretical perspectives in Chap. 2) (Image 1.1).

Image 1.1  The self-reinforcing relationship between textual differentiation, practical collaboration, and paratextual placemaking as incentives for producing TV series at peripheral locations

Differentiation (textual)

Collaboration (practical)

Place-making (paratextual)

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Serialising Crimes for an Unfinished Continent While the practical arguments about placement strategies in television series, also beyond crime series, are pivotal to understanding the increased interest in producing in the European peripheries, these arguments are also linked to a pronounced cultural and generic argument. Fiscal and aesthetic incentives may push producers from the capitals to the geographical edges of specific territories, but there are clear indications that the stories told in and through these locations also change by moving them to the periphery. In this way, the stories that represent and negotiate being at and going to the peripheries across the continent also offer ethnographic insights into both external and internal attitudes towards the spatio-­ cultural edges of specific territories. Watching European crime series taking place in the peripheries offers audiences new perspectives on the world and extends the opportunity to gain access to how peripheral cultures, geopolitical situations, and social anxieties are negotiated and experienced through the lenses of serial fiction. With its defining traits focussing on crimes and elements of investigation, including strategically serialised narratives across multiple episodes, television crime series appear to facilitate discussions of the moral context of crimes, logical attention towards the epistemological processes of knowing, and criminality’s social background and the institutional circumstances around procedures of detection. In this book, we use crime narratives as a cross-media reference to crime content in various media, while focusing specifically on TV crime series, that is, series or serials produced for broadcast or online television. The crime genre is a macro-genre that comprises several genre variations such as the whodunnit, hard-boiled noir, or the police procedural, which individually may be characterised by distinctive themes, tropes, narrative patterns, and visual aesthetics. The crime genre specifically retains its relevance in both its pragmatic effectiveness and interest in social discourses and in its broad audience interest across the European continent. Television crime series frequently present a distinct spatial sensibility and location realism that comes from the genre’s very local departure from a crime scene and the mobility of the investigation; having a specific scene of the crime motivates mobility sequences of going to and from the specific place, while the procedural focus on comprehending the composition of local milieus to solve crimes establishes an integral reason for a textual representation of local cultures, societies, and politics. In other words, a change of location towards lesser

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used peripheral locations potentially modifies and even teases out an intensified curiosity towards several contextual variables such as moral attitudes, institutional features, and social conditions. The contextual, generic argument also points towards the relevance of our broad European perspective on television crime narratives. In an article about what he refers to as European “border series”, Gott (2021) demonstrates how “TV series in general might offer complex and valuable insights into heated debates about Europe’s borders and may hold the potential to reach and influence a significant audience.” Although his emphasis is not solely on crime series, Gott indicates that television crime series have a dominant position in locating European series in “borderland settings” through his exemplification. While he is not blind regarding the generic qualities of his samples, no less than 19 out of 21 “border series” hold definite affinities with the crime genre: “Many border series fall broadly within the crime genre category, an enduringly popular format and eminently adaptable template for approaching contemporary social issues and anxieties.” In fact, Gott maintains that the crime genre—with its combined universal appeal and local sense of place—fits the European ‘unity in diversity’ project very well. “Series are well suited to [travel well] because they are by design—and necessity—aimed at a large audience and therefore reflect and re-produce common narratives of identity.” Shifting attention towards borderscapes, peripheries, and lesser-used locations creates an incorporated opportunity for cartographic, spatial, and ethnographic negotiations of the connotative understanding of Europe. Just like many other territorial denominations, ‘Europe’ as a concept is a floating and open signifier, indicating that power relations and meaningful communication activities may demandingly strive towards framing and neutralising the polysemy of what ‘Europe’ essentially is. Gott quotes the French geographer Michel Foucher for declaring that “Europe’s boundaries are still ‘unfinished’,” a condition that the war in Ukraine has brutally reminded everyone about, but rather than leaving the signifier afloat, Gott constructively observes that popular culture and arts, such as TV series, may help “define the highly contested idea of what Europe signifies in a post-1989 landscape.” Highlighting 1989 as a demarcation line for European integration and negotiated unification was a point of departure for the abovementioned DETECt project too: The fall of the Berlin wall not only considerably changed the geopolitical composition of Europe, pushing the Eastern ‘edge’ of Europe further to the East, integrating territories that were—from a Western perspective—formerly referenced as

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the ‘second world’ in relation to the Western ‘first world’ and the dearth of ‘third world’ countries. 1989 also marks an entry into a new media culture with multiple international channels, spurred collaboration in international screen production, and new opportunities for screen exposure through popular cultural expressions. As a co-production between seven European TV broadcasters, and despite all the widely discussed flaws of the ‘Europudding’ model, the TV crime series Eurocops (ZDF, Channel 4, Antenne 2, ORF, Rai , SRG, Televisión Española 1988–92) holds a representative threshold position for the changing European TV landscape and shows the TV crime genre’s capability to negotiate a transnational integrative model for connotations around Europe. The transnational environment surfacing at this time may even point towards the present situation where transnational streaming services are transforming the territoriality of spatial screen exposure. Although this book’s idea to cover the European continent through analyses of TV crime series appears highly ambitious and tricky, it also seems required to raise the stakes and enter a European bird’s eye view of local territoriality as it is handled and exposed through a range of representative European crime series. As a reaction to the abovementioned new media culture, Morley and Robins wrote the following visionary statement almost three decades ago: “Audiovisual geographies are thus becoming detached from the symbolic spaces of national culture, and realigned on the basis of the more ‘universal’ principles of international consumer culture. The free and unimpeded circulation of programmes—TV without frontiers—is the great ideal in the new order” (Morley and Robins 1995, 11). However ideal it may appear, they were also hesitant towards the notion of a Europe without frontiers, since “the experience of transborder media flows can actually work to create anxieties and a sense of cultural disorientation”—or even in our case, represent them through storytelling about crimes and societal tribulations. Morley and Robins highlight how new media policy programmes in the late 1980s and early 1990s strove towards “a common cultural identity [that] remains a vulnerable and anxious phenomenon” (ibid., 3). On the one hand, still today such media policies seek out motivations for creating a strategic sense of solidarity across regions of Europe and, in this sense, transnational media policies act as supernational placemaking activities. On the other hand, Morley and Robins already then pointed out that seeking “Euro-identity” could also lead towards both internal tensions (migrant issues, nationalism, lack of internal cohesion) and external obstacles that, for them, is most clearly represented in how

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“the periphery of Europe (or as beyond Europe) pose considerable challenges” (ibid.). This contention of Europe as an unfinished continent by Gott, Foucher, Morley, and Robins is backed by Johan Fornäs (2012) in his analysis of how Europe has been—and is—signified both from within and beyond. Fornäs refers to “the idea of a united Europe” in the wake of the mass destruction of two twentieth century world wars as “a favourite founding myth of the EU,” which neglects to integrate “influential demands for economic welfare and imperialist power expansions” as an integrated ideology of the EU (Fornäs 2012, 68). When TV series like the Norwegian Okkupert (Occupied, TV 2, 2015-), the Polish Wataha (The Border, HBO 2014–2020), or Borgen narrate stories about transborder politics, energy resources, and migrant issues, they directly engage in socio- and geopolitical discussions about the specific tension between the European peace myth and the economic and imperialist discourse in and around the notion of Europe. As stressed by Fornäs, Europe as a territorial construction and signification is ideally framed by the ideology of humanism, equality, reason, and respect for diversity, but this framing rests, paradoxically and historically, also on how “[c]olonialism and imperialism accumulated resources in Europe while enslaving other peoples” (ibid., 67). However, the three series mentioned above highlight that transborder unification may stand less united when confronted by pressing issues such as energy crises, migrant crises, or economic interdependency. For that reason, continues Fornäs, two principles have become key for an understanding of Europe as a connotation and as a territorial region, that is, the principle of national subsidiarity and the principle of diversity (ibid., 69). By and large, this may essentially imply that Europe as a construction may forever continue to be an unfinished continent, as it has become a built-in feature that Europe is in a perpetual process of becoming. At the same time, it becomes clear that the detachment from “the symbolic spaces of national culture” mentioned by Morley and Robins, in the period since the publication of their 1995 book, has developed differently during the past decade. More precisely, we have seen a resurgence of attention towards local or national spaces through using recognisable and representative locations, including peripheral locations, that simultaneously institute a translocal sense of spaces, maintaining both local and global peripheral geography at the same time. In this book, we rather argue that the audiovisual aesthetics of European TV series have created a new relationship to the national spaces that— although aligned with recognisable places—are increasingly associated

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with international, translocal spatial imagery. This development stresses the international exposure of places through audiovisual means, while also maintaining a range of common influential stylistics behind the exposure of peripheral locations. The interest in reaching levels of authenticity and local recognisability through peripheral location placement, on the one hand, rests within a transcultural visual aesthetics that, on the other, indicate levels of mainstream and international influence alongside attempts to stand out as original serial TV drama. In all its complexity, the peripheral geography represented in TV crime series frequently appears distinctly localised, while the stylistics of TV crime series emerge as a markedly international aesthetics of peripherality (cf. Chap. 2).

The Noirs of Europe: Overview of the Book Dark shadows loom over Europe. Not only the backlash of a global pandemic and the logistics and politics of contemporary warfare threaten the security and human contact zones across a changing continent. In a post-­ Brexit age, internal cohesion appears significantly vulnerable as members of the European Union offer little reconciliation after the EU’s critique of breaches in the rule of law and human rights. While global climate change throws gloomy billows across all territories, internal political and legal disputes between the European Court of Justice and legal practices in Poland and Hungary establish new intramural physical borders and cultural boundaries across the European region. Nevertheless, it is not only individual member states that pose problems for the democratic ideals of European unity and collaboration; concerns of cyber-security and a global digital media landscape also jeopardise the democratic status of each member state and sovereign country on the continent. With such pressing issues, and others rapidly emerging, it appears unsurprising that the crime genre attracts much attention, as its specific generic variations embrace flexible opportunities for debating, influencing, judging, and comprehending geopolitical and sociogeographical changes, fears, and impending solutions. With its integrated attention towards moral and legal infringements, the genre and the surrounding collaborative activities hold a diagnostically critical mirror up between producers and audiences on the one side and society’s most pressing issues on the other. Even if Europe currently may appear vaguely united against an external imperial aggressor, the continent still retains internal cultural dividing lines and continentally subregional cultural zones such as countries in the

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Mediterranean proximity, countries historically ingrained in Nordic collaboration, or the widescale reference to Eastern Europe as a cohesive unit despite major internal differences. As a combined locative and generic perception, this book departs from such spatially imbued considerations of European crime subgenres. Together, the analytical Chaps. 3–7 implicate the broader crime genre’s capability to combine local cultural features (the adjective) with narrative structures and visual aesthetics familiar to a wider crime audience (the substantive), for example, Mediterranean (adj.) Noir (subst.). In this way, a comprehensive understanding of crime narratives as a macro-genre may therefore account for multiple genre variations defined by and understood through the following five spatio-generic references: Nordic Noir, Mediterranean Noir, Country Noir, Eastern Noir, and Brit Noir for which one chapter has been devoted to each. The geographical classification of European noirs has been inspired by the EU’s Eurovoc, a multilingual thesaurus used by EU institutions for common concepts, including a subdivision of Europe into Southern, Eastern, Western, and Northern Europe (see Image 1.2). In our division of Europe into subregions, we have kept the critical references to specific subregional noirs in mind and adjusted the classification by establishing the British Isles as its own culturally specific subregion apart for Northern Europe. Otherwise, we follow the EU’s classification of subregions across the continent. The main reason for separating the British Isles is that the notion of Brit Noir exists as a critical concept (Forshaw 2016), while especially the UK has had a strong historic tradition for producing distinguishable crime narratives and motivates an internal debate about whether these isles are European. In addition, we suggestively shifted the Baltic region for inclusion in Eastern Noir, but we could as well have maintained the Baltic region as part of the Nordic region based on both historical reasons (e.g. Danish and Swedish rule in Estonia) and on the fact that the three countries have observer status in the Nordic Council, while close and equal collaboration was established through Nordic-Baltic Cooperation (NB8) in 1992. A reference to local Baltic Noir does exist, just as it has been debated whether the Baltics should be included in the Nordic region, while the idea of, for instance, Estonian Nordic Noir has been discussed by journalist Jaan Martinson (2015). However, this geographical discussion merely illustrates porous and flexible boundaries that are constantly negotiated and readjusted in the cognitive geography of Europe; in fact, the Baltic region may be regarded as a geopolitical and cultural ‘threshold region’ between the Nordic region and Eastern Europe, but as pointed

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Image 1.2  The above image represents EUROVOC’s subregional division of Europe (EUR-lex n.d.), which inspired the image below of the noirs of Europe in which the British Isles have been separated from Western Europe and the Baltic region included in Eastern Noir

out by Mrozewicz (2018, 4f), the Baltic Sea has been a “geopolitical border dividing and connecting Norden with the (former) Eastern Bloc,” a situation rapidly changing in the midst of current European conflicts (cf. Chap. 6 for further discussions of Eastern Europe). Lastly, while four of the spatio-generic references exist as both critical and academic phrases, there is no specific reference to noir from what Eurovoc refers to as ‘Western Europe’, but the subregion does include existing notions of French Noir, Belgian Noir, and Dutch Noir, and there are rare references to Austrian and Swiss Noir too, but there appears to be no such this as Western European Noir. On the one hand, the reason may be that the subregionalisation of Europe is unclear, debated and highly flexible, but it may also stem from a dominant self-image of this region as being ‘the heart of Europe’ containing most of the EU’s administrative offices. Specifically for this reason, we find it fitting to move our observations of

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Fig. 1.2  (continued)

noir in Western Europe to the countryside to expose and debate the rural peripheries apart from the centrality of European unionisation. In this way, it even spurs a discussion of the similarity and differences between the EU and the European continent, which is also a resilient discussion with regard to the self-image of the countries located within the British Isles. Consequently, these genre variations are envisioned as flexible and (con)temporary forms of pragmatic genre agreements between creatives, producers, critics, and audiences. They entail no fixed or inherent meaning as such, as they may be adopted by any of these players, also entailing migration from one artistic field to another medium (e.g. from literature to TV series), from one geographic region to another (e.g. Spanish iterations of Nordic Noir), and eventually into academic discourses (such as this one). To some extent, such a flexible terminology is tied to momentary discursive performances rather than deep generic semantics that endure over time. Although Mrozewicz, for instance, “does not deny the existence of the Eastern noir (meta)narrative or its accuracy,” she maintains that the reference to ‘Eastern Noir’ “freezes history, like a stereotype,

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into one solid block and disseminates ahistorical images irrespective of historical change” (Mrozewicz 2018, 16). It is, in fact, the case that all subregional references to specific noirs of Europe may preserve cultural stereotypes (either internal or external), but the stereotypification may be exceptionally strong in relation to Eastern Noir (Dobrescu et al. 2021). Even if this is the case, we claim that the spatio-generic concepts used in this book, maybe specifically for that reason, need critical scrutiny to disclose the cultural prejudice and bias that may rest within using such concepts. In other words, we do not claim these references to be strictly inter-defined categories, just as the book does not propose a fixed typology for classifying TV crime series. Instead, we consider them as pragmatic labels that may circulate widely in creative, social, and cultural arenas. Once subjected to theoretical inquiry, they may disclose much about the significance of local identities, the diversification of locations in contemporary crime narratives, and subregional ‘takes’ on contemporary societal struggles. In this perspective, such pragmatic genre variations work as reference points for mapping and understanding relationships between peripherality (both literal and metaphorical), locations, and TV crime series. While we dedicate one chapter to each geographical iteration, the following Chap. 2 “The Double Marginality of Peripheral Locations” outlines the theoretical and methodical engine room of the book by describing the way that peripherality becomes a serialised negotiation of place, geography, and marginality. Methodologically, we approach the series from both a productional and aesthetic approach, which involves reflections about how creatives locate series at peripheral locations and why they do so. Theoretically, the chapter introduces the translocal aesthetics of peripherality through new perspectives on, among others, drone aesthetics, scenogeography, the journey narrative, and screened liminality. Together, the theoretical approaches to peripheries on screen present concepts for a further understanding of the practical location placement strategies in European screen industries. With this book, we do not claim to present persuasive solutions for local, national, or regional problems. However, analysing European peripheries in TV crime series presents a range of narrative assessments of the dark shadows cast by the growing scarcity of socio-political cohesion, threats towards democracy, insufficient security, and transborder criminality. On the one hand, understanding the production and representation of European peripheries in TV series provides an engaging epistemological space for cultural understanding, while scrutinising series as placemaking

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events on a local-to-continental scale, on the other hand, assists us, as researchers of culture, in comprehending the social mindset around various European peripheries.

References1 Coviello, Massimiliano, and Valentina Re. 2021. Translocal Landscapes: La porta rossa and the Use of Peripheral Locations in Contemporary Italian TV Crime Drama. Academic Quarter 22: 60–78. https://doi.org/10.5278/ojs.academicquarter.vi22.6601. Dall’Asta, Monica, Natacha Levet, and Federico Pagello. 2021. Glocality and Cosmopolitanism in European Crime Narratives. Academic Quarter 22: 4–20. https://doi.org/10.5278/ojs.academicquarter.vi22.6598. Dobrescu, Caius, et  al. 2021. A Game of Mirrors: Western/Eastern European Crime Series and the Struggle for Recognition. Journal of European Popular Culture 12 (2): 93–102. https://doi.org/10.1386/jepc_00033_1. Doyle, Waddick, and Claudia Roda. 2019. Communication in the Era of Attention Scarcity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. EUR-lex. n.d. Geography. https://eur-­lex.europa.eu/browse/eurovoc.html. Fontaine, Gilles. 2022. Audiovisual Fiction Production in Europe 2020 Figures. Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory. https://rm.coe.int/ audiovisual-­fiction-­production-­in-­europe-­2020-­figures/1680a5d715. Fornäs, Johan. 2012. Signifying Europe. Bristol: Intellect. Forshaw, Barry. 2016. Brit Noir. The Pocket Essential Guide to the Crime Fiction, Film & TV of the British Isles. Herts: Pocket Essentials. Gott, Michael. 2021. Making and Mapping European Border Series: From Bridges and Tunnels to Dark Forests. EuropeNow, special issue European Culture and the Moving Image. https://www.europenowjournal.org/2021/09/13/ making-­and-­mapping-­european-­border-­series-­from-­bridges-­and-­tunnels-­to-­ dark-­forests/. Hansen, Kim Toft. 2020a. Glocal Perspectives on Danish Television Series: Co-Producing Crime Narratives for Commercial Public Service. In Danish Television Drama: Global Lessons from a Small Nation, ed. Anne Marit Waade, Eva Novrup Redvall, and Pia Majbritt Jensen, 83–102. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020b. Nordic Noir from Within and Beyond: Negotiating Geopolitical Regionalisation through SVoD Crime Narratives. Nordicom Review 41 (1): 123–137. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-­2020-­0012.

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Hansen, Kim Toft, and Anne Marit Waade. 2017. Locating Nordic Noir. From Beck to The Bridge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hayes, Dade. 2015. TCA: FX’s Landgraf Believes “Peak TV” Has Arrived. Next TV. https://www.nexttv.com/news/ tca-­fxs-­landgraf-­believes-­peak-­tv-­has-­arrived-­143211. Levet, Natacha. 2020. The Appeal of Local Noir in France: Local and International Crime Fiction. In Researching Transcultural Identity I: production perspectives, ed. Kim Toft Hansen and Lynge Stegger Gemzøe, 14–17. Deliverable for DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives. Lotz, Amanda. 2017. Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library. Martinson, Jaan. 2015. Nordic Noir—The Brand Only for Nordic Crime Fiction?. Talk at the III Nordic-Baltic Literature Forum, 9 April. https://www.norden. ee/images/kultuur/arhiiv/kirjfoorum2015_programme_final.pdf. McNutt, Myles. 2021. Television’s Spatial Capital: Location, Relocation, Dislocation. New York and London: Routledge. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. New York and London: Routledge. Morsch, Thomas, and Valentina Re. 2021. Introduction: European Identity in Popular Television Crime Series. Journal of European Popular Culture 12 (2): 93–102. https://doi.org/10.1386/jepc_00031_2. Mrozewicz, Anna. 2018. Beyond Eastern Noir: Reimagining Russia and Eastern Europe in Nordic Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pumares, Marta Jiménez. 2020. Audiovisual Fiction Production in the European Union 2020 Edition. Strasbourg: European Audiovisual Observatory. https:// rm.coe.int/european-­fiction-­production-­2020-­edition/1680a206c4. Re, Valentina. 2020. Crime sì, ma “di qualità”: sulla circolazione transnazionale del prodotto televisivo. Imago 9 (21): 169–183. Romanchick, Shane. 2022. Here’s Why You Can’t Keep Up With TV Anymore; Over 550 Original Series Aired In 2021. Collider. https://collider.com/ too-­many-­tv-­shows-­550-­series-­2021/.

CHAPTER 2

The Double Marginality of Peripheral Locations

In this chapter, we introduce the core concepts for the analysis of peripheral locations in European TV crime series. Peripheral locations are marked by double marginality in the sense that the actual shooting locations are situated in the geographical and cognitive periphery of a specific, demarcated territory, while they also become distant locations far away from customary locations of TV series and central production hubs. Simultaneously, such locations are peripheral in terms of both representation and production. Rooted in our approach to the double marginality of peripheral locations, we propose a range of theoretical and methodical perspectives that will contribute to an understanding of how specific, representative European TV series imagine various peripheries on the European continent, including theoretical perceptions of translocal spaces and the aesthetics of peripherality as well as methodical approaches to representation and location/production studies. In line with our aesthetic approaches, we introduce the notion of scenogeography as an understanding of how peripheries may be creatively staged geographies in relation to the journey narrative as a storytelling tool for engagement with concrete peripheries. Finally, we consider how such engagement with peripheral locations may stage cognitive geographical negotiations of screened borderscapes across the continent (both internal and external borders), and how close collaboration with screen production may be regarded as creative placemaking, that is, how TV series’ attention towards screened © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2_2

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peripheries may work as an active ingredient in revising and nuancing spatial connotations around local communities and cultural cohesion.

Peripherality and the Negotiation of Place In scholarly approaches to the notion of periphery, it is customary to acknowledge the fluidity and flexibility of the concept. From perspectives on cinematic peripheries and digital peripheries Iordanova et al. (2010, 6) and Szczrepanik et al. (2020, 7), respectively, refer to the concept as “elusive”, while Lotman (2001), in his cultural semiotics, demonstrates how the notion of peripherality implicates an asymmetrical relationship to a pronounced centre. Be it political, ideological, or cultural in Lotman’s own terms, such a centre may be referred to as “the ideal norm” that naturally also implies a “boundary,” which, in itself, is “ambivalent” as “it both separates and unites” (Lotman 2001, 136). For Dobrescu (2019, 8), the relationship between centres and peripheries (limits) in construing a statehood is even a paradox in the sense that a “definite limit, and process of delimitation, the form in which a state border is usually conceived, can acquire the semantic corollary of a cohesive Centre.” The elusiveness, flexibility, paradox, and ambivalence of the relationship between centres and peripheries is also common within sociology where it is frequently used as “a spatial metaphor which describes and attempts to explain the structural relationship between the advanced or metropolitan ‘centre’ and a less developed ‘periphery’” (Scott and Marshall 2009, 71). In this way, ‘periphery’ is, at least, a two-sided reference to the geographical margins of a country or specific territory, and to socio-economically lesser developed areas, countries, or regions, connecting directly to implications of peripheries as marginal to well-developed areas and richer centres. The centre-periphery model is, at root, scalable, as it may refer to local, national, regional, and even global dynamics between cultural and ideological centres and peripheries. In this sense, the periphery becomes a place different from, lesser developed than, at variance from, and spatially removed from specific centres. Centres are often urban capitals/cities and larger urban living areas, while peripheries are regularly rural areas and smaller towns that, at worst, may be marked by what Wacquant refers to as “territorial stigmatization” (2007). For Wacquant, stigmatised territories are often suburban, city-internal areas tainted by poor living conditions and crime, but processes of stigmatisation also apply to the marginalisation of larger geographical territories or regions. However,

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peripheral places are not necessarily tainted and negatively ‘branded,’ but they may often be marked by cognitive distance and lack of attention from centres. On the contrary, however, the elusive characteristics of periphery, as both concept and practice, maintain entrepreneurial opportunities for negotiating the status of peripherality, accepting the flexibility of the term not only in defining it but also in the ways that periphery may be an adaptable signifier open for active redefinition. Just like tainted neighbourhoods and territories may be shaped, managed, and changed, that is, “made better” through “place-development strategies,” writes Healey (2010, 163ff), we intend to highlight how exposure of peripheries through screened narratives may reshape how local environments are envisioned, renegotiating the periphery towards place branding rather than stigmata and marginalisation. In the process of reshaping peripheries, creative industries have increasingly been regarded as “agents of economic, social and cultural change” (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 8), as “drivers of regional growth” (Cooke and Propris 2011, 64; Cucco and Richeri 2013), or as triggers of screen-­ induced local tourist activities (Beeton 2016; Lavarone 2016; Agarwal and Shaw 2018), while specifically media industry studies, rooted in “scholarship in cultural geography and anthropology,” have been concerned with how attention towards “space, place, and the production of culture enriches the context and builds fuller understanding of many major media capitals and regions” (Herbert et al. 2020, 84). Embedded in these research trends, Hansen and Waade propose location studies as a new perspective on the actual placement strategies in film and TV series, combining insights from media production studies and textual/representational studies: Location studies reflect the growing academic, policy and business related interest in places in a global media and consumption culture. Location studies is a specific approach within analysis of media industries and production cultures […] which combines studies of the stylistic and textual features in the series themselves with empirical studies of the people producing and making decisions about the locations in the series. (Hansen and Waade 2017, 54)

Our focus on peripheral locations in crime series continues in the vein of location studies, more specifically the negotiation of the rural/urban relationships as a specific location strategy, but we supplement the general

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attention towards locations with an interest in how specifically peripheries are interpreted and negotiated in selected series from all over Europe. Besides this, we introduce a specific theoretical toolbox for the scrutiny of screened peripheral locations. At the same time, our interest in peripheral locations establishes an opportunity to enhance approaches to location studies with practical perspectives from creative placemaking, which we will return at the end of the chapter. Essentially, we analyse how creative treatments of peripheral location in serial narratives may shape and change the perception of peripheries not only from a local perspective but also on a continental or even global level. The double marginality of peripheral locations reflects location studies’ double attention towards both textual and productional perspectives on the cases in question. With attention towards how both the setting of the narrative universe and actual shooting location are regarded peripheral, already placing a narrative in the periphery establishes a direct negotiation of place. The active choice to set a series at a peripheral setting and choosing to ‘shoot’ the series at a peripheral location is from the start a potent intervention from a broadcaster, streaming service, or production company. Even if the site of production of a series is not the same as the setting of the narrative universe, or even if the universe is fictional, like for instance the British series Fortitude (Sky 2015–18), the Danish series Norskov (TV 2 2015–17), or the Italian Bella da morire (Voiceless, Rai 2020), very often such series are still produced at peripheral locations away from central production hubs. In the above examples, the actual placement of the series was part of the media coverage of the series, indicating that using peripheries as sites of production may become part of creative placemaking from the outset (Davies 2015; Hansen and Christensen 2018; Moschillo 2020). Often the headquarters of production companies and broadcasters are placed at the cultural centres, which means that creatives and producers need to be mobile themselves to reach the periphery as a site of production and location.

Desktop Production Studies and Practical Insights Researching peripheral locations in TV series requires a combination of knowledge about the active placement strategies as well as aesthetic approaches to the on-screen features of the periphery. Before returning to the aesthetic features of peripheral locations below, we need to dwell with our methodical approaches to understanding the practical aspects of

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placing serial drama in the peripheries. The key reason is that analysing cases from all over the European continent imparts a range of natural limitations regarding access to on-site production studies and physical access to creatives and producers behind the series. Firstly, it is incredibly time-­ consuming and expensive to reach production sites of numerous series across the European continent, which means that the breadth of this book would be impossible without accepting varied approaches to production studies. Secondly, during the research and writing period of the book a global pandemic situation has likewise restricted the opportunities for both international and local mobility, serving yet another dominant reason for turning to different ways of accessing empirical material. Of course, especially the first challenge is nothing new in interview-based research, and methodical alternatives to face-to-face-interviews, such as asynchronous email interviewing (Meho 2006), synchronous telephone interviews (Holt 2010), or interviews through internet technologies (Hanna 2012) have been used for a long time. Over two decades ago, Christine Hine pointed out the limitation of ethnography as a research practice still entrenched in an acknowledgement of the empirical sites as literal places that the researcher needs to go to, which according to her “reinforces an idea of culture as something which exists in and is bounded by physical space” (Hine 2000, 58). In a digital age where content from entertainment industries travels fast through online sources, and where international influences and collaboration have become an industrial standard, it appears obvious that material traditionally procured through hard legwork has become obtainable through online sources ready for the researcher to critically scrutinize. At the height of DVD- and BD-distribution, behind-­ the-­scenes footage and interview material was regarded as bonus features on special editions in wholesale distribution, but today such material is frequently published as scripted content through online sites such as YouTube or Vimeo and even through the streaming services themselves. Today, sites such as Entertainment Weekly, Digital TV Europe, The Nordic Film and TV Fund, Cineuropa, and the like, publish open access interviews with creatives, while international and local newspapers and magazines also distribute much of their interview material online (sometimes behind a paywall, but university libraries often have access). In other words, the points raised by Hine a few decades ago are meaningful and applicable to today’s online media industry studies, including opportunities to establish critical insights into TV series through online sources at a time when serial narratives for both broadcasters and streaming services

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benefit from copious cultural attention. Our two-legged approach to the double marginality of peripheral locations rests deeply within desktop production studies as a critical approach to ready-made material available online. Desktop production studies is not our methodical invention, since searching for and handling online material for TV scholars is a common and pervasive technique to access information, but locating empirical material generated by others is rarely directly acknowledged by researchers. Nevertheless, using ready-made data on film and TV predates the present digitised situation, having been one among many other ways to get access to information about specific productions (including interview books and printed magazines since the birth of film). In his approach to production cultures, Caldwell distinguishes between three different registers of so-called deep texts, depending on how accessible such material is: fully embedded, semi-embedded, and publicly disclosed deep texts (Caldwell 2008, 345). Fully embedded material requires professional exchanges, meaning that they in our case should be directly handed over by creatives to scholars. Semi-embedded material holds a middle-ground, as it is often commercial and distribution-based material sometimes used for co-production development or canned sales, but to an increasing degree distribution material is presented online, making it shift towards the publicly disclosed deep texts. Most material available for online access is publicly disclosed for “explicit public consumption” (ibid.) and distributed for a wider readership with specific interest in the creative background of media productions. Altogether, the logics of the deep text registers do not change in desktop production studies, but the ways that scholars may access material have altered significantly in a digital age. Methodically, our approach to desktop production studies also shares a relationship with the web research method online source intelligence, which “focuses on building a deep understanding of how to exploit open source intelligence (OSINT) techniques, methods, and tools to acquire information from publicly available online sources” (Hassan and Hijazi 2018, xix). Desktop production studies share several benefits with this approach: it is cost effective, it is legally less restricted to use already available information, and it is fairly easy to access. At the same time, our method also shares the challenges of open source intelligence: a lot of data may be available, which may question whether or not the researcher accesses the right material, a point that also connects to the reliability of the sources. According to Hassan and Hijazi, these benefits and challenges put emphasis on the fact that such research needs a human effort to establish the right type of

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data for the support of the research questions (ibid., 16–17)—and of course, human effort may generate human error, which necessitates a critically valid approach to the material from the researcher using desktop production studies. For our part, finding data, that is, online disclosed deep texts, is the dominant approach to empirical data, including behind the scenes footage and online distributed interviews with creatives and producers. Generating data, that is, online meetings as well as reception of deep texts through online activities (such as email exchanges), has also been a salient way to establish insights into specific productions and general circumstances. Altogether, much data behind the chapters in this book are either fully embedded or publicly disclosed deep texts, in both cases involving interview material from creatives and producers. In some cases, we have also had access to on-site production studies, for example, the case of the Italian TV series La porta rossa (The Red Door, Rai 2017–2023) addressed in Chap. 4, and in such cases the material is often combined with desktop production studies. Naturally, utilising online material issued with a different agenda than academic scrutiny, such as online magazine interviews, let alone accessing material in various languages across the continent, needs rigorous source criticism. On the one hand, finding or receiving information through email subscriptions, online search engines, or newspaper databases, we need to acknowledge that material has been interpreted by journalists or other publishers to fit the source’s own agenda, both language- and content-wise, while deep texts distributed through video channels are of course deeply scripted communication. Essentially, each case entry about a series has been critically evaluated regarding reliability in relation to both overall source/publisher and individual news perspective/agenda. On the other hand, this appears no different from the codification of “culture as an interpretative system” addressed by Caldwell, that is, how information about the media industries is always “managed and inflected” (Caldwell 2008, 2). Accessing information through online sources adds yet another codification system to the material, which means that we need to be extra cautious with accepting the information as authentic insights into production circumstances. In our defence, however, our main concern is reckoning how peripheries are ‘made’ through serial narratives, including online expositions in producers’ and creatives’ nevertheless ‘corporate scripts.’ This implies that represented peripheries in series and communication about series, in our view, become a part of how creative and communicative placemaking processes take place both as

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part of the ‘texts’ themselves and ingrained in the paratextual context surrounding the series. Desktop production studies assist in unearthing how series, through an array of communicative traces, are intentionally launched and communicatively interpreted, leading directly into critical inquiries of the aesthetic representations of peripherality.

Scenogeography and the Aesthetics of Peripherality Whereas the above section contains insights into periphery as a concept, entailing a methodical approach to peripheral locations from a practical, production perspective, the following passages propose a theoretical approach to the representational and aesthetic treatment of peripheries on screen. Even though our main empirical material concerns TV fiction, we propose the aesthetics of peripherality as a cross-media concept, suggesting ways in which we may also understand cinematic and documentary approaches to the socio-cultural periphery. Spatial sensibilities and landscape iconographies in cinema now stand as an established place studies approach in film studies (e.g. Lukinbeal 2005; Lefebvre 2006; Roberts 2012), including similar interests established in readings of documentary (e.g. Álvarez 2015), while recent scholarly trends have motivated a spatial approach to TV series (Waade 2013; Roberts 2016; Hansen and Waade 2017; Saunders 2021). In his work on Galician culture, Colmeiro (2017, 3–4) registers a shift in the understanding of peripheries much in line with the one proposed above. Firstly, he highlights the core-periphery model, a dichotomy that “privileges the center and marginalizes the periphery,” which has resurfaced at a time when new centres and peripheries have been drawn in the light of new globalised world cultures. Secondly, he also highlights how a “peripheral vision […] can let us see things in a wider context, under a different light which may reveal a bigger and more complex picture.” This shift towards a more nuanced and proactive engagement with the periphery is also the basis on which the recent supplementary shift from urban to more rural settings in European TV series has been founded. Thirdly, Colmeiro stresses how the periphery has been widely associated with frontier experiences, “a border zone where boundaries are porous,” and as “a space of gravitational tensions,” which altogether indicates how borderscapes and conflict may rest in the peripheries, but at the same time it becomes obvious how change may also be brought in from peripheries, a dynamic semiotic negotiation that is also manifest in Lotman’s above-mentioned theory of culture.

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All three modes of peripheral representation are active ingredients in what we would term scenogeography, meaning the performative staging of geographic sensibilities through film and TV.  As scenogeography may refer to all types of geographic staging on screen, we regard it as an umbrella-term that also encompasses the aesthetics of peripherality as specific staging of the geographical periphery. As a contraction, scenogeography indicates how closely the staging and the scenery of a screen production is related to the establishment of a geographical sensibility through the screen, emphasising how technological and visual representation is marked by human agency and intentionality. Here, we identify ‘geography’ as the characteristics of a specific territory, and as a physical and cultural mapping of places, while ‘scenography’ refers to the scenic design of a stage for theatres and screen production. In conflating geography and scenography, scenogeography claims a position where the diegesis of a fiction film or series not only encompass a backdrop setting in which the narrative ‘takes place,’ but also what Waade (2013, 39) refers to as an extra-diegetic dimension, that is, something intangible for the characters and more vividly guided towards the viewers’ visual pleasure and engagement with represented geography and its emotional resonances. In such a way, the geographic sensibilities or affective geographies (Anderson and Smith 2001; Davidson and Bondi 2004) become a built-in feature of the narrative and style of a production, rather than merely presenting a backdrop setting for the story. In the words of Saunders, landscape has become foreground rather than background (Saunders 2021, 69). In appropriating the visual characteristics of a specific place for screened fiction, a site-specific film or a TV series, or a production with highly recognisable locations, does not exactly stage a mapped, navigational understanding of the territory, but rather a site-specific production is more often related to what Álvarez (2015, 63) refers to as psychogeographical landscaping, that is, “a combination of an observational mise-en-scéne with an expository, reflexive and performative commentary.” Since Álvarez focuses on documentary, his notion of commentary is literally an actual voiced commentary rather than the implicit commentary through territorial exposure and scenogeography in screened fiction. Fiction films and series may, nonetheless, engage in a spatial performance through an evocative staging of places and, hence, be no less reflexive than the literal voice-over commentary of documentary. Fiction films and series may comment specifically and directly on places and geography through a stylistic combination of editing, cinematography, soundscapes, and lighting, producing a

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stylistic vocabulary that may be understood as Colmeiro’s “peripheral vision” (Colmeiro 2017) or a peripheral gaze, and as an active performance engaged in using, changing, and reframing the perception of the peripheral location in question. Across the European continent, there are important scenogeographic variations (and obvious socio-cultural and topographic differences) influencing how peripheral locations are shaped in TV series. Yet, a range of aesthetic traits is frequently reiterated through the portrayal of peripheral locations in several series, which generates a translocal sense of place through a shared stylistic approach to establishing locations and settings. As we see only a few expressed relationships between territories that rarely collaborate in media production, such as co-production between creatives from Nordic and Southern European territories, while we may still observe noticeable stylistic and narrative similarities between productions otherwise unrelated from different territories, the relationship between the productions should rather be recognised as cross-territorial inspiration and international streams of influence. Influence may, hence, be understood as “the unrestricted and even ‘un-contracted’ ways that creatives use and consult previous material as inspiration for a new production” (Hansen 2020a, 277). We may, for instance, notice the combination of low-key lighting, a strong female lead, and expressive locative features as an influence from the Danish series Forbrydelsen (The Killing, DR 2007–12) to the Czech series Pustina (Wasteland, HBO 2016), to the Italian series Non uccidere (Thou Shalt Not Kill, Rai 2015–18) and Petra (Sky 2020-), and again to the Galician series O sabor das margaridas (Bitter Daisies, Televisión de Galicia 2018–20). Although not all features are at once applicable to every series placed in peripheral locations, we still notice a range of distinctive and salient characteristics of peripherally located series, appearing in series throughout the European continent, although in a specific production, the characteristics may interact in dynamic variations. The subsequent sections detail key features of peripheral locations in contemporary European crime series, but they may in many cases be valid for other genres and forms of expression too.

Peripheral Panoramas and Drone Aesthetics Peripheral locations frequently encourage slow-paced narratives and cinematography. Placing a narrative at a peripheral location invites creatives to linger with the topography of the place, producing lengthy shots of what

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Lefebvre (2006, 28) refers to as “autonomous landscapes,” which may instigate a protracted, contemplative gaze from the viewer. A combination of longer average shots and the insistence on landscape features as something in and for itself decelerates the narrative pace, often in relation to a serial rather than an episodic structure leaving time for associating spatial qualities and character features. In this way, peripheral locations not only attract attention towards autonomous spatial imagery; they also frequently prompt contemplative panoramas of the literal periphery, for example, imagery of shorelines, mountain-ranges, or extensive meadows, which marks a concrete dividing line between that which is inside and that which appears outside. This may be a literal border separating political territories, such as countries, or it may present internal local or regional borders, such as demarcation lines between civilisation and hazardous, wild forests or snowy, cold landscapes. In some cases, such imagery shares affinities with what Noël Burch once referred to as “the pillow shot”, or what has been described as “the empty shot” in, for example, the films by the Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu (Duan 2021). This type of shot is void of human interference and transcends “the diegetic flow” of the narrative, and “comes from a worldview outside the tradition of subjective viewpoint and subject-object dualism,” writes Duan. As referenced by Duan, “the empty shot” has been debated regarding its cultural affinities to either Japanese cinema or Western modernism, which is a discussion not suited for our theoretical outline. However, what Duan refers to as “its invocation of a profound sense of communication with universal existence that is much larger than our little self” (ibid., 349–51), that is, a profound existential depth embedded in spatial imagery, finds a recognizable counterpart in the extra-diegetic spatial/landscape imagery in contemporary TV series. When autonomous images are used as so-called breakers between scenes/ sequences or as evocative interstitials in the narrative, it naturally serves as locative aesthetics, but the recurrence and persistent insertion of ‘empty’ landscapes or place imagery insists on the images as something more than mere locative features, and in some cases appear as “empty shots” of vast landscapes or empty spaces before or after the appearance of human presence. Such spatial imagery has generally become so common in series produced at peripheral locations that we should regard them as the production of a translocal space, that is, a parallel localisation trend in series produced in many different production cultures that results in conventional stylistic treatments of various places.

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The conventionality of the peripheral panoramas is commonly combined with character-on-periphery imagery (characters situated on the literal periphery), which shifts the spectatorial mode from what Lefebvre refers to as the “spectacular” to a “narrative mode”, emphasising how the peripheral panoramas represent the mood of the character in relation to the atmosphere of the drama rather than purely autonomous properties of landscape. Character-on-periphery scenes most often appear in the series at times of great quarrel or turmoil, often at a point-of-no-return for the lead character or times when great decisions need to be made, reflecting the liminality of both place and character’s mind. These three stylistic features—slower narratives, literal peripheries, and contemplative characters—are often dynamically intertwined and may, throughout a series, be stressed interchangeably from narrative/character engagement to autonomous spectacularism. One specific stylistic feature that has risen quickly during the past decade is drone aesthetics as a new mode of aerial cinematography (Dorrian and Pousin 2013). Historically indebted to military reconnaissance, warfare, and surveillance, and cinematically/visually/photographically rooted in expensive aerial airplane or helicopter shots, drone technology has become cheaper through extensive technology distribution and popular vernacular usage. This has resulted in drone cinematography as a new subdivision in film and TV production, including add-on enterprises surfacing to service the demand for drone aesthetics in new media productions across many genres. Drone imagery has become common in media production from amateur footage and local news production to very expensive drone technology in large-scale film and TV production. Drone aesthetics is not something uniquely employed in depicting peripheral locations; rather it signals a radical change in the sensorial approach to cinematography, which then has had a specific and significant impact on how peripheries are portrayed on screen. Naturally, new technology with the ability to position the frame differently proposes new representational perspectives on the depicted scenery, but to some extent such depictions resemble other types of aerial photography and cinematography, such as gliding views from airplanes or even satellite images. The navigational flexibility of a much smaller drone operated by remote control contrives new opportunities for aerial aesthetics, resulting in drones becoming what Jensen, by way of Don Ihde, refers to as an “epistemology engine,” that is, “how particular technologies and artefacts may be tied to particular ways of knowing the world.” In other words, the

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drone as a piece of technology has changed how we know the world and what we know about the world: “If the drone is an epistemology engine,” Jensen continues, “this will not only mean that it renders new ways of seeing the world ‘naturalised’ after some time. It also carry [sic!] repercussions for the epistemologies of knowing the world, and ultimately the ontologies related hereto” (Jensen 2020, 423). Judging from the omnipresence of drone imagery in popular media, such drone aesthetics have now already become naturalised and a full-fledged aesthetic approach, providing a visual alternative to drones’ oft-mentioned warfare and power connotations (e.g. Avezzù 2017; Campbell 2018). In fact, drone images also carry along a sensibility or a viewer positioning that reiterates the bird’s eye view of seventeenth Century cartography (which was, of course, also tied to representations of power), and a more romanticised viewer perspective from eighteenth Century landscape painting (Castro 2009). Therefore, presenting peripheral locations through drone aesthetics, which has become part of the common stylistic vocabulary, engages in, at once, a banal recognition of the beauty of the imagery and a complex negotiation of place qualities, power relations, and topographical epistemologies. In contrast to the hand-held camera, the navigational ease of the drone presents attractive possibilities for local branding models, including destination marketing (e.g. Stankov et al. 2019), as well as new aesthetic directions for displaying place and character in new constellations. The drone has the capacity to trespass boundaries in ways humans are incapable of. Horizontally, drone framing may visually navigate and transcend the literal periphery, often indicating awe and belittlement of mankind and narrated characters. Drones may also navigate the vertical, gravitational boundaries, presenting the scenery from airborne perspectives unachievable for humans by themselves. In this way, drone shots have incentivised an increase in landscape images without human participation (place for the sake of place), while they are just as often used to depict the atmosphere of a narrative or the placement of a character (place for the sake of character). The gliding, autonomous caress of peripheral landscape grandeur through drone aesthetics (often also as ‘breakers’ throughout a series) provides a stylistic alternative to cinematic connotations of violence, blockbuster spectacularism, and “sensory assault” (Christiansen 2017). In contrast, drone aesthetics also comprises more subtle and fundamental locative features, a picturesque non-human sensoriality, and new attractive and flexible opportunities for camera movement. According to Hollman (2020, 58–64),

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“drone photography shows its audiences a nature that they already know and that they have already seen but in a new way.” Drone images are, she states, “reshaping our geographical imaginations,” which ties together Jensen’s idea of the drone as an epistemology engine and the ways in which there may be an aesthetic push-back strategy in presenting the natural splendour of a local topography through screens. Altogether, popularised drone aesthetics have changed the way that local environments and peripheral places are portrayed through film and TV series.

Landscapes Iconographies and the Journey Narrative In geopolitical and public debates about local, national, and international interrelationships, the cultural dynamics in the centre-periphery model are often repeated, indicating that the model represents a genuine challenge while, at the same time, encouraging a discursive acknowledgement of its existence. In addition, the centre-periphery complex is echoed in how we may approach the notion of a landscape. Even if Waade (2020a, 245) stresses that “landscapes are not exclusively natural landscapes, but also include city panoramas, heritage sites, museums, architecture, industrial cityscapes, harbours, and everyday sites that represent a city, a region, or a nation”, the word landscape still holds a range of connotations connecting the landscape to rural, natural spaces. According to Oxford English Dictionary (2021), ‘landscape’ holds a double meaning as both an artistic and a geographic term: Firstly, it is a “picture representing natural inland scenery” and the “background of scenery in a portrait or figure-painting,” indicating a relationship with our facile distinction between ‘place for the sake of place’ and ‘place for the sake of character.’ Secondly, ‘landscape’ presents a “view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance from one point of view; a piece of country scenery,” overseeing a “tract of land with its distinguishing characteristics and features,” which per definition positions a viewpoint with a specific perspective on topographic features of the land. With such references to natural and country scenery, landscape clearly still maintains a rural discourse and references to natural surroundings, and in this way the contradistinction between landscape and cityscape reaffirms the difference between peripheral/rural and central/urban locations, maintaining landscapes as an especially peripheral location feature (even if it is just the landscape periphery of a city). In other words, landscape iconographies appear particularly meaningful in comprehending how the periphery is portrayed and

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negotiated through screen representation, just as it may explain the extensity of landscape imagery in series produced at peripheral locations. Typically, landscapes on screen possess some of the same logical features as a location or place. Firstly, landscapes may be presented autonomously, or in relation to the narrative and characters of the drama, presenting a code from which the viewer may decode the atmosphere of the narrative and the emotional state of the main characters. Secondly, landscape iconography holds a romantic reference to natural awe or aesthetic qualities, emphasising how preserving a central viewpoint from which to gaze at the landscape implicates the cognitive acknowledgement of appreciating the landscape for something appraised in and for itself, that is, the autonomous perspective. This perspective is historically rooted in landscape painting, further accentuated and exploited in modern touristic communication, and finally usurped in contemporary screen location placement and place branding strategies. Finally, ‘landscape’ implicates yet another double meaning, an understanding that may be noticed through Benediktsson’s distinction between landscape as scenery (replicating the common-sense idea of landscape as something to be looked at from a viewpoint) and landscape as territorial polity (Benediktsson 2007, 206–7). This is a distinction also noticed by Waade who highlights how “landscape includes a particular gaze and a power relation” and that “landscape is not just a piece of land, an empty sign, but rather a cultural instrument for people and nations to demonstrate ideas, power, and ideologies.” Waade exemplifies this relationship between the scenic and political landscape through the Swedish-French TV series Midnattssol/Jour polaire (Midnight Sun, SVT 2016), which takes place in the Swedish part of the cultural region Sápmi, partly inhabited by Sámi people, stressing how the series provides a “visual clash between the landscape’s beauty and the detrimental industry” (Waade 2020b, 48–49). In this way, appropriating the landscape’s characteristics for a TV series may probe the correlation between the geographical imaginations of a specific landscape scenery while implicating a socio-political or geopolitical dimension through the treatment of place. This is obvious in series taking place in politically uncertain and maybe insecure territories, such as an island outside the West African coast as in the Spanish-French series Hierro (Moviestar+ 2019) or the Bieszczady Mountains by the Ukrainian-Polish border in Wataha (The Border, HBO 2014–2020). However, series may also—through the exploitation of landscape—investigate a peripheral political dimension in more subtly treated landscapes, such as how the peripheries of Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Italy,

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and Norway have been portrayed as places that you go to (or move to) from an outside, central place. To name but a few, we see this in series like DNA (TV 2 2019), La trêve (The Break, La une/France 2 2016–2018), Bitter Daisies, Rocco Schiavone (Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone, Rai 2016-) and Monster (NRK 2017), respectively. Restating the centre-­ periphery dynamics by having an outside detective travel or move to the crime scene to assist local forces of limited means implicitly holds a political stance towards the provinciality of the location. In series narrating the periphery, we claim that such a narrative perspective confronts an undisclosed relationship between the specific locative landscape and the journey to the location. On the one hand, this mimes the actual movement towards a peripheral location practised by creatives and producers themselves going to the location, but on the other, it steers the narrative into ancient, mythic waters by keeping a grip on the classical trope of what Janis P. Stout (1983) calls “the journey narrative”. For popular screenwriting, Vogler (1998) refers to the journey as a “mythic structure,” while Joseph Campbell (1949) applied the concept of “the monomyth” to what he referred to as “the hero’s journey,” both indicating the journey as a root narrative from which to build new stories of travel: “The one formula that is never exhausted,” according to Frye (1957, 57). Perhaps, the journey holds its most popular iteration in the fantasy genre’s travel narrative and in cinema’s road movie variation, but the frequent dislocation of the protagonist from centres to peripheries in contemporary European crime series, hence, stands on the shoulders of centuries of storytelling about journeys into the unknown and back to the known, a trope that in many ways mirrors the epistemological, investigative structure of a crime story. In an abstract sense, writes Nestingen (2005, 292) about the road movie, “dislodging the subject from an immanent social context, journey narratives imply that a transcendental distance (cultural, economic, political, religious) can be attained, which leads to deeper understanding and perspective.” Essentially, mobility and movement into the unknown nurtures insights and new ways of seeing things, which yet again returns to the way that reworked aesthetics of the periphery may change the way that the periphery is perceived, that is, change the geographical imagination of a location through narrowing cognitive distances through the dislocation of the protagonist. In a less abstract manner, the journey narrative in crime series is frequently presented in conjunction with images of the actual movement, including images of travelling through the landscape, vertically lifting the viewpoint over the

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landscape (a literal transcendental distance, if you like) through wide drone imagery with or without the protagonist, through airborne travel through the air, or focalised through the protagonist driving/cycling/ walking through the environment. In Twin Peaks (ABC 1990–1991), a very good, yet mimicking, example of the platitude and recognisability of the dislocated detective in TV crime narratives would be the illustrious travel images of agent Cooper going to Twin Peaks while revealing to ‘Diana’ that “I’ve got to find out what kind of trees these are.” The mimicry of Twin Peaks comes with Cooper’s explicit fascination with the landscape. Although writing from the perspective of American literature, Stout’s overall conceptualisation of the journey holds several defining traits that we recognise in contemporary European crime series: “The journey is a convenient form for fiction because its parameters are so obvious and at the same time so flexible” (Stout 1983, 13). Stories of going to the periphery are numerous in crime narratives and have become an easily identifiable crime trope, but in many cases, the journey narrative in crime narratives is combined with a more specific type of journey narrative: the homecoming narrative. While most of Stout’s examples specifically relate to American migrants returning to Europe, her defining traits of ‘the return’ also apply to peripheral crime narratives where the protagonist/ detective may return to his/her peripheral hometown after having moved from the periphery to the urban centre. In the above-mentioned Danish-­ French series DNA, the detective moves from the capital to the periphery for a quiet position as local policeman after the loss of a child and breakup of his marriage; in The Break, detective Yoann Peeters leaves Brussels to return with his daughter to his small hometown Heiderfeld following the death of his wife; in the German-Romanian series Hackerville (HBO 2018), the cyber-crime detective returns from urban Germany to peripheral Romania not only to solve a transnational crime, but the plot also re-­ opens her personal family migrant issues; in the Swiss series Wilder (SRF 2017-), the protagonist returns home to a rural mountain village in commemoration of her lost brother, but ends up investigating a local murder and in the process discovering unfamiliar insights into her own family ties. In this way, the periphery may often be directly associated with past trauma, conflict, or personal anguish, and even in some cases the displaced protagonist is transferred to the periphery or hometown for disciplinary reasons, indicating the periphery as a punitive place. In the second season of The Killing, for instance, the detective Sarah Lund has been degraded

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and transferred to the periphery as a border guard, due to disciplinary reasons, and part of the narrative focuses on her reintegration into a new investigation. The homecoming crime narrative has become a widespread storytelling device that may incentivise different levels of conflict above and beyond the key crime/investigation plot, but the amount of homecoming narratives may also indicate a tacit socio-political approach from the writers of crime series towards the periphery: a peripheral location is not just a place where you are, it is a place that you go to. Hence, Stout’s identifiable characteristics of ‘the return’ in American literature may also explain the homecoming narrative taking up so much attention in European crime fiction. For Stout (1983, 66–68), “the return home signifies defeat, frustration, the giving up of freedom. At best it is a disappointment.” The return also maintains “the opposition between the sophisticated city and the virtuous countryside [and] the value-laden opposition of rural and urban scenes.” Coming home in crime narratives is often associated with loss (for instance, the loss of close relatives, even children) or with unresolved personal issues, representing an opportunity for past defeats and disappointments to become a subplot to the main crime narrative. What was once left behind by the protagonist is now “approached with distrust, diffidence, and nostalgia, the sense of returning to a lost home,” continues Stout. The crime stories’ reprise of the personal cognitive difference between the old peripheral home and the new urban home becomes a metonymic articulation of the political and mental separation of centres and peripheries across the European continent. As a specific type of journey narrative, the homecoming narrative naturally proposes an opportunity to investigate the geographical imagination of specific places, accentuating landscapes and place-specific imagery as emblematic of the protagonist’s re-experience of peripherality. In this way, landscapes and “locative panoramas” become evocative imageries “which the viewer can invest in and relate to at sensual and emotional levels” (Hansen and Waade 2017, 177): “The distinct use of rural areas in mobility scenes and contemplative situations indicates an evocative closeness between the surrounding natural landscape and the inner life of […] the main character” (ibid. 193). In many crime series, the landscape’s bleakness, the despondent liminality of place, and the literal standing-on-the-­ edge of a demarcated territory may represent the nostalgic sense of loss for the returned protagonist, often paraphrased by a melancholic or gloomy soundscape, underlining an interpretation code for the viewer’s comprehension of the state of mind of characters and the atmosphere of a series

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in general. On the one hand, this function may be a mere complex reproduction of the cinematic rain metaphor (when it rains, the protagonist is sad), but it may also, on the other, be a much more general stance towards current socio-political climates, highlighting how landscapes on screen may insert a contemplative mode of social criticism in the spatiality of crime narratives. As Saunders points out, “the current televisual turn towards landscape serves as an indispensable element of meaning-making in a world in transition” (Saunders 2021, 135). Within the narrative, the protagonist, of course, makes meaning of the current crime under investigation as well as the potential personal ordeals of the drama, but the dwelling landscape iconography and bleak beauty of the imagery in contemporary European crime series may also invite viewers’ contemplation towards more pressing local social issues or wider geopolitical controversies. In this way, writes Saunders (ibid. 11), “landscapes are also key components of popular geopolitical cultural production,” instituting the protagonist of crime narratives as an embodied image of broader social, political, and geographical concerns such as the geography of wealth distribution and the territoriality of borderscapes.

Screened Liminality and European Borderscapes Just like the detective may present an embodied image of broader issues, other characters in crime narratives may also illustrate geographic liminalities, borderscapes, and margins within and beyond the European continent. Famously framed by the Swedish-Danish series Bron|Broen (The Bridge, SVT/DR 2011–18) in which two halves of dead bodies with different nationalities were placed on the literal border between Sweden and Denmark, the borderscape and liminality of the nation-state are directly articulated and embodied by the dead bodies on the bridge, including alleged ties to the perpetrator’s social critique. As noticed by Saunders, transnational bodies (born in one country, living in another) may occur “‘stuck’ between these spaces” of borderland interstices (2021, 123), embodying the literal “liminal zones shaped by regimes of mobility/ restriction, inclusion/exclusion, and threats/opportunities” such as “territorial frontiers, international boundaries, demarcated social spaces, bridges, bodies of water, etc.” (ibid. 8). For many European transnational co-productions, an articulation of such borderscapes appears straightforward as the creative rationale behind the collaboration between producers from different territories. For instance, both the transborder plot and the

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composition of the investigation teams in the high-profiled European co-­ production The Team (ZDF, SRF, ORF, vtm, DR, SVT, FOX 2015–18) directly represents the co-producing partners; in the above-mentioned series Midnight Sun, the transnational composure of the production is not only iterated through the nationality of the collaborating detectives (French and Swedish), but the specific conflict in the series about nationhood and belonging is also ‘embodied’ through the ethnicity and transculturality of the two main characters. Crime series taking place in the peripheries of European territories, then, may articulate, negotiate, and reimagine such borderscapes and geographic boundaries through the aesthetic treatment of the locations as well as the employment of specific stories about being-in, staying-at, going-to, or even infringing the peripheries (Gott 2021). Saunders approaches the treatment of deadly borderscapes in crime series through the notion of ‘liminality,’ that is, the in-between spaces that appear when borders meet and intersect, and for him, the quintessential example is the “hybrid and liminal world” of The Bridge (Saunders 2021, 111). Borders kill, writes Saunders, because borders (in fiction and reality) may emphasise differences or conflicts that have been triggered by borders as geographical dividing lines. Even if that is true, liminality may work on many different levels, maintaining the production of conflict, or as Bjørn Thomassen (2014, 91–92) writes: “Liminal places can be specific thresholds; they can also be more extended areas, like ‘borderlands’ or, arguably, whole countries, placed in important in-between positions between larger civilizations.” For Randall Halle, liminality can be construed as an interzone, “an experience not limited to geographic cartographic proximity but rather an ideational space, a sense of being somewhere that unites two places, if even only transitionally or temporarily”, where Europe is precisely experienced as a “moment of productive transit in the interzone” (Halle 2014: 4–5). For Thomassen, spatial liminality works on three interrelated levels from specific places (such the doorway as a threshold), across areas, zones, and ‘closed institutions’ (such as specific border areas or airports), to countries, larger regions, and continents, and may be articulated through the literal geographical space but also through the embodiment of the individual. Spatial liminality, then, produces a “paradoxical state, both at the individual and the societal level,” but the scalability of liminality, in Thomassen’s interpretation of the concept, highlights how the liminal may be articulated and represented on varied geographical and spatial levels, including territorially internal liminality. From individual

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embodiment to large-scale geopolitics, liminality produces tension and conflict through its inquiries into differences, and when the periphery is negotiated as a liminal borderscape—of which, of course, there are many across the European continent—liminality becomes a narrative engine that incentivises stories of transborder crimes, bodies, and conflict. On a European scale, external liminality refers to the borderscapes in outer limits of the continent, while internal liminality pronounces the various borderlands across Europe, including specific country borders. On a national scale, external/internal liminality may designate the demarcation lines of a national construction and geographical imagination as well as the domestic peripheries of a nation. Essentially, liminality becomes a flexible term that produces an interpretation of the limits and margins of a specific geographical territory. Screened liminality is an important feature of the aesthetics of peripherality, and it is closely tied to the trope of the journey narrative. Stories about migration from outside Europe and in, or internally within Europe, for instance, have become a potent theme in European crime series, for example, The Team, The Border, Hierro, and Midnight Sun. The second season of The Team departs from crimes committed in the liminal marshland of Southern Denmark and Northern Germany, connecting a local, liminal transnational European territory with the global refugee crisis; a liminal landscape that has been thoroughly interpreted through romantic landscape paintings too. In relation to another example, ZDF Enterprises, the international distributor of the Polish series The Border (with the US title The Pack), even brands this series through its articulations of liminality. The series, they state, “tells the story of people on the borderline—the border of the state (the external border of the European Union), the border between the worlds of rich and poor, and the border of ethical dilemmas and choices” (ZDF 2014). In both series, the perils and logistic issues with mobility across the border are emphasised through largescale images of the trackless, natural landscapes, indicating that competencies of reading the lay of the land and cultures are very much needed in order to survive such difficult liminal territories. The liminality of the landscape produces a sense of existential liminality through the danger experienced by the characters and people portrayed in the dramas. As we have outlined elsewhere, “placing stories in peripheral locations tends to stimulate stories about being in the periphery, including what lies beyond borders (external liminality) as well as being away from the symbolic centre of the nation (internal liminality)” (Hansen and Re 2021, 60). This distinction

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between external and internal liminality is important in our approach to crime series from the European continent, since the basic notion of Europe as a region, including the European Union and other transnational institutions of political regions, holds both internal and external borderscapes, something obviously expressed through seeking out several internal borders within the continent while, at the same time, debating the external border of Europe and political construction of Europeanness through series at the politico-cultural border of Europe, such as the Russian-­ Estonian The Bridge-remake Мост|Sild (The Bridge, NTV 2018-) or the Finnish series Sorjonen (Bordertown, Yle 2016–19). Essentially, by debating, representing, and narrating the internal and external borders and borderlands of Europe, the series studied in this book—and many other crime series—become part of a discursive practice that maintains, reconstructs, and conveys the borderscapes of the European continent.

Televisual Geography as Creative Placemaking When series in this way participate in and directly influence the debates and discussions of the peripherality, marginality, and borderscapes of Europe, the series become an embedded part of creative placemaking on both a local, national, and continental level. On the one hand, the contemporary active engagement in the production of series by institutions that traditionally have been unconcerned with producing TV, such as municipalities and other public administrations, has changed the way that TV engages with place and placemaking. Such direct creative placemaking through public TV co-production should be, in the words of Courage, “understood as something that marries public and private, that has fiscal benefits as well as social and cultural ones” (Courage 2021, 219). Here, Courage is not directly working with TV production, but rather a general consideration of creative placemaking, but her blend of public and private interests tallies markedly with that of current TV production environments. On the other hand, when series participate thematically in specific cultural or geopolitical constructions of geographical imaginations, that is, without direct fiscal engagement, such series are nevertheless embedded in indirect creative placemaking. As noticed by Saunders, “a substantial proportion of televised series has become relevant to quotidian geopolitical understanding(s) and geographical imagination(s), arguably more so than any time since the advent of the medium” (Saunders 2021, 16). There is a gradual transition between direct endeavours by public administrations

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into TV production and indirect engagement with it, and the meeting point between the two may occur at different stages. The direct policy engagement with and creative placemaking by a local Western Danish municipality in relation to the Danish peripheral crime series Hvide Sande (White Sands, TV 2 2021-) is an example of the rising number of municipal co-productions of a TV crime series, while the consecutive spin-off tourism activities in Dorset based on the UK series Broadchurch (ITV 2013–17) show an indirect reaction to the successful series after the broadcast of the series. The most indirect mode of creative placemaking is at work when a series merely thematically interprets and influences the geographical mentality of a specific place rather than integrating specific fiscal incentives in a local production. Basically, the aesthetic interpretation of places becomes a discursive part of how practitioners, creatives, viewers, and communities on different levels understand and identify places. While there is a markedly urban consciousness weaved into the fabric of creative placemaking, something implicitly emphasised by the continuous references to ‘urban’ and ‘cities’ in Courage’s (2021) brief introduction to the concept, a rural counterpart has also surfaced as an indication of how rural, peripheral places may actively be engaged in creative placemaking. Nicodemus (2014, 2), one of the coiners of the term, has highlighted that through “creative placemaking, diverse stakeholders strategically shape their rural communities around arts and cultural activities.” Rural creative placemaking shares defining traits with its urban counterpart, but rather than proposing gentrification purposes and post-industrial rebranding processes, such “efforts to preserve and enhance rural communities’ living cultural legacies can pay dividends in terms of economic resilience, fellowship, cultural exchange, and physical revitalization,” writes Nicodemus. “Creative placemaking offers asset-based tools to meet community challenges and direct change.” In this book, we show how fictional series have become an active ingredient for peripheral locations in addressing such community challenges and broader spatio-cultural issues in creating cultural exchange. For local administrations, national policymakers and transnational policy instruments, TV series produced at peripheral locations have become symbolic resources for refashioning the local sense of place, or even changing the downward discursive spiral about territorial stigmatisation, economic devaluation, and mediocre reputation. Within the aesthetics of peripherality, the screened and serialised margins generate a symbolic peripherality in the way that series combine aesthetic attention

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towards original and less-used peripheral locations with socio-cultural and ethnographic sensibility towards place. Presuming that spaces are transformed into places through “experience, a creation of feeling and thought” (Tuan 1977, 9), screened symbolic peripheries become what Low and Lawrence-Zuñiga (2003, 13) refer to as inscribed spaces, which “implies how humans “write” in an enduring way their presence on the surroundings [and] how people form meaningful relationships with the locales they occupy, how they attach meaning to space, and transform “space” into “place”.” The most obvious example of inscribed places is architectonic space (buildings and other human physical constructions literally inscribed into spaces), which surely may perform as actual shooting locations of series. Though, for Low and Lawrence-Zuñiga inscribed spaces and meaning-making practices also involve ethnographic categories such as landscapes as place and narrating space, imbuing localities with meaningful, socio-cultural connotations. Physical locations, ambient landscapes, and serial narration may, in combination, be a powerful creation, re-negotiation, or re-appropriation of the symbolic peripheries at a double level. First, serial narratives may represent “mediated spatial experiences” in the sense that they mediate emotional and cognitive spatial sensibilities, thus initiating processes of co-creating of “affective atmospheres” (Martini and Minca 2018) and “places of imagination” (Reijnders 2011). Secondly, mediated spatial experiences may transform into lived experiences through forms of screen tourism where the viewer/visitor “is able to extend the productivity of his or her affective relationship with the original text, reinscribing this attachment within a different domain (that of physical space) which in turn allows for a radically different object-­ relationship in terms of immediacy, embodiment and somatic sensation” (Hills 2002, 114). In this way, mediated spatial experiences become engrained in the fabric of the interpretation of place as an extension or augmentation of reality, that is, an extra layer of meaning attached to local environments. In close relationship with the above-mentioned journey narrative, the etymology of the ‘landmark’ highlights several ties between inscribed spaces, narrating space and the physical location. For centuries, landmarks have been used for navigation (e.g. seamarks, milestones), but new meaning has been attached to the ‘landmark’ as it also means something directly associated to a specific place (e.g. a church tower or skyscraper). In addition, the landmark holds the meaning of a boundary mark (e.g. a country flag at a border crossing or even a boundary post between two cadastres).

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Historically, a ‘landmark’ means an object marking the limits of land, hence a literal indication of liminality, tying back to the above understanding of borderscapes as well as the combined meaning of landscapes as both splendour and power. The symbolic periphery, then, comprises inscribed, narrated spaces with potent socio-cultural connotations about demarcation lines that, in themselves, are directly associated with landscape iconographies and the opportunity to use narrative fiction as symbolic resources for policymakers at different levels. In this fashion, creative placemaking and cultural policymaking become closely entangled, indicated by the fact that both conceptions involve the active undertaking of ‘making something’ with either creative outputs or policy objectives. Three examples from three different geopolitical levels may illustrate the association between the two: EU’s Creative Europe TV programming scheme, national public service content, and local screen policies. Naturally, cultural exchange is the guiding principle behind various transnational funding programmes, such as EU’s TV programming scheme within the Creative Europe programme, incentivising collaboration and distribution across and beyond Europe on a very broad geographical policy level (cf. Bengesser and Hansen 2022). This type of screen policy actively ‘makes’ a continental space through references to ‘the European dimension’ in the evaluation criteria, something applicants need to address to be taken into consideration by EU’s reviewers of the co-­ funding applications. On a national level, many European countries offer public service content for the general public, some publicly funded and some on a commercial basis, but all public service remits contain specifically national policy obligations for the audiovisual service providers, including responsibilities to also cover, reach, and represent the specific national peripheries. In this way, national media policies and the resultant public service catalogues, including profiled fictional series, engage directly and communicatively in creative placemaking, which may be noticed in the upsurge of place-specific series produced or commissioned by public service providers, including the increase in series taking place in peripheral locations. On a local administrative level, it has become commonplace to have a screen policy or to be engaged in multilocal associations with the intention to attract local screen production to the local environment, for example, the set-up of regional screen agencies by the UK Film Council such as Screen Yorkshire or Northern Film & Media, The Galician Agency for Cultural Industries in Spain, the Italian Film Commissions association, or even local municipalities’ increasing interest in local screen policies. In

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fact, the far majority of the series mentioned in this book have in different ways and to different degrees been co-produced or co-funded by agencies or public service providers, maybe even with fiscal contributions from all three levels mentioned here. In other words, the close connection between serial fiction production and public funding practices infuses the series analysed in this book with creative placemaking practices instilled in the spatial dimensions of screen policies across the continent. Finally, the rise of global streaming services in Europe has changed what Lobato (2019, 100) refers to as “the geography of internet television.” For Lobato, this has mostly to do with the infrastructure of television distribution through web-based services, which makes the perspective slightly skewed in relation to the literal geographical focus in this book. However, the way that Lobato ‘rethinks the transnational’ in the light of internet television has repercussions for the way that geographical imaginations are recalibrated by new distribution methods for TV series. While the local-to-transnational policymaking practices reflect different geographic levels of creative placemaking activities, streaming services such as Netflix and HBO also engage directly in making places through a specific and localised way of producing content. Until the launch of HBO Max in 2021, HBO Europe’s market model was designed for specified sub-­ regions of Europe, such as HBO Nordic or HBO Adria, with a commercial interest in creating local content, while specific local series commissioned by Netflix (so-called Netflix Originals) also localise the global content provider in ways similar to localising processes managed by other global conglomerates such as McDonald’s. The localisation and geographical imagination of local Netflix series show a remarkably different logic than the national public service approach; rather than commissioning local content for local viewers, Netflix’s local content serves an international audience at the same time. Even if national and transnational policy incentives, such as the Audiovisual Media Services Directive, motivate local production on the European continent, productions converging with the policy may simultaneously cater an audience dissimilar to the local one. Nevertheless, local productions and localisation strategies have nonetheless been specifically oriented towards local tastes and stylistic variations, which has been especially noticeable in relation to European crime series by global services. For instance, an internationally recognizable Nordic Noir style has been a model for market penetration for both HBO Europe and Netflix in different territories, especially the Nordic region, but also HBO activities in the Eastern European territories (cf. Hansen et al. 2021;

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Hansen 2020c). In this way, streaming services on the market pose a new model for indirect creative placemaking processes (sometimes direct too) and, in this way, they present a model that surpasses the local-­ to-­ transnational policy perspectives and present a different geographic imagination through its over-the-top distribution practice, local production models, and global perception of viewership. This chapter has presented the theoretical and methodical basis on which this book has been built. Firstly, we defined peripheral locations as specific shooting locations in both the geographical margins of a certain territory and located at a production site away from the central production hubs. Secondly, we specified our methodical approach as a combination of production studies and textual/stylistic perspectives on locations, which means working in the nexus between practical understanding of and aesthetic approach to peripheral locations. Thirdly, we spent the main part of the chapter outlining the aesthetics of peripherality through the notion of scenogeography, peripheral panoramas, drone aesthetics, landscape iconographies, the journey narrative (including the homecoming narrative), and finally screened liminality and borderscapes. Fourthly, we returned to the practical perspectives on peripheral locations in establishing a link to symbolic peripheries as creative placemaking. In the vein of location studies, the practical attention towards peripheral TV productions wraps the aesthetic/textual analysis of peripheries on the screen, thoroughly connecting production and textual studies of television.

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Adaptation, Appropriation, ed. Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen, and Jaakko Seppälä, 37–53. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wacquant, Loïc. 2007. Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality. Thesis Eleven 91 (1): 66–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0725513607082003. ZDF. 2014. Wataha—The Pack. https://zdf-­enterprises.de/en/catalogue/international/zdfedrama/series/crime-­suspense/wataha-­the-­pack.

CHAPTER 3

Nordic Noir and Arctic Peripherality in Northern Europe

Nordic Noir has been an influential stylistic variation and a common reference point in international television crime series production during the past two decades. Coined as the title of a British book club, the notion was picked up by critics and popularised as the main title of BBC’s Time Shift documentary Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction (2010) (Agger 2016). However, the geopolitical and geographical shift in the concept from Scandinavia to the Nordics went by slightly unnoticed, since the geographical scope of the reference may be of lesser importance to, for instance, the British press that took the term in as a description of a contemporary tendency in the UK reception of crime narratives from predominantly Sweden and Denmark. The spread of Nordic Noir was unmistakably driven by broad international attention towards the Swedish Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson franchises, and the Danish TV series Forbrydelsen (The Killing, DR 2007–12), all three titles that marked a significant change in international attention towards Nordic crime series (Creeber 2015; Hansen and Waade 2017). While the modified geographical reference was steadily usurped in academic approaches to Nordic crime narratives as a standard reference to narratives about crime in the Nordic region and even beyond, the production of television series in settings and locations all over the Nordic region was slower to catch on. Crime novels by Nordic writers have to a great extent been able to map the climatic, geographical, and demographic diversity of the Nordic region by placing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2_3

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the narratives in a variety of both urban and remotely rural Nordic places, but the increasingly expensive production of international television crime titles as well as costly production in the Nordic peripheries have complicated the representation of the Nordics in its entirety, both rural and urban. Lately, though, diversity in the representation of different Nordic peripheries has entered Nordic crime series with a greater ability to and more profound interest in narrating the fringes of the Nordic region too. While Ófærð (Trapped, RÚV 2015-) decisively put Iceland on the map of international crime series, four specific crime series have marked an entrance into territories untouched by high-end television production, which finally introduced the territories Åland, Greenland, and the Faroe Isles into the long list of television crime series located in different Nordic autonomous territories: The series Tjockare än vatten (Thicker Than Water, SVT/Yle/Viaplay 2014–20) placed the geopolitically autonomous island Åland on the crime map, a location between Sweden and Finland at the entrance of the Gulf of Bothnia that, in itself, holds a peripheral position in relation to the Baltic Sea. Then, the crime thriller Tunn is (Thin Ice, TV 4 2020) was set in Greenland, but mostly shot on substitute locations in Iceland, although it signalled a changed attention towards Greenland as a mediated part of the Nordic region. Nevertheless, it was not until the production of the most recent season of Borgen—Riget, magten og æren (Borgen—Power and Glory, DR/Netflix 2022), which included a production set-up with extensive on-location shooting in Greenland as well as a thriller plot motivating the notion of Arctic Noir, that high-end television utilised Greenlandic sites of production and international geolocation (Grønlund and Redvall 2022). Finally, Trom (Viaplay 2021) was the first crime series with an international production set-up produced in the Faeroe Isles, a series with an obvious emphasis on the peripheral commonwealth relations to Denmark, a concrete locative coverage of Faeroese landscapes, and a concrete negotiation of place, culture, and identity. With these four series, it is now finally viable to refer to Nordic Noir as being truly Nordic and not just set and produced in mostly Scandinavian territories. This centrifugal spread of Nordic Noir from and around the capital cities in predominantly Sweden and Denmark, and with a slight delay in international attention towards Norway and Finland, to peripheral locations throughout the entire Nordic region represents, by itself, an expansive peripheralisation of Nordic Noir to such an extent that we have recently seen new subgeneric tendencies within Nordic Noir, such as the supernatural form in Nordic Twilight (Halskov 2021), the sunny variety in

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blue sky crime titles, and the cold iteration in Arctic Noir titles. This chapter focussed on series above or close to the Arctic Circle. With Svalbard in the far Norwegian north and Greenland in the North-­ West, the Nordic region is by far the largest subdivisional geographical region in Europe, covering more land and water than the whole of continental Europe, and distances farther from southern Denmark to the arctic north than from Denmark to the southern Mediterranean terrestrial territories in North Africa. As features within Nordic Noir, such locative opportunities facilitate a staggering diversity in authentic climate and weather conditions ranging from warmer and sunny peripheries in the ‘blue sky crime’ series to the deadly cold in a range of series set in the arctic territories. Today, Blue Sky Crime is its own brighter, lighter, and sunlit stylistic reaction to the dark and gloomy Nordic Noir variation, often with series produced in peripheral locations such as the Danish series Hvide Sande (White Sands, TV 2 2021-) and Sommerdahl (The Sommerdahl Murders, TV 2 2020-), in the predominantly German series in Swedish Gotland Der Kommisar und das Mehr (The Inspector and the Sea, ZDF 2007-), and the Swedish series Lyckoviken (Hammervik, Viaplay 2020-). On the other end of the climatic parameter, the far northern areas of the Nordic region—including scarcely populated places peripheral almost per definition—have also become a significantly trendy stylistic variation within Nordic Noir. In between the temperate south and the freezing north, we find a substantial number of Nordic television crime series that take place in different types of peripheral locations. This includes inland locations such as Sala in Sweden, which recreates the mythological background of the primaeval forest for the supernatural crime drama Jordskott (SVT 2015–17), and suburban areas around Vargön as the setting for another supernatural crime plot in Ängelby (SVT 2015), both series fitting the aesthetic notion of ‘Country Noir’ very well (cf. Chap. 5). As one of the main titles in the spread of Nordic Noir, the television series Wallander (TV4 2005–13) was specifically instrumental in the way that the Southern Swedish town Ystad was used as a peripheral location and as a border position between Sweden and the Baltic states to the maritime south, an emphasis also reused for the British iterations of Wallander (BBC 2008–16) (Waade 2013). Although the Nordic Noir trend comprises a dominant urban trend, the attention towards Nordic peripheries—for different purposes such as co-funding practices, policy incentives, tourism perspectives, or mere aesthetic interests—has been running as a current for decades and incentivised by a strong literary tradition throughout at least

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Scandinavia to represent different locales as settings for grim crime plots (Bergman 2014). In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the production of television crime series above or close to the Arctic Circle. The Arctic Circle is a latitude that demonstrates a climatic periphery or geographical boundary by itself, which has resulted in an area historically badly represented in popular screen cultures, because the trackless landscapes and scarcely populated areas have made television production both difficult and expensive. However, new regional policies, local production incentives, and an aesthetic and geopolitical interest in the Arctics have given rise to a trend that has been dubbed ‘Arctic Noir’ (Waade 2020; Hiltunen 2021)—a genre variation that has a prevalent position mostly within contemporary Nordic crime narratives, but not reserved to only take place in the Nordic arctic territories (see Image 3.1). In this chapter, we analyse

Image 3.1  Map of the Nordic region with the Arctic Circle passing through the territory. The map contains the most relevant television crime series in settings above or close to the Arctic Circle, ranging from the early iteration in the British series Fortitude (Sky Atlantic 2013–18) to the latest titles such as Catch and Release (Altibox 2021). The outward ‘drift’ towards peripheral locations is much broader in the Nordic region, but this map emphasises the contemporary trends towards production and settings in and around the arctic territories (image made with MapChart/Visio)

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the contemporary and rising interest in producing crime series in the arctic periphery. Firstly, we highlight a distinctive cycle in Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish television crime series towards a utilisation of a specific arctic aesthetics of peripherality, a trend motivated by new policy incentives towards producing in the far Nordic north (for instance, the Finnish Lapland Film Commission, or quite a few different regional North-Norwegian institutions such as Filmfond Nord). Secondly, we analyse three representative television crime series that, in different ways, exhibit different attitudes and stylistic variations of the arctic and the subarctic areas of the Nordic region. The first series, Trom, is a subarctic case set, located and produced in the Faeroe Isles and, through the productional set-up, represents a colonial and peripheral perspective on the Danish commonwealth. The second series, the Finnish Ivalo (Arctic Circle, YLE 2018-), is, through its international co-production model, a good example of a combined local and international gaze onto the arctic cold. From the first to the second season, Arctic Circle changes season from the freezing, white winter to a red-golden autumn aesthetics, which underlines the notable locative variations in Arctic Noir that also includes more vigorous nature and climatic phenomena. The third series, the Norwegian Outlier (HBO 2020), stages a similar climatic aesthetics with brighter summer imagery of midnight sunny arctic landscapes, but implies a return to a dark and gloomy Nordic Noir aesthetics as a potentiation of the dramatic events. All three series represent variations of the journey/ homecoming narrative, a clear narrative motivation for telling crime stories in the arctic territories, as well as climatic and aesthetic differentiation within the trends towards telling stories in the cold Nordic north. While some series in the Arctics have been academically approached, the field is still a less scrutinised area, but the main incentive for including a chapter on series in this territory is that the Arctic Circle and the arctic territories highlight a scenogeographic phenomenon like Arctic Noir not as a specifically local trend, but rather it becomes very clear that using and portraying the arctic periphery is an unmistakably transnational phenomenon. The current production and distribution agreement between the recently started Danish company REinvent Studios (founded by Rikke Ennis, former CEO of TrustNordisk), the Norwegian production company Shuuto Arctic (partnered by creatives Kristine Berg and Arne Berggren), and the production service company/film fund FilmCamp Norway shows how remarkably fast the media landscape has changed and highlight the contemporary interest in producing in the Arctics. The first

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instalment out of four series in the agreement, Catch and Release, recently premiered through the Norwegian media service provider Altibox, while the three additional titles will be produced in and around the same Norwegian territory in Målselv where FilmCamp Norway is located. While the production and funding set-up agreement signals an interest in producing local high-end series for an international audience, the agreement includes no commissioners for the series, which indicates an interest in exploiting the fast-changing media landscape for creative distribution practices. Internet/television services such as Altibox as commissioners of television series is an increasing trend in the Nordic region, while the previous series created and produced by Berg and Berggren through Shuuto also show a combined interest in new distribution channels and the Arctic area. The Arctic series Elven (The River, TV3 2017) was produced for the NENT Group (Nordic Entertainment Group), specifically the Norwegian TV3 channel, at a time when NENT’s pan-Nordic streaming service Viaplay was strategically starting to challenge the position of especially Netflix in Nordic territories, pointing towards increased competition on the streaming market. Innovatively, the series Outlier was commissioned by the Norwegian media group AMedia, a company housing mostly local newspapers, and distributed to audiences in Norway with various local newspaper subscriptions, later distributed through HBO Nordic’s and HBO Max’s transnational streaming service platforms. Both series anticipate the recent production agreement by producing both series in Målselv, while the idea of using the Norwegian Arctics as a specific universe is underlined by tying the two otherwise unrelated series together through similar casts and characters in the police force, essentially establishing seriality across series commissioned by different players in the media market. The subsection below on Outlier reads the series’ placement strategies in relation to the way that series from Shuuto Arctics stages place as a wider productional interest in the arctic Norway. In different ways, Nordic crime series produced in or close to the Arctics utilise landscapes, climate, local infrastructure, the multi-lingual context, and very often the geopolitical and cross-cultural situation in the Arctics become part of the plot. In series like the French-Swedish series Midnattssol/Jour polaire (Midnight Sun, SVT 2016), Outlier, Trapped, Arctic Circle and other different Nordic series, Sami, Russian, and other European languages are used as a marker of the transnational characteristics of the territory, while most of the series establish various negotiations of the vast geographic and cultural distances between central urban areas

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and peripheral Arctic areas. Almost all series, including Twin (NRK 2019), Rebecka Martinsson (TV 4 2017-), The Valhalla Murders (RÚV/Netflix 2020) and more, involve characters going to the local Arctic or Subarctic area for different reasons, often in relation to an investigation, and in series like Twin, Monster (NRK 2017), and Rebecka Martinsson the journey narrative is specifically intertwined with a homecoming narrative that creates additional drama through past trauma and conflict, but at the same time coming home provides an opportunity to tell stories about local existential issues, cultural differences from centres to peripheries, and establish recognisable characters with broader geographical ties also across borderscapes. Such local production with international links secures an opportunity to create storytelling for international producers and audiences while, at the same time, maintaining what for audiences may be interpreted as an authentic approach to the localities in which the series are produced. Upon the launch of Outlier, for instance, Arne Berggren noticed how local audiences in the portrayed region reacted positively to the series: People in the region recognise the characters, the slow pace and the investigation style of the police. They are used to production companies trying to create stories with the Arctic as a background, but they don’t see themselves, so the best feedback we could get was that they could recognise themselves and their own surroundings. (Pickard 2021)

While being a comment on one specific series, it is representative of the more general interest in producing locally/authentically in the Arctics, and Berggren continues to underline the comprehensive, innovative opportunities in Arctic storytelling: It’s either daylight for 24 hours or totally dark. That triggered some new storytelling, and we have to find solutions for productions. It was creatively challenging, so we fell in love with the region and established a production company, Shuuto Arctic, there to give crew, photographers and writers more experience so they don’t have to go to Oslo to work in the business. That was the main reason why we discovered thrillers and stories from the north. (ibid.)

Essentially, Berggren’s point appears to be that producing locally with a keen eye on local colour and attention towards authentic portrayals of the chosen location and settings is a creative stimulation to write and

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produce stories dissimilar from other contemporary television crime series. In the interview with Berggren, journalist Pickard notes that Outlier “might not escape being labelled as the latest Nordic noir series”, indicating that Nordic Noir is something that one needs distancing from, and this way of stressing new, fresh storylines through the change of location highlights that series during the contemporary peak TV situation need modes of differentiation in an overfilled television series market. As we show in this chapter, the Arctics has become one specific way to stand out in a subdivisional Nordic region that has received much attention towards its crime series trends often associated with the brand Nordic Noir. The tagline included in the official international trailer for Rebecka Martinsson—“At the edge of the world”—puts an emphasis on how the practical production of Arctic Noir is happening in the geographical fringes of the Nordic region as well as how the stories springing from the territories also lie in the peripheries of the Nordic countries and territories. As an abstraction of the negotiation of peripherality, the titles of the three case studies below highlight the same border state of the series’ locations: ‘trom’ means edge/fringe/border in Faeroese, something also wired into the fabric of the series through its constant attention towards steep Faeroese fells; ‘outlier’ means a location situated at a distance as well as a person with divergent behaviour, a built-in characteristic that metaphorically associates the location and the main character of the drama; ‘Ivalo’ is an existing small-town in Arctic Finland, but the international titles of the series ‘Arctic Circle’ underlines how the drama takes place in the Nordic or Global cold periphery, and indicates an exotic fascination for the international audience regarding the Arctic Circle in itself. All three series produced in the Arctics include a journey/homecoming narrative and involve an international set-up in both production and narrative, altogether parameters indicative of the contemporary trends towards Nordic Noir.

Trom and the Peripheries of the Danish Realm When news broke that the series Trom would be shot and produced entirely on the Faeroes, one dominant angle on the story was that this series would be the first large-scale Faeroese television series. With almost 1400 square kilometres and just above 50,000 citizens, the Faeroes is one of the world’s smallest countries, part of the Danish Realm (the Kingdom of Denmark) together with Greenland, both countries with established home rule. According to Köppen climate classification, the Faeroes are

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classed as Maritime Subarctic, which gives the 18 islands a milder climate than the extreme cold of the Nordic Arctic territory, but its central position in the North Atlantic Ocean still results in a windy, unpredictable, and cool weather the whole year round, including storms and heavy rain. The series’ Faeroese creator, Torfinnur Jákupsson, highlights this specific peripheral position of the Faeroes as a meaningful setting for both plot and character, reprocessing the logic of Rebecka Martinsson’s tagline: TROM is set at the edge of the world, with our main characters slowly being pushed to their limits as they try and seek redemption for old sins. It is a fictional version of the Faroes, although it does touch on topics that do play out in real life too—a social commentary, wrapped up in a crime story. (Pham 2021)

Trom’s edge-of-the-world-experience started as a working title for the creator but ended up being a peri-textual metaphor for the setting and the characters: “Trom means ‘edge’ or ‘fringe’ in Faeroese. It was fun to portray the Faeroes as the fringe of the world where our characters are pressed towards the edge. It was just a working title, which I planned to change, but everyone liked it” (Bruun 2022). In the end, the basic spatial connotations embedded in the title also resemble other Nordic place-names like Troms or Tromsø in Norway, establishing both a bleak, dark phonetic ring to the title as well as a flexibly recognisable tone for international audiences. Describing the creative and financial backing for the series, Jákupsson thematises the lack of being taken seriously as a television creative willing to produce at peripheral locations in the Faeroes, since “there’s never been a big drama series produced in the Faroes like the ones we know from the rest of the Nordic countries” (Pham 2021). At the same time, the natural lack of financial opportunities from only local sources is an obvious rationale behind both local and international set-up of production. Jákupsson mentions how collaboration with the above-mentioned Danish production and distribution company REinvent Studios changed the pace of financing the series, while the international objectives of Faeroese producer Jón Hammer’s production company KYK Pictures also opened doors for a largescale international co-production. In fact, having a Danish production company in the mix was, according to Jakúpssen, necessary to attract international co-producers and co-financing (Bruun 2022). In many ways, the route from having a dream of a high-end Nordic crime series from the Faeroes resembles, in this way, the story about developing

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the Icelandic breakthrough series Trapped (Hansen and Waade 2017, 248ff). In collaborating with German (ZDF) and French-German broadcasters (Arte), the series maintains already well-established international co-production partners from a long range of profiled Nordic Noir titles, while also co-producing with the Faeroese public service broadcaster KVF. With additional support from transnational media funds (Creative Europe, Nordisk Film & TV Fund), transnational Nordic production service (TrueNorth), tourism industries (Visit Faroe Islands), three local Faeroese municipalities (Runavíkar, Tórshavnar, Klaksvíkar), and both Faeroese and Icelandic ministerial and film institute support, the set-up includes many ‘usual suspects’ in setting up a production like Trom for a combined local and international audience, but at the same time the complexity of quilting together a financial budget like this also shows a remarkably multi-faceted composition of the different both local and international players. Essentially, Trom is a perfect example of a glocal production (Hansen 2020, 87), which fundamentally matches well the transnational strategy of the commissioner, NENT (Nordic Entertainment Group), and their increasingly international streaming service Viaplay (now present in the Nordic region, the UK, the  US  and Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and the Baltic states). Such a glocal production continuously highlights the necessary collaborative measures of a small-nation production like Trom while maintaining an opportunity to also narrate local stories with internationally recognisable characteristics like the crime drama. In the above-quoted interview for Nordisk Film & TV Fund’s news section, Jákupsson accentuates the local characteristics of the drama: “For me, the story is as much as about the Faroes as a setting and community, as it is about the characters inhabiting it. That has played into the themes of the story we’re telling” (Pham 2021). As a rephrased adaptation of crime novels by Faeroese crime writer Jógvan Isaksen, Trom tells the story about the Faeroese journalist Hannis (residing in Denmark) who is contacted by a Greenpeace environmentalist who claims to be his daughter and wants Hannis’ help with unravelling corruption in the Faeroese fishing industries. With the scent of a good news story, Hannis travels to the Faeroes where he lived years ago (homecoming narrative), and when he discovers his daughter dead in the local bay (the literal periphery), he ends up entangled in a murder story with deep ties to his personal backstory. In an interview for Variety, Jakúpsson maintains the focus on the local, spatial sensibilities and the sense of Faeroese peripherality, but simultaneously he

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builds a bridge into larger political issues, essentially connecting the local with the transnational, spatial logics of the series: I’ve always liked those stories that have a very strong sense of place, and the Faroes are a big character in both the books and the series. This mysterious, beautiful but also brutal place, isolated from the rest of the world. The small town community and the culture that comes with that. The culture of silence both as a survival mechanism but also something that can slowly kill you. I also wanted the nature and environment of the Faroes itself to form our characters as much as the other way around, which is where the bigger political topics come into the crime story through the characters we put up against each other. (Linville 2022)

Altogether, the intentions behind Trom—through references to silence culture, local whale hunt, local nature, a dominant fishing industry, local whisky, and so on—claim an obvious connection to local colour and Faeroese identity, but the generic affiliation of the series, and the connection to environmentalist and industrial issues, resonates with internationally familiar topics. One noticeable political topic in both production and final series is the close ties between the Faeroes and Denmark in the Danish Realm. In more than one interview, Jakúpsson refers to the mixed identity of people from the Faeroes. To the Guide to Faeroe Islands, a large Faeroese tourist partnership, he stated that the “Faroese are a people with their own strong identity. At the same time, we’re still part of the Danish Kingdom” (Guide to Faroe Islands 2022), a circumstance also fitting the combined living conditions of Jakúpsson who lives in both the Faeroes and Denmark. To the Danish national newspaper Berlingske, he candidly expresses the cultural situation for Faeroes as “a bit of a schizophrenic, national psychosis.” He continues: We feel like Faeroes, but also as Danes. There are many Danes in the Faeroes—and many Faeroes in Denmark. But it is fifty-fifty among people whether they wish to break away from the realm or not. It is peculiar to grow up forced to make up one’s mind in this way: Are you in? Or are you out? (Ganderup 2022)

Even before the premiere, the sense of Faeroese belonging was critically debated, according to Jakúpsson because the two main characters in the series were portrayed by a Danish cast and spoke Danish in the series

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(ibid.), whereas both characters are native Faeroes in Isaksen’s novels. Crime writer Isaksen, from whose novels the series has been adapted, is also a literary scholar (presently at Copenhagen University), and in his history of Faeroese literature (Isaksen 2017), he sporadically and politely touches upon the dominant Danish rule over the Faeroes, underlining that only very few Faeroese writers have attempted to write only in Faeroese as Danish was the official written language from the Reformation (Isaksen 2017: 60). Although not originally a blatant perception in Isaksen’s novels, this perspective permeates the television series Trom in both ‘text’ and paratext without necessarily being an overall critical point of view. Rather, the postcolonial sensibilities rest in how the police-force needs help from the Danish ‘mainland’ and how characters mutually speak and understand Danish and Faeroese, which, for the majority of Danes, only goes one way, since Danes do not comprehend Faeroese. Historically, the complete Danish Realm (Denmark, the Faeroes, Greenland) has played a minor role in the historical consciousness of Danes in Denmark, and “has never become part of the Danish national self-perception” (Brimnes 2013, 183). This has changed considerably during the past decade with what has been referred to as “the scramble for the Arctics” (Hønneland 2017), which has transformed the geopolitical attention towards the Northern territories of the Nordic region—a situation that has also impacted the geopolitical perception of the Faeroes and the islands’ central position in the North Atlantic. Entitled “Forget Greenland, There’s a New Strategic Gateway to the Arctic”, the influential American magazine Foreign Policy brought an article in which it was claimed, “the islands are now receiving more attention from superpowers” (Poulsen 2020). Essentially, the discreet postcolonial perspectives in Trom reflect this altered point of view towards the two Northern countries in the Danish Realm, an attitude that also appears echoed in the newspaper reception of Trom. With the Greenlandic locations of the fourth season of Borgen in mind, journalist Kristian Lindberg at Berlingske states the following: “Just like in DR’s and Netflix’s current season of Borgen, it is refreshing to see the dramatic potential in our multi-faceted environments unfolded” (Lindberg 2022, our emphasis). This is a statement in which the small word ‘our’ claims an indirect national ownership of the Faeroese and Greenlandic locations if not a participation in a Nordic fellowship, while the journalist, in the above-quoted interview with Jakúpsson from the film magazine Ekko, references the Faeroes as a “brother country”— altogether, an inclusive behaviour towards the Faeroes and Faeroese

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locations in the context of a successful, attention-receiving high-end television series. With the contemporary change of geopolitical and productional attention towards the Faeroes, the small country of 18 islands appears to transpose from the ‘edge of the world’ to now being ‘the heart of the North Atlantic,’ or nonetheless an included geographical territory of the Nordic region now put on the mediated crime map by a high-end Nordic television series. With a locative title sequence signalling both place and genre, Trom evidently follows the translocal aesthetics of peripherality (cf. Chap. 2), including extensive panoramas and drone imagery of Faeroese landscapes and townscapes, while the close relation between dominant landscape iconographies and the main character’s homecoming narrative involves a narrative route guided directly towards him standing on ‘the edge of world’ (a literal trom) in the final episode (see Image 3.2). As a final reference to the series’ title, the awe-inspiring point of view of this image beyond the edge of the cliff (shot with drone and digitally altered) places the viewer’s perspective in an impossible position, producing a sense of detachment and bewilderment as well as an extra-textual position forcing the viewer to accept the impossibility of viewing from beyond the periphery. Besides such geographical peripherality, the series also portrays and negotiates the cultural and professional distance between the local police force and the necessary technical collaboration with Danish investigators. On the one hand, the high-profile Danish cast, most importantly Ulrich Thomsen in

Image 3.2  Hannis, the main character of Trom, standing on the literal edge of the Faeroes, underlining the meaningful relationship between place and character in the series

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the leading role, accentuates the need for international distribution and funding for the series, but on the other hand, the mixed identity of Hannis—having left the Faeroes years ago and today refusing to speak Faeroese—insinuates the delicate postcolonial relationship between the Faeroes and Denmark, not fundamentally critical as such, but cautiously also used as a narrative rationale behind casting a Danish actor without Faeroese language skills. As textual qualities in the series, the use of the Faeroes as an overall national setting and by employing recognisably local peripheral locations, Trom combines spectacular autonomous and ‘touristic’ landscape imagery and climate/weather conditions as both a metaphor for cultural/transnational relationships, as a way into environmentalist debates, and to brand a series with ‘fresh’ scenery for an international audience. For Trom, breakers and mobility scenes end up having at least two traditional functions. Firstly, breakers mark a shift from one scene to the next, while scenes with cars driving through the landscape causally bring characters from one place to the next. Secondly, breaker or mobility imagery performs as a built-in opportunity to depict the landscapes often from an autonomous perspective. Especially sweeping drone aesthetics, breakers and mobility scenes in Trom ‘naturalise’ the setting by also having characters or the viewer’s perspective rest on the literal edge of the Faeroes, which in the end leaves three different openings for interpreting the series’ title: (1) as a geographical interpretation, the Faeroes as a country lies on the fringes of the Danish Realm, of the Nordic region, and of the world; (2) as a characterological interpretation, the title deals with the different characters’ states of mind or personal situations as being ‘on the edge’; and (3) as a spectatorial interpretation, the series drives the viewer from a comfortable and grounded point of view to a marginal gaze through image perspectives placed beyond the periphery. In the end, these three interpretations intersect and influence each other in a way that resonates with the creative intentions behind the series, that is, using the Faeroese landscape as character in such a way that it performs with agency and influences the character’s behaviour. Most importantly, we follow Hannis’ change of character effectuated by his homecoming and his belated discovery of a daughter that ends up dead upon his arrival. Breaker images of landscapes and locative mobility scenes through space wrap the narrative in a sense of place that, at once, performs at a local and translocal level, underlining the local-to-glocal productional set-up of the series.

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Ivalo and the Wild East of Arctic Finland The two first seasons of the Finnish crime series Arctic Circle have been doubly prophetic in handling contemporary societally timely topics. The first season narrates the icy mystery about missing and murdered Russian prostitutes in North Finland close to the Arctic village Ivalo, a story that claims its prophecy by how the police investigation exposes the breakout of a local, potentially global pandemic, as one of the prostitutes is infected with a dangerous and contagious virus. Premiering at the Finnish streaming service Elisa Viihde in December 2018, launched internationally only months before the breakout of the global covid-19-pandemic, the internationally produced series appeared much more well-timed than what indeed could have been planned. Abandoning the virus plot, the second season continues the story about missing prostitutes in Murmansk in North-­ Western Russia and recounts a story about the difficult collaboration between Finnish and Russian investigators, including the institution of a renegotiated perspective on Russian crime and aggression. Premiering in December 2021, only months before the Russian attack on Ukraine, Arctic Circle was once again a significantly timely television crime series that demonstrated the genre’s apt ability to tap into socially sensitive and critical issues, including transnationally mobile diseases and organised crime. The way that Arctic Circle uses the 1340 kilometres long Finnish-­ Russian borderscape as a motivator of conflict works as a geopolitical marker of the periphery of the Nordic/European region, but the series simultaneously frames the indigenous Säpmi territory—covering North-­ Norway, North-Sweden, North-Finland, and Murmansk in Russia—as a transnational area predating and transgressing modern borderscapes. The series’ focus on internationally appealing and recognisable themes with a transnational breadth—a potentially global virus and Russian antagonism—is on par with how the series was conceived as what producer Jarkko Hentula refers to as “a global show” (Hentula 2022). Financing the series, Hentula stresses that, “as we knew that we wanted to make the show international, the key was the arcticness and the snowness […]. We knew that we needed financing from outside Finland for that show, so we knew that this would be attractive for foreign audiences” (ibid.). In a scripted statement for the Nordisk Film and TV Fund’s news section during the production of the series, co-producing partners Milla Bruneau (executive producer at Finnish Yellow Film & TV) and Moritz Polter (executive producer at German Bavaria Fiction) exhibit the series’ local

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focus on place and attention towards international distribution by referring to it as “a compelling and atmospheric drama with strong appeal for global audiences.” (Pham 2017). In comparison with Trom, the productional/financial set-up for Arctic Circle appears slightly simpler, but the collaborative composition changes from the first to the second season. Produced for the Finnish public service broadcaster Yle and the streaming service Elisa Viihde, the first season was co-produced by Finnish company Yellow Film & TV and German company Bavaria Fiction, which provides a financial rationale of the German subplot about a German virologist that travels from Helsinki to Ivalo to investigate the virus breakout. With additional collaboration with the French international distributor Lagardére Studios Distribution and support from The Finnish Film Foundation as well as a cash rebate from Business Finland’s production incentive, Arctic Circle is less composite than Trom and more like a traditional bilateral co-­ production. The missing component is the commonly standard German broadcaster in co-production agreements like this, but Bavaria accepted a built-in responsibility to find a German broadcaster and, subsequently, secured a canned sale of the series to ZDF (Hentula 2022). During a global pandemic, however, the creatives from Yellow Film & TV chose to discard the viral plot for the second season, hence also abandoning the German plotline, which made it difficult to maintain the co-production agreement with Bavaria. Although Bavaria is still credited in the title sequence (but not in the end credits), the second season was developed with the US streaming service Topic on board through a presale agreement, which then explains the partly American cast and storyline in the second season (ibid.). The development process and financial background outlined here explain, firstly, the German and American side-stories in the two seasons, but secondly, it also highlights the flexibility of the concept behind Arctic Circle, an elasticity and attraction of the Arctics as a more general, exotic feature alongside the local elements indicated through the original Finnish title’s reference to a small town. According to the series producer Jarkko Hentula, the Arctic in the series is conceived as a more generalisable idea rather than a locally distinguishable place. In her analysis of Arctic Circle, Hiltunen frames the series’ sense of place as “cosmopolitan Arctic” and stresses how “the world seems to shrink” even though Arctic distances in the series are presented as unpassable, long, and unsurmountable from an investigative point of view (Hiltunen 2021, 131f). In this way, the series portrays an Arctic space

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rather than an Arctic place like Ivalo, which resonates with how the series, according to Hentula, was envisioned: Quite early, we made the decision that we wouldn’t confine ourselves to the actual Ivalo place. Ivalo and the Arctic was for us more of a state of mind than the actual place. We actually had some critique from some local financiers and from audiences, since our series in Finland is called Ivalo. Actually, we haven’t shot that much in actual Ivalo. Almost all key nature locations were actually shot outside Ivalo, much more north closer to the border of Norway. (Hentula 2022)

Such generic Arctic exoticism is, for Hentula (2022), “a way of differentiating the series from your normal Scandinavian city-based crime shows,” which becomes a combined generic and spatial point. In an interview for the tourist site Lapland Above Ordinary, Hentula hesitantly labels the series as Arctic Noir to highlight the originality of the series genre and sense of place in opposition to what has been known as Nordic Noir: Nordic noir is usually associated with big cities, darkness of tone, grimness of visuals and coolness of locations. The Lapland landscape—and likewise importantly—also mentality offers quite a striking difference to that. Therefore I would not label Arctic Circle as Nordic noir. If you want to give it some label—which I personally don’t like to do—you can call it Arctic Noir. (Lapland Above Ordinary n.d.-a)

In an interview for the same tourism site, the director of the first season, Hannu Salonen, appears a little more specific in his reference to Lapland (the non-Sami, sometimes derogative reference to the transnational territory Säpmi), although in a Nordic context this specific area almost coincides with the Nordic Arctics (except Greenland and Svalbard). Hannu makes the common spatial allusion to place-as-character (Hansen and Waade 2017, 10) in his description of the series’ depiction of the area: Lapland is absolutely irreplaceable. It cannot be recreated digitally, even with lots of money. The atmosphere here is quite different and freezing cold, too. Lapland is so physical, and that pushes the actors to another state because it’s so genuine. Plus the scenery and even the weather are so beautiful in their own way, or even dramatic at times. And this setting—Lapland— you can’t recreate in the south. In Arctic Circle, Lapland itself is definitely one of the main characters. (Lapland Above Ordinary n.d.-b)

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Hentula continues along the same lines in the above-quoted interview, but rather than using place as a character, he underlines how the series communicates a relationship between character and place: “The landscape embodies the main characters’ inner feelings and struggles. Just as the landscape is empty, cold and beautiful, you could say the same about the characters. They are at the same time lost and saved by the majestic wilderness” (Lapland Above Ordinary n.d.-a). In an interview with Television Business International, Maximillian Bruckner, cast as the German virologist, repeats this specific point too: “The funny thing is, in the beginning I thought Iina [Kuustonen] was the main actress and I was the main actor. Now I realise the landscape is the third main character in this series, and it’s unbelievable” (Bylykbashi 2018). Essentially, three almost identical references to the place/landscape as character appear as a scripted, conceptual idea that may be used for marketing the series through its Arctic exoticism, but it tallies with the intention to create a “global show” by utilising a translocal notion of the Arctics. In effect, Arctic Circle produces a much more cosmopolitan gaze in the Northern peripheries of Finland through the way that Ivalo and the Arctics have been used as a common denominator or as what Hiltunen calls a “translocal character” (Hiltunen 2021, 132). “Although Ivalo is not entirely free of exoticism,” she writes, “it challenges the view of the Arctic as an elsewhere”—or more precisely, it almost creates the Arctic somewhere that could be anywhere in the Arctics. Nevertheless, a more local aspect of the series may be the depiction of Finland as, according to Hiltunen, “a buffer state between Russia and Europe”. While the series’ second season softens the bad guy image of Finland’s Eastern neighbour through a homosexual and victimised Russian policeman, “a negative image of Russia” (ibid. 130) or Eastern Europe as a European other, as analysed by Anna Mrozewicz (2018), is still a conspicuous part of the narrative, especially in the second season where much of the plot takes place in Murmansk, shot in substitute locations in Finland. Hentula touches upon this creation of a mythical Russia as a conceptual aspect of the second season: Russia has always been sort of like wild east and we wanted to, sort of, develop that as a kind of an image. I mean, instead of how the Americans always have this wild west, Russia is a mythical place for us. Russia is the wild east where anything can happen. (Hentula 2022)

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With cultural roots in cold war imagery, the image of Russians and Eastern Europeans as “villains, victims and ‘other’” (Mrozewicz 2018, 196) has been—and still is to some extent—dominant in the discourses of Nordic Noir, a master narrative in Nordic crime narratives dubbed “Eastern Noir” by Mrozewicz, but the negative imagination of Russia has changed: Over the past three decades, the Eastern noir narrative has been gradually complemented by other perspectives. Yet, rather than being abandoned, Eastern noir has been displaced from its hegemonic position, and now coexists with a multiplicity of other discourses. (ibid.)

In other words, Hentula’s experience and production of Russia as ‘the wild East’ is deeply influenced by this overall boundary discourse between the Nordics and Russia, while the creatives’ attempted shift from the first to the second season of Arctic Circle appears like a metonymic representation of the overall displacement of the master narrative during the past decades. However, the basic plotline of the second season—wild hunting of criminals in the Murmansk forests—clearly retains the mythical characteristics of the Finnish wild east in Russia. Moving into a Russian setting, however, was also motivated by the intention to showcase a different and less ‘white’ Arctic territory in the second season, an Arctic autumn imagery that highlights dense and crispy forest topographies rather than the vast snow-filled landscapes. As noted by Hentula, this highlights producers’ need to differentiate series in a saturated screen market, but it also stresses the location-based media imagery opportunities in a diversified Arctic landscape: For the second season, we decided to have it in the autumn instead of winter, just to differentiate it. But many buyers have been missing the snow. Foreign buyers are like “we want more of snow. Bring me some snow.” They want the snow instead of this autumn. Now, our third show takes place in wintertime, and it will, once again, be very snowy. (Hentula 2022)

Hentula’s assessment of the international buyers’ call for snowy landscapes underlines the high demand for distinctive arctic imaginaries, a view of the Arctic that in itself becomes as mythical as the wild east of Russia. This maintains a translocal/cosmopolitan gaze on the Arctics that influences the popular cultural screening of the territories and stresses the

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extent that producers may need to envision the creative content in order to secure international co-financing and co-production agreements.

Outlier and the Authenticity of Peripheral Policing Returning to the above-mentioned collaboration between REinvent Studios, Shuuto Arctic, and FilmCamp Norway, the final series analysed in this chapter, Outlier, was conceived by the collaborative couple Kristine Berg and Arne Berggren (both co-owners of Shuuto) as a precursor to the four-title agreement under contemporary production. This collaborative endeavour, including Outlier, shows a remarkably local image of Troms-­ Finnmark in the Arctics in relation to Arctic Circle’s mythical/generalised gaze, specifically guided by the intention to also produce a sense of place recognisable by people well-acquainted with the locations and cultures portrayed. The story commences when a young girl is found murdered in a fictional small town close to the North-Norwegian Arctic town of Kautokeina. From London through news coverage, the native criminal psychologist Maja recognises traits from a serial killer in a case where the local police may have imprisoned the wrong perpetrator. For that reason, Maja travels home to assist the local police with the investigation, claiming that her presence is scholarly research, but during her stay, she realises that the case is closely tied to her own traumatic childhood, a trauma so intense that she may have forgotten her experiences. The title of the series bears a complex of interrelated interpretations that tie together place, character, and plot. (1) Place: The arctic town is a geographical outlier, a fictional town also used as the setting for Berg and Berggrens television series Elven, presented as being the outskirts of Norway far away from centralised power structures. (2) Character: With her childhood trauma, Maja is a person with an outlier personality herself, while her interest is detecting outlier personalities such as serial killers, meaning that her expertise is dealing with deadly outliers of society. (3) Plot: While the local police claims to have caught the right killer, Maja argues things differently, based on her research expertise in serial killers, which means that what she performs during the narrative is what is normally referred to as ‘outlier detection,’ that is, noticing data that appears markedly different from other observations, mainly the other male police officers. These three interpretations end up closely entangled, as Maja— through her homecoming to the village—ends up realising causal relations between her place-bound, embodied recollection, the case under

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investigation, and her own private background and history. As a narrative set-up, when we meet Maja for the first time, she gives a feminist speech about how men may have difficulties in connecting serial crimes/murders because they are committed by other men, and when Maja arrives in Norway, she ends up experiencing this specific problem, since male policemen are unable to accept her critique of the original investigation. On the one hand, this is delivered as a full-blown feminist critique of the male investigative gaze that, at worst, appears unable to decode signs of a serial killer. On the other hand, this interest in the capabilities and capacities of the police is also imbued in the series’ portrayal of local, peripheral resources in comparison with centralised police forces in Norway, a country with significantly long geographical distances and a disproportionately represented police force in the outskirts, which obviously diminishes the local proficiencies in crime detection. The perspective on the lack of police coverage of the Arctic Norwegian territories was an intentional social commentary in the series, a plot also represented in the productional set-up in the Arctics. On Shuuto’s website, the producers state, “we are concerned with building sustainable production environments well-distanced from Oslo” (Shuuto 2022), which reverberates through their continuously close collaboration with FilmCamp Norway. This concern should be seen as part of an extended, multi-faceted support system for regional film and television production in Norway (cf. Norwegian Film Institute 2022), but as pointed out by Stine Agnete Sand in several iterations, the Norwegian film support system still maintains a centre-periphery-structure with Oslo as the central production hub, while the lack of geographical diversity still appears to be a consequential issue (Sand 2015, 2019). Sand and Vordal, however, highlight Norwegian policy incentives towards local screen production as influential for producing the Arctic public service series Monster, a significantly local crime series, which fulfilled NRK’s obligations towards geographical diversity, but ended up receiving substantial transnational interest as well (Sand and Vordal 2021). In a podcast interview by the American writer and researcher Paul Levinsen, Berggren states a very similar motivation behind their local Arctic set-up: The big challenge for the Norwegian business [is that] all of the productions are going on in Olso, in the main city. So, we are trying to scale up the business by doing more co-productions and giving students and young talents

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the opportunity to get into the business and co-produce and co-write. (Levinson 2022)

In this way, producing in the Arctics becomes, for Berg and Berggren’s production company, ingrained in local talent development away from the hubs, local business development in the Norwegian outskirts, and essentially locally incentivised placemaking activities in Troms-Finnmark. Berggren directly criticises the lack of intention to produce in the far North: It is incorrect that it is challenging to set up television productions in the north […]. We are beginning to see an effective model for establishing a regional drama industry, and we plough the surplus into more development. At FilmCamp, an organised infrastructure, fantastic talents and professionals exist with wishes to make it without going to Oslo—a powerful entrepreneurship and creativity unseen in the south. (Redaksjonen 2021)

Managing director at FilmCamp, Kjetil Jensberg, points out a similar matter: The venture gives the profession a much-coveted amount of training and opportunities to build a business around television drama […]. Shuuto has shown the way and confirmed what we have always insisted, that it is possible to build a sustainable television business outside Oslo. As a co-producer, co-financer and with the complete resources of the company, FilmCamp wishes to contribute, together with Shuuto and REinvent, to the realisation of new television productions in the north. (ibid.)

The location strategy behind and the locative portrayal of social and natural phenomena in Outlier, including the endeavours to produce more local material in the arctic Norway, lies deeply ingrained in this local policy interest in series in North Norway. The peripheral issues debated in relation to local television production are echoed in the social commentary in Outlier’s attempt to authentically portray the arctic setting and the difficulties in police investigation in the outskirts of Norway, a debate also ingrained in a national discussion about centre-periphery relations. Kristine Berg commented on police coverage in an interview for Drama Quarterly: There’s a big discussion about it in Norway […]. It’s difficult; they have a lack of resources and manpower, so it was interesting to dive into a different

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type of conversation than we have here in Oslo. It was interesting to do the research and discover people up north or outside of Oslo don’t get the same treatment as people in the big cities because it’s difficult to investigate crimes there. People up north were happy we told a story about it. (Pickard 2021)

Arne Berggren elaborates on these issues and relates them to the wider political environment in Norway: You have this myth about Norway and a social democratic society where everyone, regardless of where they live and who they are, should be treated equally as in Oslo. People expect that when you call the police because someone is breaking into your house, they should respond within 20 minutes as in Oslo. But up in the north, it’s four hours’ drive to go to the crime scene so, of course, they are very relaxed when it comes to what to prioritise. We thought it was very interesting to build a story around how it is to be a police officer when they have a patrol area 10 times the size of London. (ibid.)

Besides the policy incentives behind Outlier and the set-up for further co-production between the partners, such social commentary ties in with how the storyline is closely associated with the location and authentic setting of the series. Such authenticity permeates the series’ use of language that, besides the use of English for the British narrative set-up, includes both Norwegian and Sami in such a way that the multi-lingual situation appears in the series merely as an un-commented given fact, represented in the way that characters with an indigenous Sami background naturally codeswitch between different languages. In the same vein, Berggren also uses the locative features in Outlier as a specific mode of differentiation from location strategies in many Netflix series: “they all look the same, feel the same and taste the same” (House 2022), indicating that Outlier does not look the same as other series. Finally, the place policy and commentary on local police also connect to the producers’ interest in developing a feminist perspective on the investigative plotline, including the rationale behind the serial killer. “We have a lot of female bosses and politicians. So, there are a lot of female role models,” says Berg. “The police force has been a place where there has been male dominance. It’s a bit of a special case” (ibid). Fundamentally, the context around Outlier is imbued with different cultural ‘outliers’ in a Norwegian context: although we see important contemporary changes, producing in arctic Norway is still presented by creatives as an ‘industrial outlier’ and as a peripheral obstacle;

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the series criticises the lack of a female gaze in the Norwegian police-force, because ‘investigative outliers’ may go by unnoticed by male investigators; and more generally, the series presents the complex issues in the lack of peripheral law enforcement, forming a ‘security outlier’ for people living in the outskirts. Just like in many other peripheral crime series, the peripherality of the production and plot is marked by the protagonist Maja contemplatively gazing into the open peripheral landscape (see Image 3.3). A location trait also utilised in the crime series Midnight Sun, Outlier takes place during the summer period with midnight sun as a special Arctic phenomenon, presenting the Arctic from a less-mythical, fertile, and markedly green perspective in comparison with Arctic Circle. Just as midnight sun is a trans-arctic occurrence, so does the series establish a plot that connects the Arctic/Säpmi territories of Norway, Sweden, and Finland through covering the perpetrator’s journey narrative too. In this way, the rationale behind why a serial killer has been able to operate for years has to do with the vast distances across the Sami territories, the lack of police coverage, and the male gaze on the crimes. The killer’s modus operandi has been possible through his utilisation of the sparsely populated areas, which means that the murderer is able to ‘write’ his killings into the landscapes through his ability to be more mobile than the police, producing what Reijnders has dubbed “guilty landscapes.” As Reijnders

Image 3.3  In the final episode of Outlier, the protagonist finds herself having solved the case, but still she is found with a concerned and contemplative gaze into the open peripheral landscape

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reminds us: “Although the ‘guilty landscape’ frequently has few physical indicators that remind us of its past, the place will always retain an important, sometimes even traumatic, significance to the survivors and others who were involved” (Reijnders 2009, 176). Such a significance becomes important for Maja’s own homecoming quest, a pursuit that is locative in the way that Maja triggers her remembrance through being at specific places, just as her trauma-based lack of remembrance is woven into how the series portrays her re-experience of the past through places. Place-­ bound memory becomes the series’ direct approach to the peripheral aesthetics of local policing and authentic spatial pointers, something ingrained in the spatial design of the series, according to Berggren: We also like the challenge of going into real locations without moving anything. It’s very rare that we use a production designer. We like it to feel as it is, so we don’t take much time to prepare each location. We like to be surprised. If the dishes are on the table and it looks like a mess, we use it as it is. That’s part of the good feedback we’ve had from people in the region, that it looks authentic and doesn’t look designed by someone from the big city. (Pickard 2022)

As a marker of how collaborators wish to brand the series from a spatial perspective, co-producers from REinvent, Rikke Ennis and Helene Aurø (former head of DR’s international sales), continue scripting the series through its “stunning location” (Ennis) and the “remote area of the north that not many people have seen before” (Aurø) (Keslassy 2020). For Ennis, her interest in the series also comes from the way that it is “fresh content,” that is, its ability to differentiate from the contemporary massive flow of content from broadcasters and streaming services. For Aurø, the locally authentic series appears to be “a good fit for a number of buyers,” which will make it “travel far,” underlining the international appeal of local crime narratives with local colour traits like midnight sun and vast, awe-inspiring landscapes.

Arctic Noir from the Outside In and the Inside Out The three series analysed in this chapter present three different, yet also similar ways to approach the territories close to or above the Arctic Circle. Trom presents a windy, subarctic portrayal of the spatial and geopolitical context around the Danish Realm in a series with a manifest incorporation

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of a Faeroese sense of place and landscape. Arctic Circle is highly influenced by a mythical approach to both the Arctics and Finland’s Russian neighbour, a generalised, translocal gaze into a white and snowy as well as crisp and autumnal arctic space. Outlier communicates a complex analysis of several different ‘outlier’ positions and mentalities in a series taking place in a less mythical and intentionally more authentic Arctic place. The narrative motivation in all three series comes from variations of the journey or homecoming narrative, which leads to spatially imbued expositions of past trauma in both Outlier and Trom or transnationally challenging issues such as border-crossing crimes, border-crossing pandemics, or a translocal image of the wild east or icy Arctics in Arctic Circle. The chapter does not cover the contemporary breadth of Arctic Noir, but it serves three analytical approaches to different seasonal climates in the Arctics (summer in Outlier, autumn/winter in Arctic Circle) and the Maritime Subarctic (autumnal subarctic climate in Trom). All three series present local imagery through internationally co-produced series, highlighting an international interest in the Arctics from an aesthetically peripheral perspective. The Arctics appear branded as something significantly different from other Nordic Noir cases; yet again, the Säpmi areas of the Nordic region are at the same time presented as a remarkably ‘naturalised’ transnational geopolitical territory. Perhaps except for the Russian Sami territory, the Nordic Arctics has now become mediated through popular cultural crime narratives in a way that merges the territory more than it upholds the national borderscapes. Differentiating series internationally through the use of specifically Arctic senses of place was popularly instigated by the British series Fortitude that, through substitute locations and a paranormal plotline, created an internationally mythical gaze into the Nordic Arctics, a gaze that has also become an internally communicated gaze in order to attract international co-financing. However, Arctic Noir is now one specific aesthetic mode in Nordic Noir among others, a mode with a decisive interest in conveying a translocal peripheral gaze and a sense of being close to or beyond the edge of the world. In Nordic crime series to a greater extent utilising the Arctics, however, the edge-of-the-world metaphor may appear lesser and lesser of a way to differentiate television series on a saturated world market, but such content is clearly branded and scripted as ‘edgy’ through the series peripheral location placement strategies.

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 For all online references, the date of access is 1 December 2022.

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Hentula, Jarkko. 2022. Zoom-Interview with Jarkko Hentula, conducted by Kim Toft Hansen, 29 April. Hiltunen, Kaisa. 2021. Remote but Connected. Lapland as a Scene of Transnational Crime in Ivalo. Academic Quarter 22: 124–136. https://doi.org/10.5278/ ojs.academicquarter.vi22.6606. House, Christian. 2022. Outlier: New Horizons for Norwegian Noir. Norwegian Arts. https://norwegianarts.org.uk/outlier-­new-­horizons-­for-­norwegian-­noir/. Hønneland, Geir. 2017. Arctic Euphoria and International High North Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Isaksen, Jógvan. 2017. Færøsk litteraturs historie 1298-1950. Fredensborg: Marselius. Keslassy, Elsa. 2020. Reinvent Kicks Off Pre-Sales on Hot New Scandi Drama Outlier. Variety. https://variety.com/2020/tv/global/reinvent-­kicks-­off-­pre-­ sales-­on-­hot-­new-­scandi-­drama-­outlier-­exclusive-­1234635215/. Lapland Above Ordinary. n.d.-a. Arctic Circle, Season 2—Pandemic Prophecy. https://www.lapland.fi/film/arctic-­c ircle-­2 -­p andemic-­p rophecy-­f ilming-­ during-­a-­virus-­outbreak/. ———. n.d.-b. Arctic Circle—Blood & Snow in Finnish Lapland. https://www. lapland.fi/film/arctic-­c ircle-­2 -­p andemic-­p rophecy-­f ilming-­d uring-­ a-­virus-­outbreak/. Levinson, Paul. 2022. Light on Light Through. Podcast episode 239. https://paullev.libsyn.com/arne-­b erggren-­a nd-­k ristine-­b erg-­i nter viewed-­b y-­p aul-­ levinson-­about-­nordic-­noir. Lindberg, Kristian. 2022. Ulrich Thomsen er den mest plagede mand i rigsfælleskabet. Berlingske. https://www.berlingske.dk/aok/ulrich-­thomsen-­er-­den-­mest-­ plagede-­mand-­i-­rigsfaellesskabet-­og-­faeroeerne-­er. Linville, J.D. 2022. Blood in the Water in First-Ever Faroese Series Trom. Variety. https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/trom-­viaplay-­reinvent-­torfinnur-­jakupsson-­ 1235243397/. Mrozewicz, Anna. 2018. Beyond Eastern Noir: Reimagining Russia and Eastern Europe in Nordic Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Norwegian Film Institute. 2022. Regional Funding. https://www.nfi.no/eng/ grantsfunding/other-­funding/regional-­funding. Pham, Annika. 2017. Stellar cast for Finnish-German Arctic Circle. https://nordiskfilmogtvfond.com/news/stories/stellar-­c ast-­f or-­f innish-­g erman-­ arctic-­circle. ———. 2021. Trom’s Torfinnur Jákupsson on his Dream of Creating the First Faroese TV Series. Nordisk Film & TV Fond. https://nordiskfilmogtvfond. com/news/stories/troms-­t orfinnur-­j akupsson-­o n-­h is-­d ream-­o f-­c reating-­ the-­first-­faroese-­tv-­series. Pickard, Michael. 2021. Breaking Out. Drama Quarterly. https://dramaquarterly.com/breaking-­out/.

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———. 2022. Thawed Hero. https://dramaquarterly.com/thawed-­hero/. Poulsen, Regin Winther. 2020. Forget Greenland, There’s a New Strategic Gateway to the Arctic. Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/07/ forget-­greenland-­faroe-­islands-­new-­strategic-­gateway-­to-­the-­arctic/. Redaksjonen. 2021. Shuuto Arctic med ny seriesatsing i nord. Rushprint. https:// rushprint.no/2021/04/shuuto-­arctic-­med-­ny-­seriesatsing-­i-­nord/. Reijnders, Stijn. 2009. Watching the Detectives. Inside the Guilty Landscapes of Inspector Morse, Baantjer and Wallander. European Journal of Communication 24 (2): 165–181. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323108101830. Sand, Stine Agnete. 2015. Supporting “Film Cultural Peripheries”? The Dilemmas of Regional Film Policy in Norway. The International Journal of Cultural Policy 24 (1): 85–102. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2015.1128419. ———. 2019. Small Places, Universal Stories. Diversity, Film Policy and the Geographical Dimension of Filmmaking. Norsk Kulturpolitisk Tidsskrift. Sand, Stine Agnete, and Thomas Vordal. 2021. “Northern, not Nordic Noir.” A Norwegian Case Study on Crime Series and Strategies for Transnational Television. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 11 (2): 157–176. Shuuto Arctics. 2022. Et lite tv-selskap som elsker å grunnforske. http://shuuto. no/om-­oss. Waade, Anne Marit. 2013. Wallanderland: Medieturisme og skandinavisk tv-krimi. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press. ———. 2020. Arctic Noir on Screen: Midnight Sun (2016-) as a Mix of Geopolitical Criticism and Spectacular, Mythical Landscapes. In Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation, ed. Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen, and Jaakko Seppälä, 37–53. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Mediterranean Noir and Nordic Peripheries in Southern Europe

Nordic shadows loom in the South. Compared to the Nordic Noir (see Chap. 3) ‘brand,’ however, the Mediterranean Noir label has not been able to extend its pragmatic effectiveness from its literary origin to the audiovisual sphere, and there is very little evidence of its use in television promotional strategies and criticism. As Forshaw puts it, “it is notable (and perhaps regrettable) that, as yet, many of the remarkable and idiosyncratic talents of this Mediterranean branch of the crime fiction genre have not made the mark that their Scandinavian confrères have” (Forshaw 2014, 12). Within film and television studies, though, the category has progressively been gaining popularity comparable to the term Nordic Noir. While the term originated in the early 1990s to describe the transnational poetics of literary authors from Southern Europe and North Africa, the label Mediterranean Noir has become a broader cultural and academic category that encompasses film and TV series too. It indicates a tendency or subgenre (although not strictly codified) primarily characterised by crime stories with a firm engagement with social issues and located in the countries overlooking the Mediterranean Sea (Reynolds et  al. 2006; Turnaturi 2013) According to Johnson (Johnson 2020, 15), the Mediterranean region is conceived as a “‘liquid continent’ of unity and exchange” and an area primarily defined by both transcultural exchange and conflict: “Beyond regional, national, and ideological boundaries, the Mediterranean Sea may be regarded not as yet another barrier but as an © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2_4

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analytical point of departure or medium for exploring issues of difference and interconnectedness” (Johnson 2020, 4)—a point fitting the narrative engagement in Mediterranean Noir very well. In Halle’s terms, the Mediterranean region can be conceived as an “interzone between the EU as a coherent body and those neighboring countries, a common territory of hospitality and privileged partnership” (Halle 2014, 130). In this respect, the establishment of the Euro-­ Mediterranean Partnership (EUROMED) implied “the recognition that the territory has been historically a region of interaction and trade, fostered by ease of transportation over the sea and a history of grand empires that lined and united the shores” (ibid., 130). Thematically, Mediterranean Noir stories often display how European borders dissolve southwards into a transnational, multicultural and multiethnic experience, a ‘Mediterranean experience,’ before being French, Italian, Spanish, Algerian, Egyptian, and so on. In contrast, crime stories set in the Mediterranean region may also reveal how these multiethnic experiences involve cultural or social clashes, and analyse the problems of integration and social inequalities. The etymology of the name ‘Mediterranean’ as ‘midland, surrounded by land’ even evokes multiple markers of liminality for narratives set in the ‘in-­ between’ Mediterranean region, which triggers a primary concern in Mediterranean Noir with transnational, transcultural, and geopolitical issues, including immigration and refugees, contraband, human trafficking, mafias, organised crime and political corruption, and increasingly also ecological crimes. In addition to the location-based tension between intercultural dialogue and conflict, a more topographical opposition also characterises Mediterranean Noir. One of its key features lies in depicting the beautiful, bright locations with a rich cultural heritage in contrast to the brutality and bleakness of the stories and the crimes narrated. The beauty of the settings may explore a romantic backdrop in pronounced contradistinction to the graveness of the crimes and murders committed—a locative trait we see in other European crime traditions too. This contrastive strategy is a good example of how narratives can create what Anderson and Smith (2001, 8) refer to as “emotionally heightened spaces,” or be interpreted as “forms of emotional expression […] to communicate, represent, and make sense of the Mediterranean experience” (Johnson 2020, 4). On the basis of the social and political commitment of Mediterranean Noir, we would argue that places are never mere backdrops, but they are rather an integral part of the depicted communities’ and characters’ identities.

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The use of stereotypes customarily associated with the pleasant and cheerful life of Mediterranean people (regional food and dialects, cultural traditions, and other elements of local folklore, comic or grotesque inserts) is therefore an additional trait in the contrastive strategy to emphasise the violence and injustices of social reality. Nevertheless, when social criticism is toned down, especially in mainstream television adaptations, the folkloric atmospheres and stereotypical representations may prevail. In internationally distributed Mediterranean crime series, location placement in this contrastive style—from historical port cities like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Barcelona and Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marsiglia, to small picturesque towns like the imaginary Vigata, Il commissario Montalbano’s Sicilian village (Pezzotti 2015)—has progressively created a range of visual tropes and stereotypical landscapes often in accordance with the tourist gaze (Urry and Larsen 2011). Following the great national and international success of the literary series and its TV adaptation, Il commissario Montalbano (Inspector Montalbano, Rai 1999–2021) has, for instance, generated considerable cultural and screen tourism activities in the real places behind the narrative (Clausi 2006). However, Montalbano’s Sicily has been criticised for stereotypical spatial representations as well as the effects such stereotyping may have on the places’ relation to the story’s complexity and the identity of characters. In her work on Montalbano, Eckert stresses that: the mitigation of the original message occurs through an able use of cinematographic techniques (above all aerial and panning shots of Sicilian locations) combined with an insistent focus on female beauty, food, and slapstick comedy involving Catarella. Adding some thematic and narrative manipulation of the original books, the television series manages to deflect from the political messages and uncomfortable topics that Camilleri insists upon in his novels and produces a completely different product, aimed at a different audience. (Eckert Forthcoming)

Commenting on the British reception of the TV series, Forshaw argues that the British viewers savoured the warm glow imparted by the Mediterranean setting, the blue skies, a personable Latin hero tackling none-too gritty crimes—all of which were provided by this glossily made series, in which the town of Vigàta, with its unspoilt, antique beauty (unmarred by even a scribble of graffiti), provided a sumptuous wish-we-there backdrop. (Forshaw 2014, 59)

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In terms of more general location marketing, Roberts has conveniently pointed out that “the degree to which such productions trade centrally on their tourism and place-marketing appeal can be inversely pegged to their capacity to furnish a ‘deeper’ […] cartography of place and location.” Essentially, Roberts’ point is that the touristic appeal may dilute the potential for experiencing “a more ‘authentic’ sense of place” (Roberts 2016, 365), much in line with Eckert’s point raised above. For Mediterranean film and TV productions, Inspector Montalbano may therefore be considered both as a desirable model concept and as the opposite. As a model, Montalbano demonstrates the appealing potential of location strategies for both the national and international circulation of productions, as it paradigmatically exemplifies the facilitating role of the crime genre as a familiar cross-media frame with an intermediate access to unfamiliar local cultures and territories (Crovi 2002; Pezzotti 2012). However, we should keep in mind that the first 1999 season of Inspector Montalbano predates the recent wave of “quality” or “complex TV” (Mittell 2015), which was increasingly popularised mostly around and after the turn of the Millennium (Thompson 2007, xvii). In Italian crime series, the ‘quality’ impact surfaced in the spatial integration of Rome in Romanzo criminale—La serie (Sky 2008–10), while we see the Spanish impact from the crime series El Príncipe (Telecinco 2014–16). This series was peripherally “set in Ceuta, the Spanish city on the African side of the Straits of Gibraltar, in the border region which gives the series its title” (the working-class neighbourhood Barrio del Príncipe), and exposes an “intense sense of place, with vibrant and recognisable locations that played an integral role in the story” (Cascajosa Virino 2018a, 161). In other words, the more complex exploitation of recognisable locations arrives comparatively late in Italy and Spain, serving as an explanation of why the scenogeography of Inspector Montalbano today may appear slightly outdated. In relation to contemporary high-end series characterised by innovative visual style, complex storytelling, and higher production value, Inspector Montalbano provides a successful yet isolated concept that may be risky to imitate. Although still possible, as the recent Italian successful series Le indagini di Lolita Lobosco (The Investigations of Lolita Lobosco, Rai 2021-) shows, above all Inspector Montalbano is a reference point in relation to which it is necessary to change and innovate. As we return to in more detail below, in the television adaptation of Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Spanish Petra Delicado novels from the original setting in Spain to Italy, Sicily was explicitly considered as a “taboo area” precisely to

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create distance to the Montalbano concept (De Chiara 2020) and other Southern areas most profoundly identified with mafia stories (Buonanno 2018; Renga 2019; Morreale 2020), like Naples and Sicily. Throughout the past decade, TV series have intentionally avoided stereotypical representations of Mediterranean areas to prevent the settings from becoming mere decoration and staffage and from losing their integrated narrative and visual role. Set in the city of Bologna, Carlo Lucarelli’s adaptation of his own novels into L’ispettore Coliandro (Inspector Coliandro, Rai 2006-) was a pioneering experience and an appropriate example of this tendency. Director Marco Manetti underlines the intentions with respect to the fresh and unconventional way in which Bologna is depicted: “We were asked to film the exteriors in Bologna, but we wanted to shoot everything in Bologna, also the interiors, because we wanted the city to be felt, that Bologna could be glimpsed behind the windows. Localising is an incentive for the circulation of Italian works” (Manetti and Manetti 2019). In her analysis of the identity of Bologna in Carlo Lucarelli’s novels, Lucia Rinaldi has characterised the police detective Grazia Negro (the protagonist of another Lucarelli book series) as “an anti-Montalbano, because, unlike the born and bred Sicilian policeman of Camilleri’s detective novels, who has a profound knowledge of the territory and of Sicilian cultural codes, she struggles to appreciate Bologna” (Rinaldi 2009, 131). The same can be said about the Coliandro character: “The image of Bologna which is presented to the reader is distorted by Coliandro’s viewpoint, filtered through his bewildered response to the complexity of the city. Coliandro’s confused and naive outlook allows Lucarelli to discuss identity issues in contemporary Bologna, and present the city as a composite and unsettling space” (ibid., 125). Although Coliandro despises Bologna and addresses it in harsh tones, expressing the worst prejudices in his statements (most predominantly race and gender discrimination), his behaviour overturns all the stereotypes that the character seems to embody in words. Empathising with his caricatured portrait, viewers are invited to ironically distance themselves from preconceptions and stereotypes and become acquainted with an increasingly complex society. As a paradigmatic example of Mediterranean Noir, Inspector Montalbano features a relationship of ‘continuity’ between the protagonist and the region to which the character is bound by a strong sense of belonging. The series thus offers a narrative of identity in which the character is fundamentally static, rooted in an intimately beloved territory that reflects the

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identity of the protagonist. Essentially, character and territory may match and conform to each other even when archetypical Mediterranean locations are replaced by less-used peripheral ones, which is the case with the Italian TV series La porta rossa (The Red Door, Rai 2017-2023), featuring Inspector Cagliostro and set in the border town Trieste. Cagliostro is murdered in the first episode, but decides to remain in limbo between life and death to locate his murderer and save his wife, which creates a noticeable continuity between protagonist and setting: From an aesthetic and narrative point of view, the city’s geographical position at the crossroads of Latin, Slavic, and Germanic cultures, on the border between Italy and Slovenia, between land and sea, makes it an ideal, yet unconventional location to tell a story about the border between life and death. Moreover, Trieste’s liminality also concerns its position as a threshold between Northern and Southern Europe: The North European atmosphere, eclectic architectural styles, and the ‘cooler’ light are mixed with the Mediterranean cultures of the people living there. Ultimately, Trieste embodies the in-between nature of North-Eastern Italy, offering the TV series a clear visual identity (Coviello and Re 2021a, b). In contrast to narratives of identity, discontinuous relationships with the local territory may also characterise the investigator, for example, the above-mentioned Coliandro. Frequently such ‘anti-Montalbano’ characters have undergone a forced transfer, often for disciplinary reasons, from their place of origin to a new location, which they fail to understand and appear reluctant to familiarise themselves with. These characters produce narratives of challenge in relation to a territory perceived as estranging and perhaps even hostile. Although characters and environments are discordant and dissimilar, these narratives may further develop a Mediterranean Noir dialectic between intercultural dialogue and intercultural conflict precisely through peripheral locations. In this sense, a significant example is the Italian TV series Rocco Schiavone (Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone, Rai 2016-), based on the crime novels by Antonio Manzini. As a result of his violent and controversial past, Schiavone is a Roman-born deputy superintendent who finds himself displaced in the mountainous region of Valle d’Aosta in Northern Italy. Cynically and sarcastically, he continuously deals with the hostility and coldness of the climate and people around him. Diversification in location placement in Italy and Spain has explored a richer geography of ‘marginal’ and less screened zones and territories, including locations with a greater distance to the traditional centres of

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production, that is, mainly Rome and Madrid in Italy and Spain, respectively (Avezzù 2020, 2023; Cascajosa Virino 2018b), which has motivated a more dynamic collaboration between independent production companies and regional film funds. This development has incentivised the integration of urban and rural areas normally not included in main tourist itineraries, and a complex approach to cultural identity that does not necessarily correspond to national brand ideals (or stereotypes) of cultural heritage and landscape elements. As Hom argues, the Italian case is emblematic from a tourist point of view: The origins of modern mass tourism are clearly rooted in Italy, and specifically in the Grand Tour whereby foreigners from Britain and northern Europe, like Byron and Goethe, came to Italy to complete their aesthetic education. […] Their well-trodden routes through the peninsula standardised modern touring practices, while their ubiquitous gazes sacralised sites like the Colosseum as tourist attractions and transformed heritage into a touristic industry. Destination Italy, then, became a model for tourist destinations everywhere. (Hom 2015, 7)

Moving away from beautiful cities like Rome, Naples, Florence or Venice, as well as from quaint mediaeval hill towns in Tuscany, meant moving away from a more traditional topographic aesthetics and experimenting with innovative visual styles. Commenting on how a location’s affective atmosphere strongly relies on the way it is represented, the director of Petra (Sky, 2020-), Maria Sole Tognazzi said: We watch TV series from other countries. Sometimes we are fascinated by the very fact that they come from those countries. It almost becomes an element of attraction because it allows you to travel, which is the great value of stories. […] Exportability should not influence you. You should not shoot with the target of a given country in mind. I knew that Genoa would be seen in many parts of the world, and this was a responsibility, but I had in mind how to tell and represent it. I did not want to represent a postcard Genoa, but I wanted to tell it as if it were a character, and it is a character to all intents and purposes. (Tognazzi 2020)

Such a pursuit of distance from the postcard image of Genoa is particularly interesting in the framework of the argument we are developing, since it brings us back to the interest in avoiding the eighteenth Century ‘Grand Tour’ imagery and the ‘tourism map’ of il bel paese (the beautiful

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country). As Hom demonstrates, the mass-produced tourist postcard was, in fact, invented in the mid-nineteenth century and can be directly traced to the “belvedere” (bel/beautiful + vedere/view) as “a new way of seeing that was born of mass tourism, with tourists using this panoramic vision, or veduta, to dominate landscape with their gazes” (Hom 2015, 68). As a detailed view of a land- or cityscape in seventeenth Century paintings, the “veduta” is “a motif that refers to the depiction of a place of perspectival composition, which is the instrument through which reality is understood and transposed, by the workings of human reason, to that depiction” (Milani 2009, 74). This ‘vedutismo’ genre established the panorama as a dominant mode of tourist vision in eighteenth Century Italy and determined the invention of the “postcard view” (Fusco 1982)—a view that has been very influential in the depiction of place in recent TV series. In breaking away from stereotypical Mediterranean imagery and the postcard rhetoric, Nordic Noir was a significantly influential style and tendency (Badley et al. 2020). As pointed out by Hansen and Waade (2017, 265), a highly similar historical development can be found in the Nordic region’s landscape paintings in the same period and its relation to today’s portrayals of Nordic landscapes in TV series. Considered a prestigious cultural model with an international vocation, which we document below, the Nordic model facilitated the renewal of aesthetic and narrative forms in Italian and Spanish TV series and enhanced “spatial capital” related to peripheral locations. During the past decade, the trajectories of audiovisual production in Spain and Italy have developed in parallel and are largely comparable with Nordic Noir as a common model for innovation and internationalisation, while at the same time the use of peripheral locations allows local specificities and traditions to be enhanced. As noted by Antonio Manetti, co-director on Inspector Coliandro, “In Scandinavian thrillers, the smaller the locations, the more they work. If I had to choose between Stockholm or an isolated Scandinavian village, I would choose to localize” (Manetti and Manetti 2019). As pointed out by Cascajosa Virino (2018a, b), the choice of peripheral locations away from Madrid (as Spain’s traditional hegemonic space) represents a production differentiation strategy to overcome the impact of the 2008 economic crisis on audiovisual production in Spain and to target international markets. This location strategy has been strongly indebted to Nordic Noir as a model for adapting US “prestige” or “complex” TV to European production and funding practices while showing crime series’ potential to tackle international geopolitical issues (Saunders 2017). Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean

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both in the north and in the south, Spain has been progressively framed as Europe’s Southern border in, for instance, TV productions like Mar de plástico (Plastic Sea, Antena 3 2015–16), set in the province of Almería, and Perdóname señor (Forgive Me, God, Telecinco 2017), set in the Province of Cádiz. The establishment of a new and multilayered logic of place in Italian and Spanish crime series is tied to a ‘nordification’ process of the settings and an aesthetics in line with what Mikos and Perrotta (2012) call “travelling style” or what Hansen and Christensen (2017) refer to as creatives’ “intertextual consciousness,” including gloomy atmospheres, monochromatic colour tones, the slow narrative pace, and a reduction of comic or melodramatic inserts and subplots. At the same time, transcultural encounters between Nordic and Mediterranean traditions has been interpreted as imbedded within a broader “noirification” process (Locatelli 2017), that is, a “tendency to merge the more classical detective and procedural genres with the themes and atmospheres of the noir genre, usually relying on an anti-heroic portrayal of its protagonist and a critical view of the local or national socio-political context” and a “strategy to gain cultural and aesthetic legitimation” (Casoli and Pagello Forthcoming; see also Steenberg 2017). On the other hand, the use of ‘fresh’ peripheral locations allows Italian and Spanish TV series to balance international stylistic influences with spatial originality and an authentic sense of place in the specific crime series. In other words, we would argue that the overall noir influences in European crime series also draw “on local, and especially literary, traditions, creating distinct regional or macroregional approaches” (Casoli and Pagello Forthcoming). The recent spatio-generic labels Galician Noir and Basque Noir examined in the following sections are expressive examples of these processes. While many TV series have explored peripheral and unconventional locations of the so-called Green Spain, we will focus on O sabor das margaridas (Bitter Daisies, TVG 2018–20) as an example of how multiple factors concur in making regional noir trends possible and attractive to international audiences, and how ‘authentically’ situated narratives, especially in little-known contexts, may renew topoi such as ‘the sleepy town hiding a dark secret’ and ‘the out-of-town investigator’. The following two sections focus on two Italian productions, Non uccidere (Thou Shalt Not Kill, Rai 2015–18) and Petra. The two case studies show very well the trajectory of Nordic Noir’s impact on Italian TV production, while allowing us to discuss the complex negotiations between requisite

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internationalisation, location diversification, and the promotion of local cultures and territories.

O sabor das margaridas and Regional Noirs in Green Spain In March 2021, approximately one month before the second season’s release, The Guardian’s Julia Webster Ayuso described the TV series Bitter Daisies as an “unlikely milestone.” Not only because Bitter Daisies represents “the first series in Galician, a language spoken by fewer than 2.5 million people, to be broadcast by Netflix”, but more importantly it reveals a broader tendency: “A decade after Nordic noir captured the attention of international TV audiences, Galician noir is emerging” (Webster Ayuso 2021). About a month later, the Spanish newspaper elDiario.es claimed, “Netflix surrenders to ‘Galician noir’ with the second season of O sabor das margaridas,” hence endorsing the new label with reference to The Guardian as source: In crime fiction, there are subgenres where landscape, climate or other specific features of a place appear as almost as an independent character, which influences the plot. This is what happens with O sabor das margaridas […]. In addition to the language milestone, this TV series has been framed in what is already considered almost a genre of its own, the Galician noir as The Guardian named it, which borrows from its Nordic brother but gives it its own personality. The first season was set in the grey and oppressive atmosphere of the Murias village where nothing ever happens, and everyone wants to silence what does not seem to happen. (Horrillo 2021)

While acknowledging the international legitimacy that The Guardian gave to the Galician Noir label, the term already circulated during the release of the first season in both Galician and Spanish sources. The Galician ICT news magazine Código Cero, for instance, reports that the international success of Bitter Daisies confirms the creation of a new style called “Galician Noir” (Fernández 2019), while in an article in the Spanish newspaper El País, entitled “The miracle of the Galician ‘thriller’ that nobody wanted and that triumphed on Netflix”, we read: “Vargas’s troubled personality, dealing with inner demons that are difficult to appease, is one of the key features of the series, which its creators describe as Galician noir” (Vizoso 2019; see also Pérez Pena 2021). In this chapter, we are less

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interested in establishing the exact origin of the term ‘Galician Noir’ and more drawn by the multiple factors behind the construction and circulation of this new label among different players (professionals, critics, and audiences) internationally. Examining such factors indicates how national, local, and international factors are closely intertwined. According to journalist and art historian Lorenzo Peroni, Spain “is no longer a peripheral productive centre” (2021), but we would, more precisely, claim that Spain as a productive centre has been able to grow precisely because of its peripheral locations. As we discussed above, Spanish film and TV industries chose to address peripheral locations as a production differentiation strategy to overcome the impact of the 2008 economic crisis and to target international markets by addressing international geopolitical issues. Indicatively, this is demonstrated by TV series like the above-mentioned El Príncipe in Ceuta, Plastic Sea in the fictional town of Campoamargo (Andalusia), and Forgive Me, God, set in Barbate, close to the Strait of Gibraltar, which all explore the Southern frontier of Spain and issues of terrorism, drug trafficking and human trafficking. More recently, this “wave of Spanish dramas that have found global success” (Webster Ayuso 2021) has been fuelled by both the increase in public funding for the audiovisual sector (Peroni 2021) and the acceleration provided by national and  global streaming platforms (Netflix, HBO Spain, Amazon Prime Video,and Movistar+). The success of TV series like Élite (Netflix 2018-), the second Spanish Netflix original, and La casa de papel (Money Heist, 2017–21), which was originally produced by commercial broadcaster Antena 3, but from season 3 both commissioned and distributed by Netflix, paved the way for Netflix’s first European production hub in Madrid in 2019, intentionally focussing on “local stories created by local talent and produced locally” (Netflix 2019). While location strategies continued to explore the South-western and South-eastern frontiers of the nation, increasing importance was gained by so-called Green Spain, the Northern region stretching along the Atlantic coast from the Portuguese to the French border. In this region, usually referred to as Cornisa Cantábrica, the appearance of Galician Noir was accompanied by the competing term ‘Basque Noir,’ referring to TV series like Presunto culpable (Presumed Guilty, Antena 3 2018), La víctima número 8 (Victim Number 8, ETB/Telemadrid 2018), and Hondar ahoak (Mouths of Sand, ETB 2020). In an interview for Variety entitled “Filmax Brings Breakout Basque Noir Thriller Series Mouths of Sand to LA Virtual Screenings”, Eduardo Barinaga, director at ETB (Basque Television), claims:

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The backing that EITB [Euskal Irrati Telebista—Basque Radio-Television] has given fiction has been most relevantly displayed in the series Mouths of Sand, in which the know-how of a movie producer [Marian Fernández at Txintxua Films] has come together with an experienced director and the platform that EITB offers. What the critics have dubbed the new ‘Basque noir’ is the start of a collaboration that EITB hopes will be long-lasting. (Lang 2021)

From a different perspective, Koldo Almandoz, the creator and director of the series, remarked: The theme of the labels helps to sell. The context is what makes and differentiates, from the geographical to the political-social. It is impossible to do ‘noir’ here and not take into account where we live and where we come from. The plot may be similar, but it cannot be developed in the same way in Ondarroa, Vigo, Malmö or Nebraska. […] On the other hand, I don’t believe too much in idiosyncrasy. I don’t think there is a way to be Basque or to make Basque cinema. I feel that my work is closer to that of specific people in other parts of the world than that of most Basque or Spanish cinema. In art, I don’t like generalisations or the concept of roots. (Then24 2021)

Similar, multi-faceted perspectives on the relationships between locations, senses of place, cultural identities, and storytelling practices may be traced out with regard to Galician Noir. This underlines how, while still important, direct references to transnational themes are not the only way to appeal. The creation of stories that insightfully narrate the local reality from which they come, marking the productions as both attractive and authentic to domestic and international markets, is equally important. Although the topoi of ‘the village where nothing ever happens’ or ‘the sleepy town hiding a dark secret’ have always been widely exploited in crime fiction, it is the situated narrative and the perceived authenticity of the portrayal of the socio-cultural context that seems to make the difference. This applies to both Bitter Daisies, set in the small inland Galician town Murias, and El desorden que dejas (The Mess You Leave Behind, Netflix 2020), set in the fictional village of Novariz filmed in the small town Celanova close to Orense. Carlos Montero, writer and screenwriter of the latter, adapted from his own novel, remarks that:

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I come from a small village like that, where everyone knows each other, and where you need to fight to preserve your little corner of privacy. It’s the perfect setting to develop a mystery story. […] One of the great things about TV shows is that you always want to learn more. You want to discover a new place in the world that you didn’t know about, and the language has a lot to do with that […]. I think about the audience that I know, and if it moves me, then, hopefully, it will move someone else, even if they live in New  York […]. What changes is the hyperlocal setting, and that is what makes it much more authentic, if you are loyal to yourself and to your place. (Webster Ayuso 2021)

Emphasised by Carlos Montero’s role in the creative process, the local literary tradition is a pivotal, specific factor contributing alongside the local film industry and landscape to the international appeal of Galician Noir. “We have a network of film industry workers with great technical and creative skills”, claimed Ghaleb Jaber Martínez, one of the creators of Bitter Daisies, joined by Raquel Arias and Eligio Montero: “Televisión de Galicia has always invested in fiction, and it’s where a lot of the creators come from. The film sector managed to work with very little resources, but this actually allowed creativity to flourish” (Webster Ayuso 2021). Local industries and site-specific storytelling appear to explain the international interest in local stories from Netflix and from an international noir audience. In addition to social microcosms mirroring broader social tensions, The Guardian’s framing of Galician Noir (Webster Ayuso 2021) reiterates how “[c]rime stories emerging from Galicia […] have their roots in the region’s literature” as well as a Galician historical heritage as “landing place for pirates and smugglers,” which applies to contemporary and transnational concerns like local drugs and arms trafficking. This relates to, for instance, Fariña (Cocaine Coast, Antena 3 2018), based on Nacho Carretero’s nonfiction book Fariña and set in the 1980s Galicia; the Spanish-Portuguese miniseries Auga seca (Dry Water, 2020–21), set in Vigo and Lisboa, marking the HBO debut in the Galician language, and produced by Alfonso Blanco, one of the producers of Hierro (Movistar+ 2019–21), a series with an interest in similar local migration issues (Hopewell 2019); and Vivir sin permiso (Unauthorised Living, 2018–20), co-produced by the Fariña production company Bambú Producciones with Telecinco, which has had an Italian remake titled Il patriarca (Mediaset 2023) (Lizana 2022). Despite a visual style and melodramatic

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inserts consistent with the intended mainstream audience, the ‘documentary effect’ and close spatial inspection in the opening for Unauthorised Living is particularly interesting. Following a speedboat racing along the coast, an unidentifiable male first person voice-over recalls his first meeting with one Nemo Bandeira: “He pointed at a map with the cue and asked us all: ‘Hey! Hey! Where are we?’. Of course, nobody answered, and he said, ‘Here! Here! North-west quarter west. Here we are, and we’ve got a fantastic coast, it’s infinite, full of hiding places. A secret sea protecting us.’” Meanwhile, two men disembark the speedboat onto a wooden pile-­ dwelling filled with fishing gear a short distance from the coast, while the voice-over turns into dialogue. The voice-over is disclosed as Ferro, Nemo’s best friend and henchman, blustering, “‘We’ve got everything. We’ve got fuel, we’ve got a coast, we’ve got boats, we’ve got men. And the most important thing of all: we’ve got balls.’” Uttering these words, Ferro looks at a third man, wounded, bound and gagged, and held captive on the pile. Expressively, the “fantastic coast” is tainted and utilised as a place of delinquencies and violence, a “guilty landscape” (Reijnders 2009). All the TV series mentioned above exploit the distinctive characteristics and geographical diversity of the Galician landscape, which features rugged coastlines, sandy beaches, windy coastal towns, and a hilly countryside. Diego Ávalos, vice-president of Originals—Spain, Portugal & Nordics at Netflix, remarks, “it’s a place that, on the surface, appears to be very peaceful, and that lends itself to the narrative tension” (Webster Ayuso 2021). This contrast between what is visible on the surface and what remains deeply hidden in addition to the topoi of ‘the sleepy town hiding a dark secret’ and of ‘the out-of-town investigator’ form the basis of Bitter Daisies, which has its main allure precisely in the localised place and culture. Addressing the popular interest in the capital, the series’ creator Martínez maintains that: “[T]here is a ‘saturation’ of Madrid and other big cities […]. As with Nordic noir, taking the story in a small village in Galicia simply offers a new environment, something authentic that moves away from the more uniform aesthetic of a city” (Webster Ayuso 2021). The series was filmed in the territory between A Coruña and Santiago de Compostela with exterior locations in Abegondo, A Estrada, and Vedra, while interior scenes were filmed in CTV studios in Teo (CRTVG 2018). CTV co-produced the series with Comarex and TVG (Televisión de Galicia), the free-to-air television channel owned by the television subsidiary of Galician regional-owned broadcaster Corporación Radio e Televisión de Galicia (CRTVG). Upon the 2019-broadcast on

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TVG, Bitter Daisies has been distributed internationally by Netflix dubbed in Castilian Spanish and subtitled in 29 languages. The story begins in Murias with the arrival of Civil Guard Inspector Rosa Vargas, relocated from A Coruña to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Marta Labrada. Vargas must act as quickly and stealthily as possible before the case reaches the media on the very days when Pope Benedict XVI is expected to visit Santiago, but the investigation takes a macabre and dangerous turn upon the discovery of the bodies of ten young women. While the investigation uncovers crimes of sexual exploitation and corruption lurking beneath the town’s apparent quietness, a second exploration unfolds and seeks to capture the viewer’s curiosity, which is particularly interesting for two main reasons. From a gender/generic perspective, it stages Rosa as a solitary and private investigator, a difficult and tormented woman, and a brilliant but emotionally distant professional in accordance with the model of the “flawed detective” (Dresner 2007) popularised by Nordic Noir. The solitary, unofficial investigation matches the figure of the detective as a textual representation of the viewer, who, alongside the detective, must take the journey to Murias, decipher clues, reconstruct a scenario in order to reach an overall comprehension of the plot. Secondly, the solitary endeavour is likewise a spatial investigation in the strictest sense of the term, that is, an investigation that, in an unknown territory, aims to identify (with) a recognisable location. The series’ construction of a sense of place is even more interesting since Rosa possesses no visual clues to carry on her personal enquiries, only audio clues. In the second episode of the first season, a recorded, unrecognised female voice can be heard over the images of Rosa looking around and taking notes in the outskirts of Murias (see Image 4.1): “I got lost at the exit, I don’t know where I am. In the middle of the woods. There’s a kind of red tank. And some billboards.” We appreciate Rosa’s personal attempt to identify the exact location of the recording, which she finds in the fourth episode after noticing tanks and a bouquet of daisies by the side of the road—of course, these are the daisies referred to in the series’ title. In the end, we realise that Rosa—whose real name is Eva—has been searching for her disappeared sister, which as a murder case turns up tied to the overall murder plot of the season. Besides the complexities of the plot, the series’ storyline appears in this way to be closely tied to the construction of a sense of place, since Rosa/Eva is just as spatially perplexed as the viewer and needs to show special attention towards the surrounding locations to construct the place-bound coherence of the crimes

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Image 4.1  Bitter Daisies presents the protagonist Rosa/Eva trying to localise a phone call from her disappeared sister, representing an in-depth scrutinisation of the series’ setting

committed and, hence, an overall comprehension of the locality in which the story takes place. In this way, Bitter Daisies is a representative example of how the creators’ intentional search for something ‘authentic,’ as noted above, may result in site-specific storytelling with a strong sense of place and departing from the protagonist’s own close inspections of the local town.

“Things Are Going to Get Darker”: Non uccidere In searching for and promoting new peripheral locations capable of stimulating complex stories from the periphery and innovative visual styles, the Italian public broadcaster Rai has played a leading role (Hansen and Re 2021). Under the leadership of Eleonora Andreatta (head of Rai Fiction from September 2012 to June 2020) and driven by original productions by linear and non-linear pay TV players (Sky, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video), and by the increasing circulation of production and narrative models from other European countries, Rai has in fact strongly innovated and diversified its production strategies, emblematically titled “Nessuno escluso” (Nobody excluded). The changes implemented by Rai Fiction have

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progressively offered an interesting case of balancing tradition and innovation through the integration of international models, a process in which authenticity is valued as a means towards “overcoming cultural stereotypes” and the creation of “strong identity connotation” (Rai Fiction n.d.). The transformation has been expressed particularly through the promotion of inclusive narratives (often from female points of view) combined with the diversification of locations: Rai Fiction wants to enhance the diversity of territories and territorial cultures, thus encouraging a process with a strong economic and, more importantly, cultural value. This process promotes inclusivity towards the entire country and from an international perspective too. Local, in this sense, does not mean localism: rather, it means the accuracy of a reference point, and a setting that can become universal precisely because of its specificity. (ibid.)

In the words of Andreatta, the former Rai head of fiction, who is presently with Netflix: To us, talking about Italy means representing it in its territorial diversity. The setting is not an appendix or a background. It contextualises and gives substance to the plot […]. In the last few years, we have been shooting in every region of Italy, telling the story of our country in all its cultural variety. (Guarnaccia 2018, 19–20)

Diversity, innovation, and differentiation through location placement have, in other words, been a dominant mode of production for Rai as the most important producer of TV series in Italy. In the context of Italian TV series production, the origin of Rai fiction’s progressive innovations can be traced back to the crime series Thou Shalt Not Kill, the second case study of this chapter. The series was co-produced with Fremantle (Italy), an independent division of the media conglomerate RTL Group that in the early 2000s was one of Rai’s major suppliers, especially with the police procedural La squadra (The Team 2000–07) and the soap opera Un posto al sole (A Place in the Sun 1996-), both filmed at the Rai Production Centre in Naples. In contrast to these two flagship productions, the project Thou Shalt Not Kill was developed with a clearer international vocation. The TV series was produced by Lorenzo Mieli, founder of the production company Wildside, acquired by Fremantle in 2015, and currently the president of Fremantle’s Italian branch. The

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complete first season was directed by Giuseppe Gagliardi, who collaborated with Mieli and Wildside on the Sky TV series 1992 (2015), the first instalment of a trilogy that narrates the impetuous changes in Italian politics in the early 1990s. In 2022, Gagliardi collaborated with The Apartment, a company founded by Mieli within the Fremantle group, for the production of the Sky prison drama Il re (The King 2022-). For variously combined co-production arrangements between Sky, Rai and HBO, Lorenzo Mieli also produced the international TV series The Young Pope (2016), The New Pope (2020), and L’amica geniale (My Brilliant Friend 2018-). In other words, the Mieli-Gagliardi endeavours markedly represent international ambitions within Italian TV industries. Targeting international audiences with Thou Shalt Not Kill is not as such expressed through the direct coverage of geopolitical issues or supranational themes. Starting with the working title “I delitti in famiglia” (Crimes in the family), Rai presented the TV series as: a procedural that portrays our country in a verisimilar and modern language through the privileged point of view of its founding communities: first and foremost, the family. Cases inspired by more or less recent crime news [are used] to explore the sentimental ecosystems that have gone through—or are going through—the trauma of crime. (NEWSRai 2015)

According to the series’ creator, screenwriter and creative producer, Claudio Corbucci, crime and family drama are “the two main genre references from which we started to approach the series’ concept. It is precisely from this perspective—that of a ‘noir of feelings’—that we shaped our stories. […] We intended to create a product that would be close to the language of the most prestigious international TV dramas” (ibid.). The series’ aim to address local issues and social microcosms in an international way appears mainly through three characteristics: its characters and storytelling devices, its visual style, and the peripherality of its location placement. Firstly, in paratextual materials accompanying the release, great emphasis is placed on the double function of the female protagonist, Valeria Ferro, a woman in her thirties and inspector in the homicide squad. The character construction breaks with Italian traditions of both male protagonism and the team-based model for the character ensemble, although series showing female professional investigators in leading roles started in the late 1990s and early 2000s, for example, Linda e il brigadiere (Linda

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and the Brigadier, Rai 1997–2000), La squadra, Distretto di polizia (Police District, Mediaset 2000–12), and Carabinieri (Mediaset 2002–08) (Barra 2020; Buonanno 2012). More precisely, the Valeria Ferro character pushes Italian production into an international context in connecting to innovative models from Nordic countries. In the promotional materials available on the AVOD RaiPlay platform, director Michele Alhaique (season two) said, “The fact that the protagonist is a female inspector is a very original feature in the context of Italian crime TV series. This possibility was opened by Scandinavian dramas, which later had remakes in the United States, and it was time for a TV series with a strong female protagonist in Italy as well.” Interpreted by the actress and beauty pageant titleholder (she won the Miss Italia 2008 beauty contest) Miriam Leone, Valeria exhibits a sort of denied beauty and sensuality, masked by the absence of makeup and apparent negligence in her apparel. Valeria’s solitude and past family traumas acquire great relevance in the running plot, making her a gloomy, tough, and lonely character, which permeates the overall narrative with an oppressive and anguishing atmosphere. In addition, significant attention is paid to psychological precision in the development of other narrative arcs and storylines, including both the serial arches regarding Valeria’s relationship to colleagues and her dark personal backstory, and the episodic features regarding the characters and individual crime plots of each episode: As a result, comedic contrasts typical of Italian series are completely eliminated, melodramatic aspects and action scenes considerably reduced, and the series demonstrates a generally slower narrative pace. Secondly, creatives had a clear intention to produce a refined visual style in order to give Thou Shalt Not Kill a recognisable visual identity on par with high-end European standards, which may have contributed to how it was able to target international audiences. Director Giuseppe Gagliardi stated, “when making a film or a TV series, you can no longer forget to address a global viewer. We have to get used to a different aesthetic approach in Italy too” (Buttitta 2015). In published promos on RaiPlay, Timoty Aliprand, director of photography on the second season, emphasises the use of soft contrasts, backlighting, and a slightly colour-graded bluish tone, which further clarifies the international stylistic influences and more particularly the Nordic Noir reference: “We chose a Northern European style as if the sun was always low, and it was always cloudy” (see Image 4.2). Thirdly, the final element that contributes to the international ambitions of the series is the peripherality of its location placement, and in this

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Image 4.2  Valeria Ferro (Miriam Leone) in the trailer for Thou Shalt Not Kill, highlighting the atmospheric use of lighting strategies in the series

respect Thou Shalt Not Kill may be considered one of Rai’s most radical experimentations in stressing the sense of place and its relationship with the gloomy atmosphere of the setting and visual style, the ambiguous moral landscape, and the transgressive identity of the protagonist. The radical nature of this experimentation entails, as we shall see, some important strengths, which paved the way for other breakthrough series, as well as some weaknesses. In relation to this book’s topic, we focus on location placement below. Part of the shooting took place in the Rai and Lumiq studios in Turin where the Homicide Department of the Turin Police Headquarters was designed and reconstructed as one of the central settings of the story. In cooperation with the Rai Production Centres in Naples and Rome and with the support from the Film Commission Torino Piemonte, the contribution of the Rai Production Centre in Turin was expanded to involve set designers, costume designers, cinematographers and post-production services. Overall, the season one production process involved more than 250 people with more than 90% based in the Turin and Piedmont areas for a total of about 50 weeks. Choosing Turin can be read as a strategic compromise in the Italian quest for peripheral locations. In fact, the presence of Rai’s production facilities and crew on location optimised production costs, thus facilitating the innovative choice to shoot in a northern, industrial city, not comparable to tourist destinations and traditional

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Mediterranean locations. The series creator Sergio Corbucci (Ariotti 2016) especially supported the two units shooting simultaneously in exteriors and interiors—a production model already used by Corbucci in Rai’s Naples studios for La nuova squadra (The New Team, Rai 2008–11). Additionally, the “noir of feelings” concept and the need to scrutinise familiar microcosms affect the use of space and determine, in particular, the extensive use of interiors to express the characters’ psychology, social class and living conditions with claustrophobic connotations. Paradigmatic examples are not only family homes, often depicted as oppressive to underline the characters’ inability to overcome traumas and deal with conflicts, but also workplaces and particularly the interrogation room in the police station, where Valeria best displays her ability to pursue suspects and expose their lies: the bare and geometric aspect of the place perfectly matches the character’s hardness and roughness. With more than 300 sets and about 25 different locations for each episode, most exterior locations of Thou Shalt Not Kill were found in the North-western region of Piedmont and in the industrial city of Turin. In the pressbook and other promos on RaiPlay, Corbucci stated the following regarding the choice of location: Turin is not merely the backdrop for the investigations but becomes an integral part of the story. This element is already in the TV series’ concept: the city is described through its specific places, communities, and contradictions, thus becoming a mirror of the entire country. […] We chose the north because we wanted to make a Nordic detective story. In the colours, in the atmospheres. Turin has everything, the industrial suburbs, the monumental centre, the countryside, the vineyards, the Langhe, the mountains (NEWSRai 2015)

In the location placement strategy, the criterion of economic efficiency also has a partial impact on the aesthetic and narrative traits of the series. In this regard, it may be interesting to recall the similar pre-production history of The Red Door, which was likewise temporarily identified with the city of Turin as the setting of the story to optimise the budget (Coviello and Re 2021a). Not before the involvement of director Carmine Elia, Trieste was instead chosen as the main location based on the city’s ability to amplify the themes of the TV series and substantiate its original visual identity. From a production point of view, the choice of Trieste meant an increase in the production company’s autonomy, allowing an exploitation

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of different resources than those made available by the broadcaster, which in Turin would have been compulsory facilities (Tini 2019). From an institutional perspective, Rai equally benefited from the choice of Trieste, allowing the PSB (public service broadcaster) to pursue a broader policy of promoting the national territory in all its diversity and richness. Despite the accuracy and variety of locations in Thou Shalt Not Kill, the aesthetic model of Nordic Noir seems to prevail over the sense of place and the capacity of telling a story as if it was “grown out of the landscape” (Roberts 2016, 375). Rather, it is the landscape that seems to adapt and be functional to the needs of the story and especially to the stylistic traits from Nordic Noir, which are pursued in a very consistent and radical, yet one-sided manner. Partly reprinted in Fremantle’s pressbook (n.d.), the critical reception in the Italian press confirmed the disruptive effect of the production and especially the series’ Northern atmosphere, exemplified by the TV critic and historian Aldo Grasso in the newspaper Corriere della sera: Non uccidere learned the lesson from successful TV crime series from Northern Europe. There is a young investigator with an edgy character, a flair for investigation, and a mountain of unresolved problems that guarantee her strong motivation in doing her job. There are the gloomy atmospheres of Turin, portrayed in cold and grey cinematography, and a certain narrative dryness extraneous to the tradition of Italian mainstream TV series. (ibid.)

This critical description of Thou Shalt Not Kill arrives at the same time as the Nordic Noir as a concept was becoming an academic topic under scrutiny, and fits, for instance, Glen Creeber’s definition of the genre/style very well, including “a dimly lit aesthetic,” “barren landscapes,” and “troubled detectives” (Creeber 2015, Hansen and Waade 2017, 13–17). The influential traits from Nordic Noir on Thou Shalt Not Kill have also been acknowledged by Thoumelin in her work about the “cosmopolitanism” of Danish TV series (Thoumelin 2020). Interpreting the series in the context of Nordic Noir is also confirmed in the international critical reception, which put a strong emphasis on the break with the Mediterranean tourist imagery celebrated by TV series such as Montalbano. For the Boston-based PSB GBH, Journalist Wolanin wrote the following:

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If you were hoping for a romantic backdrop of Roman ruins, you’re in the wrong place: Thou Shalt Not Kill is set and filmed in Turin, the capital city of Piedmont in northern Italy. A post-industrial city with a sizable influx of immigrants, Turin has a population of more than 2 million people in its greater metropolitan area. The city is known for its culture and universities, and all of these factors weave together to create the perfect backdrop for the mysteries Valeria works in each episode. (Wolanin 2020)

The British online magazine Crime Fiction Lover continued along the same lines: Put away thoughts of the baking hot Sicilian afternoons you’ve seen on Inspector Montalbano. With Thou Shalt Not Kill […] things are going to get darker, moodier and even a little sultry. Originally titled Non uccidere in Italy, Thou Shalt Not Kill quickly becomes reminiscent of The Killing. It doesn’t quite achieve the chilling, grey atmosphere of the groundbreaking Danish series, but it does put plenty of red herrings into the stream from early on and has a calm, calculated procedural feel to it as secrets from the victim’s past come to the surface. People often think of ancient churches and Roman ruins when they visualise Italy—here you get the gritty urban settings of a modern city. (Crimefictionlover 2019)

Although the critical reception is outside the scope of this book, it is very interesting to note that the disruptive impact of the TV series lies precisely in the connection between Turin as a less-seen peripheral location and the innovative visual style of Nordic Noir. Rather than its ability to narrate Turin and Piedmont or Turin as a local storytelling device, the identity and originality of Thou Shalt Not Kill are both above and beyond appreciated for what the TV series is not (no “romantic backdrop of Roman ruins”, no “baking hot Sicilian afternoons”), for its disruption of Italian TV traditions, and for its unexpected connection with the new wave of Northern European serial narratives. The domestic and international circulation of the TV series confirms this interpretation and indicates why the strong international orientation may have bewildered the Italian PSB audience. Despite poor ratings in Italy, also due to some uncertainties in scheduling by the broadcaster, the show circulated fairly well outside Italy, including French (Squadra criminale) and German (Die Toten von Turin) broadcast on Arte, and distribution through the British Channel 4’s Walter Presents streaming service (also available in US from 2017) for UK and US audiences. After the experience of Thou Shalt Not

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Kill, TV series such as Rocco Schiavone, The Red Door and Petra represent further and perhaps more complex and balanced attempts to ‘translate’ the European quality model of Nordic Noir into the Italian context, but they struggle to achieve the international circulation that Thou Shalt Not Kill achieved.

A Journey from Barcelona to Genoa: Petra While still exposing the Mediterranean Sea’s culture-historical local heritage, the drift towards peripheral locations in Italy has mainly involved the development of innovative location placement strategies rather than typical/stereotypical representations, a process many Italian creative professionals interviewed for this book consider as more “European.” Nordic Noir’s influence on Rai’s contemporary crime drama may be traced by comparing Thou Shalt Not Kill with two more recent productions. Firstly, the miniseries Bella da morire (Voiceless, Rai 2020) may be considered a more elaborate ‘translation’ of established Nordic Noir traits in the Italian scenario. This cultural negotiation occurs both through the protagonist’s attitude, the overtly feminist inspector Eva Cantini, whose tough and edgy personality is softened through specific casting strategies (D’Amelio and Re 2021), and through the series’ location strategy. Indeed, the original dark and rainy setting in Northern Italy, the imaginary town of Lagonero, conceived in the development stage by screenwriter Filippo Gravino, was during production replaced by the more Mediterranean Lake Bracciano and Lake Albano closer to Rome. As director Andrea Molaioli claims: Economic reasons led us to shoot close to Rome, but I was fond of the original idea of Nordic suburbs and I have tried to conceive the locations as Nordic: although illuminated by the sun, they are never completely clear and limpid. Therefore, while remaining close to Rome, we have moved away from the concrete geographical places. (Molaioli 2020)

The aesthetics of the TV series, along with the absence of comedic inserts, maintains therefore the TV series’ Nordic-oriented conceptualisation. The second illustrative example is Petra, a TV series co-produced by Sky and Cattleya with support from Genova Liguria Film Commission more than ten years after the pioneering experience of Quo vadis, baby? (Sky 2008). The last-mentioned anticipated the turn towards peripheral

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locations and female narratives through adaptations of Grazia Verasani’s Bologna novels about private detective Giorgia Cantini. The Inspector Petra Delicado character (Delicato in the Italian series) derives from Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s successful literary crime series with the first novel, Ritos de muerte, published in Spain in 1996, translated into Italian in 2002, and into English in 2008 (Death Rites). Set in the city of Barcelona, the book series follows the investigations and turbulent friendship of Inspector Petra Delicado, an educated, independent, and non-conformist woman, and the deputy inspector Fermín Garzón (Antonio Monte in the Italian adaptation), a generous policeman close to retirement with a seemingly traditionalist working class background. The Italian TV adaptation (D’Amelio and Re 2023) relocates the narrative to contemporary Genoa, a port city in North-Western Italy, which makes Petra a paradigmatic case study to conclude this chapter because it illustrates the richness and diversity within the poetics of Mediterranean Noir. Besides showing the dialogue between the Italian and Spanish traditions, Petra exemplifies the metaphorical encounter between the Mediterranean and the North Sea, that is, the influence of Nordic Noir as a prestigious cultural model with an international vocation in Sky and Cattleya’s TV iteration. Confirmed by producer Arianna De Chiara, the stylistic transcultural encounter between Mediterranean and Nordic traditions was deliberately integrated into the production strategies: We realised that we had to try to find our own way. On the one hand, we had to differentiate Petra from the typical Italian imagery, as it has been successfully consolidated over the years through the series produced by Rai and Mediaset. At the same time, we did not want to go directly toward the dark Scandinavian colours. This search for the right tone was done in parallel, both in writing and in the visual part. (De Chiara 2020)

In aligning with international production standards, the location placement and the way the city of Genoa was depicted played a key role. As mentioned by Cattleya’s President Riccardo Tozzi, Genoa appears as an “unseen location from a cinematic point of view” enabling dialogue with contemporary international models (Cattleya n.d.). If we accept that “the need and desire to broaden narrative horizons” also means broadening “visual horizons” (De Chiara 2020), it appears necessary for the production to “break away from the reference to Montalbano, and Sicily was a taboo area” (ibid.). Production and location manager Michele Ottaggio

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confirms this: “We wanted to exclude a Southern city because we wanted a slightly more Northern setting, a city with an industrial past, with a slightly more European atmosphere” (Ottaggio 2020). In Ottaggio’s view, producing away from Rome represents spatial capital and production values compensating for the extra expenses of distant locations from both a visual and a narrative perspective, fostering a fresh imagery and broadening “universal” traits that make stories circulate. An additional factor explaining Genoa as location lies in its similarities with the city in which the novels are set. Confirmed by the series’ additional scriptwriters Furio Andreotti and Ilaria Macchia, scriptwriter Giulia Calenda stresses, “if you have read the books, you know that Barcelona is a character which lives through its neighbourhoods and its social stratification. It is a large city by the sea, a large port, a bustle of cultures and people” (Andreotti et  al. 2020). Genoa offered all such elements, and more particularly the city granted a verticality that was both visual (geomorphological and architectural) and historical (social and cultural stratification). Director Maria Sole Tognazzi highlights that “Genoa is a city that, depending on the neighbourhood, allows you to narrate different moods” (Tognazzi 2020). In the pressbook, the originally Genoese Michele Ottaggio describes the distinctive features of the city as follows: Genoa is a city characterised by different historical periods. Starting from the medieval historical centre, the famous “caruggi,” it climbs up the mountains, changing style and becoming Renaissance, Maritime Republic, and then “umbertina” in the nineteenth-century districts. At the same time, going from west to east, one can distinguish the industrial districts with shipyards and factories from the wealthier, more residential ones. The land’s orography, sea to the south and mountains to the north, have forced it to narrow and lengthen. In each episode, we explored a different feature of the city and a particular area. Each story allowed us to discover a different part of Genoa and a different social context. Locations were sought to identify the most appropriate environments for the narrative. (Cattleya n.d.)

If grasped and represented in all complexity, the distinct function of a character like Petra rests in how they may be disengaged from original space-time coordinates and literary scenogeography and work as intermediary access to new geographical contexts. What is important to sustain is, ostensibly, the situated narrative and the relationship between character and territory, not necessarily that specific territory. Characters are mobile,

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location placement changes accordingly, and so may the character approach to the contextual environment. Rather than having a specific place in mind, then, the scriptwriters traced a certain relationship between the place and the character, establishing what Martini and Minca (2018) refer to as an “affective atmosphere.” As noted by Furio Andreotti, “we have met the challenge of rendering an atmosphere. […] The identity of the characters prevailed over the specific geography of places” (Andreotti et al. 2020). We should add that the subordination of places to the characters identities and relationships is explicitly claimed by author Giménez Bartlett: “When I write detective novels, the place is functional to the characters” (Casavella et al. 2001, 34). She fully supports the prospects of the Italian project, especially when compared to the previous Madrid iteration (Petra, Telecinco 1999), while maintaining aesthetic and creative autonomy for artworks (and characters) in adaptations between different media: In the first 1999 TV series, Ana Belén [the actress portraying Petra] said she could not be away four months from home for the shooting, and the action was moved to Madrid. This change was costly because the location is essential in crime novels. The Raval is not the same as Pedralbes, and they had to look for the Madrid neighbourhoods that matched the story. The same thing happened with Genoa in Italy. The Italians tell me that it is a city just like Barcelona, but the city’s planning is not the same as in Barcelona. In any case, I have seen the first episode and the images are amazing, especially the shots taken at night. Nevertheless, it is unfair to Barcelona and above all unfair to me. […] Petra’s success seems fine to me, but as soon as she moves to another medium, she is no longer my character. She is the Petra Delicato created by the director of the series, Maria Sole Tognazzi. It is another concept, another artistic work. (Lozano 2020)

Naturally, the authentic atmosphere of the locations cannot be separated from how they are represented in writing or on the screen. Besides emphasising the contribution of Tognazzi’s specific visual style, Ilaria Macchia claimed that they have “never imagined a sunny TV series, which is the stereotype of Italy in the world. Our references have always been to the north: […] light in Petra is a Northern light, not a Southern light, and it corresponds perfectly to the type of character and story” (Andreotti et al. 2020). Interestingly, the location treatment not only claims ambient traits from the local Genoese environment, but also from the visual

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approach to narrating the place in relation to especially the central character. Finally, the choice to set the narrative in Genoa depended on the city’s aptitude to represent Petra’s character and her relocation to Genoa from Rome, her city of origin in the Italian transposition. As pointed out by Furio Andreotti, “Genoa is also a ‘shy’ city, and it seemed perfect as a representation of Petra’s character and her choice to ‘stand aside’” (ibid.). As a Genoese by choice, Petra’s character may be read as a creative re-­ interpretation of the displaced detective as a narrative topos, involuntarily transferred to an unfamiliar environment that is perceived as hostile. The case of Petra shows how voluntary displacement may establish harmonious relationships between character and environment, which typologically differentiates from both the above-mentioned continuity and the discontinuity models. Instead, the result is narratives of choice in which the character chooses to move far from home or return home to join or reconnect with a place s/he feels a sense of belonging and identification with. The recurring image of Petra’s dark silhouette in the city’s renowned aquarium—where the inspector takes refuge when she seeks a solitary moment to think—is a stylised, almost abstract representation of her spatial bond (see Image 4.3). Not only does such imagery metaphorically express the affinity and osmosis between Petra and Genoa, but it also incorporates an obvious tourist destination with complex character developments, enabling the placement strategy to generate new connotations and affective atmospheres that would not exist if Petra’s story and identity were not inscribed in Acquario di Genoa. In this way, Petra becomes attached to tourist destination branding and local placemaking activities, which must be of great interest to local tourist agencies. Another recurring image consolidating Petra’s relationship with Genoa is that of Petra walking alone along the seafront, thinking and smoking. Explained by Ottaggio in the press book: It was necessary to find some places with a strong Genoese imprint that would return in the various episodes, and that could represent and embody the relationship between Petra and Antonio. Petra lives in Genoa because in this city she has found, perhaps, the familiar place she could not find elsewhere. With its industrial and touristic parts, the port was the right choice because it contains the distinctive architecture of the city, and it is both majestic and melancholically beautiful. Around the port, we looked for a

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Image 4.3  In the series Petra, two recurring locations both represent the main characters’ traits and illustrate the location placement of the series place that was a bit “suspended”, which would act as a frame for the two protagonists. (Cattleya n.d.)

That “suspended” place was the imagined Samarcanda Bar. As an actual summer bar in the old port of Genoa, it was emptied and refurbished in a minimalist way to resemble a glass box, a sort of private ‘aquarium’ where the relationship between Petra and Antonio could develop in protected isolation (see Image 4.3). These two emblematic choices of locations highlight a series where locations are subsumed under character

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developments, and how it shows obvious influential traits from Nordic Noir too, but it still shows how local authenticity and recognisable main locations may peep through the perspectives of a character’s sense of place.

Allowing Cross-Cultural Dialogue Through European Middle Lands In film and television studies, the spatio-generic term ‘Mediterranean Noir’—internationally recognised as a transnational literary style—is increasingly applied to crime films and TV crime series produced in countries overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Characterised as a dialectic between transcultural dialogue and cultural clashes, the idea of the Mediterranean region as a ‘middle land’ is expressed in crime narratives related to Mediterranean Noir through their contrastive style, provocatively associating beautiful landscapes and picturesque stereotypes with brutal criminality and organised crime. As seen above, TV adaptations that downscale the social criticism inscribed in the original novels may risk reproducing stereotypical representations and validating the “tourist gaze.” In the past decade, though, new high-end dramas produced in Italy and Spain have attempted to avoid stereotyping mechanisms, and to showcase less seen, unconventional peripheral locations. As the cases discussed in this chapter indicate, location diversification and the use of peripheral locations have had several positive effects on innovative processes in Spanish and Italian film and TV industries: (1) Firstly, producers take advantage of contemporary territorialisation policies, infrastructures, and regional screen support systems, while at the same time aiming for an international standard in the finalised productions. (2) Secondly, creatives take a conspicuous part in creating recognisable visual styles and complex narratives with clear visual identities with territorial roots and an authentic base underneath the storylines, as if “they have grown out of the landscape” (Roberts 2016, 375). (3) Thirdly, creatives have worked towards an integration of Nordic Noir—considered a core model for addressing international audiences on the European continent—within national and local traditions, allowing for fresh representations and the facilitation of cross-cultural dialogue.

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Lang, Jamie. 2021. Filmax Brings Breakout Basque Noir Thriller Series Mouths of Sand to L.A.  Virtual Screenings. Variety. https://variety.com/2021/tv/ global/mouths-­of-­sand-­filmax-­la-­virtual-­screenings-­1234975508/. Lizana, Almudena M. 2022. Así será Il Patriarca, la versión italiana de Vivir sin permiso. formulatv. https://www.formulatv.com/noticias/il-­patriarca-­version-­ italiana-­vivir-­sin-­permiso-­114908/. Locatelli, Massimo. 2017. Psicologia di un’emozione. Thriller e noir nell’età dell’ansia. Milano: Vita & Pensiero. Lozano, Sergio. 2020. “Las mujeres tienen un sentimiento de culpa muy fuerte.” La Vanguardia. https://www.lavanguardia.com/cultura/20201004/ 483761831084/petra-­delicado-­bartlett-­novela-­negra.html. Manetti, Antonio, and Marco Manetti. 2019. Interview with Manetti Bros conducted by Monica Dall’Asta, Federico Pagello and Valentina Re. Bologna, 29 August. Martini, Annaclaudia, and Claudio Minca. 2018. Affective Dark Tourism Encounters: Rikuzentakata after the 2011 Great East Japan Disaster. Social & Cultural Geography 22 (1): 33–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365. 2018.1550804. Mikos, Lothar, and Marta Perrotta. 2012. Traveling Style: Aesthetic Differences and Similarities in National Adaptations of Yo soy Betty, la Fea. International Journal of Cultural Studies 15 (1): 81–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1367877911428116. Milani, Raffaela. 2009. Art of the Landscape. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mittell, Jason. 2015. Complex TV. New York: New York University Press. Molaioli, Andrea. 2020. Online interview with Andrea Molaioli conducted by Elena D’Amelio and Valentina Re, 8 December. Morreale, Emiliano. 2020. La mafia immaginaria. Roma: Donzelli. Netflix. 2019. Producing for the World: Netflix Launches its First European Production Hub in Madrid. Press release. https://about.netflix.com/en/ news/producing-­f or-­t he-­w orld-­n etflix-­l aunches-­i ts-­f irst-­e uropean-­ production-­hub-­in-­madrid. NEWSRai. 2015. Non uccidere. https://www.rai.it/dl/doc/1441983340692_ non%20uccidere.pdf. Ottaggio, Michele. 2020. Online interview with Michele Ottaggio conducted by Elena D’Amelio and Valentina Re, 7 December. Pérez Pena, Marcos. 2021. Hai que rematar co mito de que as cousas en galego non se venden fóra. Claro que se venden, o que hai que ter é calidade. Praza Pública. https://praza.gal/cultura/hai-­que-­rematar-­co-­mito-­de-­que-­as-­ cousas-­en-­galego-­non-­se-­venden-­fora-­claro-­que-­se-­venden-­o-­que-­hai-­que-­ter-­ e-­calidade.

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Tognazzi, Maria Sole. 2020. Online interview with Maria Sole Tognazzi conducted by M. Elena D’Amelio and Valentina Re, 30 November. Turnaturi, Gabriella. 2013. The Invention of a Genre: The Mediterranean Noir. In New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies Volume 2: The Arts and History, ed. Graziella Parati, 53–72. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage. Vizoso, Sonia. 2019. El milagro del “thriller” gallego que nadie quería y que triunfó en Netflix, El País. https://elpais.com/cultura/2019/12/06/television/1575641850_170507.html. Webster Ayuso, Julia. 2021. Galician Noir: How a Rainy Corner of Spain Spawned a New TV Genre. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2021/mar/03/galician-­noir-­how-­a-­rainy-­corner-­of-­spain-­spawned-­ a-­new-­tv-­genre. Wolanin, Andrea. 2020. Everything We Know About Thou Shalt Not Kill. GBH. https://www.wgbh.org/programs/2020/02/05/everything-­we-­know-­ about-­thou-­shalt-­not-­kill.

CHAPTER 5

Country Noir and Rural Peripheries in Western Europe

Representing Western Europe, the geographical focus of this chapter is France, Germany, Austria, and the Benelux region. This region proposes a certain liminality not only between urban and rural areas of each country, but its status also stresses geographical tension on a much broader level. Housing a range of politically dominant offices as well as the historical roots of the EU, Western Europe maintains a historic, hegemonic apprehension of defining Europe, which may generate—in other European regions—a sense of being geopolitical and metaphorical peripheries of the continent. Whenever TV crime series, then, move into the Western European periphery and crosses its borders and margins, the result may appear even more powerful in the sometimes extreme accentuation of country noir sensibilities and rural settings. With France facing the Mediterranean Sea and particularly affected by postcolonial intercultural integration issues, the country occupies a prominent role in Mediterranean Noir and shares dominant features of Italian and Spanish TV crime series set in peripheral areas. As a socio-­geographical territory, France functions as a threshold region between Western Europe’s centralised political nexus and the Mediterranean cultures and expressions and could just as well have been analysed in Chap. 4’s focus on Mediterranean Noir. As in Spain and Italy, French creatives’ location strategies revisit the more traditional Mediterranean locations in the south of the country as well as explore other seaside places in northern regions, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2_5

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providing colder and bleaker atmospheres for the series. As instances of the latter, the French-Belgian co-production Jugée coupable (Found Guilty, La Une/France 3 2021) was filmed in the Morbihan region with the support from the Brittany region; Commissaire Magellan (Inspector Magellan, France 3 2009–21) was filmed in the Lille area with the support of the Nord Pas-de-Calais region; and Les témoins (Witnesses, France 2 2015–17) was also filmed in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region and set in the coastal town of Le Tréport in Normandy; all three series with darker colour-­ scheme and specific attention towards the series’ peripheral settings. As a special transnational case, the German series Kommissar Dupin (Inspector Dupin, ARD 2014-), featuring a police officer relocated from Paris to Concarneau in Brittany, may also be traced back to this type of location strategy. Writing under the pen name Jean-Luc Bannalec, the Concarneau-­ location of the series was based on the German writer Jörg Bong’s Inspector Dupin novels, which locative status has been reflected in the critical reception of the series. “The main character of the series is the region itself, narrated in a dreamy form between Celtic myths and legends and a provincial world where crimes are often concealed behind a more than reassuring appearance” (Caldiron 2021). A similar German case is the German-Swedish co-production Der Kommissar und das Meer (The Inspector and the Sea, ZDF 2007–21), which also takes place in a non-­ German peripheral setting, in this case the Nordic seaside location in the Swedish island of Gotland in the centre of the Baltic Sea. The Swedish broadcaster pulled out after the first season, but the German production continued without Swedish collaboration after this. As many TV series set in the peripheries of Western Europe fall within the “borders series” category (cf. Chap. 2), their borderland settings and scenogeographic approaches tend to re-negotiate screened European borderscapes. As drivers of conflict and integral parts of the plots, these series express transboundary concerns and they address transborder geopolitical issues such as immigration and racist biases, drug and human trafficking, and cultural clashes stemming from national prejudices and stereotypes. For instance, they include the German productions Wolfsland (ARD 2016-) set in Görlitz, the easternmost town in Germany adjoining the Polish town of Zgorzelec on the other side of the Lusatian Neisse river; Über die Grenze (Borderland, ARD 2017-) set in south-western Germany in the town of Kehl, on the river Rhine, opposite the French city of Strasbourg; and the Austro-German co-production Die Toten vom Bodensee (Murder by the Lake, ZDF/ORF 2014-) filmed on the southeastern shore

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of Lake Constance at the border between the towns of Bregenz (Austria) and Lindau (Germany). Although not a member of the EU, the Western European region also includes Switzerland’s internal geopolitical ‘outsider’ position with its border series Der Bestatter (The Undertaker, SRF 2013–19), placed in Aarau near the rural Jurapark Aargau and close to the German border. Closer to the heart of the EU, two Belgian-Dutch co-­ productions reveal glimpses of unexpected transnational areas, like the mudflats of the river Scheldt along the border between Belgium and the Netherlands in Grenslanders (Floodlands, VRT/AVROTROS 2019), and the Flemish province of Limburg, bordering the Netherlands and known as the ‘Colombia of ecstasy’ in Undercover (Eén/Netflix 2019-). Exploring the natural wilderness that appears forgotten or marginalised in an urbanised and geopolitically centralised European region, other border series are particularly interested in questioning the entangled relationships between external and internal borders or what Jacquelin refers to as “the internal social margins in […] rural spaces” (Jacquelin 2021a, 113). In this way, harsh contrasts as well as profound connections resonate powerfully between very small and local conflicts and larger, global issues with small, isolated communities in mountainous or wooded areas as the major location trend. For instance, the Pyrenees Mountain region is explored in the French drama Glacé (The Frozen Dead, M6 2017) where the harshness of nature is combined with in-depth psychological exploration, including the key narrative and investigative role revolving around an isolated, high-­ security psychiatric prison. In this case, conflict and danger not only emanate from human capacities, but also from the strangeness and perils of nature. The Alps are more than just a backdrop in a number of series: Le Chalet (The Chalet, France 2 2018) was filmed at Chamonix, a commune in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, situated to the north of Mont Blanc at the junction between France, Italy, and Switzerland; or in the Swiss drama Wilder (SRF 2017–2020), which is set in Oberwies, a fictional mountain village in the Bernese Alpes; and in the German/Austrian co-production Der Pass (Pagan Peak, Sky Deutschland 2019–2023), inspired by the first season of the Swedish-Danish series Bron|Broen (The Bridge, SVT/DR 2011–18) and set in a mountain pass in the Austria-­Germany border area. Distinctive awareness of the dangerous mountain wilderness and associated transnational issues, combined with an overt influence from Nordic Noir, makes Pagan Peak an exemplary case to be explored later in this chapter.

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Close attention towards forests and woodlands represents another spatial strategy to emphasise the persistence of a sense of wilderness in the heart of Europe. With a conspicuous spatio-generic title, the German drama Ein Schwarzwaldkrimi (A Black Forest Crime Story, ZDF 2019-) is, less surprisingly, set in The Black Forest close to the German borders with France and Switzerland. Stressed by the mobility reference in the title, the French series Le voyageur (The Traveller, France 3 2019-) features a retired police officer who travels alone in his van to the most isolated and desolate peripheries of the country to investigate unsolved murders and crimes. In addition, some French and Belgian productions have had a strong international resonance for their ability to represent distant communities and wild peripheries in the border zones of the Ardennes and the Vosges. The Vosges Forest is the location of the first case study we examine below, Zone blanche (Black Spot, France 2/RTBF 2017–19), while the Ardennes woodlands are heavily featured in the Belgian series Ennemi public (Public Enemy, La Une 2016–19), as well as in the two French-Belgian co-productions La forét (The Forest, France 3/ La Une 2017) and La trêve (The Break, La Une/France 2 2016–18), both co-financed by the Wallonie Brussels Federation-RTBF Fund (Hopewell 2016). In many interviews, director of The Break Matthieu Donck argued that the idea of filming in the Ardennes was the primary driving force behind the series, adding that the “aim was to tell a universal story in a very typical and familiar setting. Americans have used their sumptuous Far West settings to create the arena for their worlds (e.g. Westerns). In Belgium, the Ardennes seemed to be the best place to create our arena” (Lardot, Hazard 2016). The spatial sensibilities of crime narratives set in such rural peripheral areas in Western Europe may be traced back to a specific trend called ‘Country Noir’ (Jacquelin 2021b). Related to generic characteristics of the Western and portrayals of the wilderness in US popular culture, Country Noir refuses to provide a bucolic sense of place and portrays instead a rough and rugged environment emblematic of the characters that inhabit the stories that unfold there. In other words, rather than establishing a neologism such as ‘Western Noir,’ which has no critical counterpart in European crime fiction, we embrace the notion of ‘Country Noir’ in this chapter as a significant reference to the extreme characteristics of many peripheral settings. This tendency becomes particularly interesting considering this region as the true heart of the EU, which geopolitically and metaphorically makes other European regions peripheral to Western Europe. In fact, Western

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Europe embodies the geographical and institutional ‘centrality’ or ‘home’ of the EU or Europe, including the European Council (Brussels), the Council of Europe (Strasbourg), the European Parliament (Strasbourg and Luxembourg City), the Court of Justice (Luxembourg City), European Central Bank (Frankfurt), and the European Commission (Brussels and Luxembourg City). As Country Noir emphasises, this ‘European heart’ contains its own peripheries and internal borders, which makes the crime genre’s attention towards the rural peripheries even stronger. Filmed in Junglinster in northern Luxembourg, the Luxembourgian TV crime series Capitani (RTL Télé Lëtzebuerg 2019–22) is located conspicuously close to the heart of Europe. Using the peripheral forest topos to depict complex contrasts between urban and rural mindsets, and to narrate hidden and obscure ambivalences of small, isolated communities, this series qualifies as the third and final case study of the chapter. The label ‘Country Noir’ was coined as the subtitle of Daniel Woodrell’s novel Give Us a Kiss (1996), set in the cross-state mountain plateau The Ozarks in the US and translated into French in 1998 with the subtitle “un roman noir rural”. At that time, tendencies towards rural settings had already commenced in different Western European territories, including France (Levet 2020) as well as Germany and Austria with “Regionalkrimi” (McChesney 2014), but the semantics of Country Noir imbue direct attention towards specific natural environments and often contains a US stylistic influence that represents a real visual and cultural challenge for the European territory. In 2010, the film adaptation of Winter’s Bone (2006), Woodrell’s last novel from the Ozarks series, strengthened the label and encouraged its extension into a transmedia perspective so that today it may be used to designate a cross-media brand of crime narratives set in rural and peripheral areas like swamps, mountains, forests, farming environments, and suburbs, including also US TV productions like Breaking Bad (AMC 2008–13), Ozark (Netflix 2017–22), and True Detective (HBO 2014-) as well as many European productions like the titles analysed in this chapter. Specifically, True Detective’s first season set in the so-called Louisiana Deep South plays a major role in encouraging an extension of Country Noir aesthetics to television while relocating the values and motifs of the classic western to the Deep South. Once incorporated into the debate of dramatic inequalities of a globalised world, these values and motifs make the Deep South a paradigmatic example of the ‘new West’, geographical and socio-political marginality, and cultural and economic

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underdevelopment. Indicated by St. Laurent in the US magazine Sensitive Skin, this becomes a complex debate about the relationship between civilisation and wilderness: Out of the contradictions and uncertainties of the American situation, the ‘Southern’ has emerged as the ‘Western’ of our time. Ambient and immersive treatments of the historically and geographically baroque south provide a metaphorical space for audiences to contemplate the twin ghost-worlds of our preindustrial past and post-industrial present. True Detective engages the symbolism of the Deep South by leveraging the neglected infrastructure and environmental collapse of contemporary Louisiana for its aesthetic language, tonality and plot. […] The borderline between the suburbs and the swamp highlights how fine the line is between civilisation and wilderness, directing our attention toward the point at which domesticity ends and ferality begins. (St. Laurent 2014)

Defined as a sense of social, economic, and political marginalisation, geographical marginality is an essential feature of Country Noir, or as Jacquelin points out about literary Country Noir: Country Noir is a form of literature from below, listening to forgotten and marginal voices. […] Rurality represents a new marginality, which has replaced the suburbs of the great cities of the nineteenth century, and today embodies a forgotten and sometimes terrifying part of contemporary lifestyles. […] Country Noir is a genre that, within a globalised system, allows the geographical and social margins to be given a new existence. (Jacquelin 2021b, 8–11)

This relationship between socio-economic marginalisation and geopolitical marginality is reflected in the relationship between external and internal borders of national space, emphasising once again the capacity of peripheral locations to show tensions and changes in the borderscapes of European territories. Although they are often located on external borders to express transboundary concerns, peripheral locations of Country Noir especially highlight the borders within the nation-state and the relationships between external and internal borders, between local and global, thus showing the consequences of global issues in very localised situations. In Country Noir series, small communities at the centre of the plot are often marginalised from the broader national context and forgotten by national politicians and cognitive geography. Such communities are driven

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by local moral codes, rules, and laws, often imbued with lies, secrets, superstition, and prejudice. At times, the restrained local mentality produces a spatio-symbolic imprisonment for the characters. Yet, the local and rural dimension creates a simultaneous, pervasive network of profound, ambiguous relationships and a sense of community. Small, rural environments allow creatives to explore the psychological recesses and past traumas of flawed characters while offering social commentary about dysfunctional families, racial tension, violence, and the condition of the working class. Additionally, by showing small rural places experiencing marginalisation and economic decline, Country Noir expresses broader concerns about the crisis of the rural world, sustainability, globalisation, and economic growth, and emphasises the need to re-negotiate the cultural identity of rural peripheries in the contemporary world. Although the crime genre has always benefitted from a localised dimension that stresses the topos of gated communities, Country Noir goes much further than detective stories set in small, rural places. To a greater extent, Country Noir focuses on separate communities in the wilderness, stressing the contrast between nature and culture, and represents this conflict with all its ambivalences. Nature is depicted as both a vital resource and a dangerous, mysterious threat. The focus on nature, rural life, and rural ecosystems (often exploited by corrupt politicians and companies) corresponds to contemporary anxieties about ecological crises, environmental policies, and social inequalities. At the same time, attention towards the Western European wilderness may also imply investigations of the ‘margins’ of civilisation, popular beliefs in supernatural elements, and the persistence of pre-modern rituals or pre-social behaviours, an interesting variation that we also see in recent Nordic Noir, for example, in the Swedish series Jordskott (SVT 2015–17) and Ängelby (SVT 2015). These two perspectives may nevertheless be linked: In distant, rural communities, excluded from economic and social progress, where natural resources are exploited without any welfare and development effects on the home territory, the protection of the rural environment can ambiguously be accompanied by an almost ‘magical’ relationship with nature accompanied by the re-emergence of pre-modern traditions and forms of eco-terrorism. As a result, Country Noir sometimes hybridises with forms of “eco-­ fantastic crime thrillers” focused on “a nature-related mystery with fantasy features” (Mäntymäki 2018), or take on the tones of realistic “eco noir” showing how “ecological catastrophes do not confine themselves to national borders,” addressing “the cross-national connections and impacts

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of ecology-related crimes from a local vantage point” (Mäntymäki 2021, 152). Finally, a supplementary form of hybridisation sometimes surfaces between Country Noir and the subgeneric qualities of Rural Horror or ‘Folk Horror,’ which correspondingly engage with the failure of what could be defined as the ‘rural utopia’ and the demise of peripheral post-production areas in the global economy, dwelling on the landmarks of abandoned production activities and commercial routes. […] Dismissed factories, mines, and isolated rural communities are clearly defined as marginal and as the ‘dark Europe’ that tourists, as well as viewers, seldom come across. […] Films belonging to the subgenre represent spaces that show an economic and social post-apocalypse with no hope for the future and with the cumbersome remnants of a recent productive past. (Baschiera 2019, 225)

Embracing a locative counternarrative to the established centrality of urban Western Europe, Country Noir debates and criticises a lack of awareness of rural areas and peripheralities that, in the vein of fantasies and mythologies of a lost ferality, maintains a dark and evocative sense of ‘deep Europe’ or a lost way of life expelled by urban living conditions. Before we turn to our three case studies, then, it is worth clarifying the relationship between ‘Country Noir’ and other categories that may partially or even fully overlap. In addition to the above-mentioned generic relationships, there is a broader range of competing terms like ‘Rural Noir’, ‘Regional Noir’ or ‘Local Noir’, ‘Rural Country Thriller’ or ‘Regional Gothic’ (Heholt and Hughes 2018) in which geographical adjectives (rural, regional, etc.) ambiguously overlap localism and rurality, while the substantive root identifies a hybrid semantics in which narrative forms, atmospheres, and emotional resonances specific to certain traditions and genres (or subgenres) may be combined in varying degrees. However blurred the categorical boundaries may be, what remains unchanged is the capacity of such spatial and geographical references to evoke different cultural identities, promise a narrative grounding in the locations, and thus ensure recognisability in an increasingly crowded audiovisual landscape as extreme locative choices may also be used as branding ammunition in the contents arms race (cf. Chap. 1). Regarding the proliferation of competing categories that risk identifying a redundant, if not confusing and contradictory semantic field, it should be noted that the semantic level is not prominent in this book, nor does this book aim

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to draw a fixed semantic map or a rigid taxonomy to classify TV crime dramas set in transnational and national peripheries. Instead, we seek to relate the conceptual fluidity and variability with the effectiveness of these concepts or generic references as brands for regional crime narratives. As brands, they do not imply ‘essential’ meanings; rather, they are valued for their pragmatic efficacy and communication value.

Zone blanche and Peripheries at the Heart of the EU Black Spot is a French-Belgian series co-produced by the French company Ego Productions and the Belgian company Be-Films. Broadcast on France 2 and on RTBF in Belgium, the two seasons of the TV series are now distributed worldwide by Netflix. According to statements by Fanny Rondeau, head of fiction at France 2, Black Spot corresponds to a precise intention of the French PSB to “explore [défricher] new territories” (Jaurès 2017) and to create a “mainstream TV series” capable of offering “a global experience” (Nurbel 2017) in competition with global streaming services. Created by Mathieu Missoffe in collaboration with producer Vincent Mouluquet and directors Thierry Poiraud and Julien Despaux, Black Spot matches France 2’s ambitions for “a polar in nature that changes from the eternal urban series” (Nurbel 2017). In collaboration with Despaux, Missoffe was part of the writing team for the first five seasons of Profilage (Profiling, TF1 2009–20), a period in which he also co-wrote the fifth season of Engrenage (Spiral, Canal+ 2005–20), which BBC Culture lists among “the TV shows that reveal the real France” in a way that counters a “sanitized image of Paris” and demonstrates internal marginal existences within the urban confines of the capital (Ramm 2021). Backed by significant experience in French TV crime series, Missoffe shows a general interest in transgressing the picture perfect of French culture, an image today epitomised by the US-French romantic comedy Emily in Paris (Netflix 2020-) in Ramm’s BBC description of Spiral (ibid.). Unlike traditional urban crime shows, the first episode of Black Spot opens with a long shot of a mountainous landscape with low clouds creeping through the gloomy trees covering the hills. In the distance, we can hear the contrasting melody of Bobby Vinton’s “Mr Lonely,” overlaid at times by the cawing of crows. A closer shot shows a car stopped by an isolated road surrounded by forest on both sides. A man gets out of the

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car and runs towards an emergency telephone placed on the roadside. Next to the word ‘SOS’ there is a poster with a picture of a missing (“Disparue”) girl. The handset has been torn off and the phone is unusable. The man lifts the mobile phone upwards and shakes it uselessly: there is no signal. When an insect stings him, the man starts to trudge towards the car. Only with a desperate effort does he manage to inject himself with the medicament that saves him from anaphylactic shock. On the final notes of “Mr Lonely,” a road sign informs us that we are in Villefranche, after which we cut to the same long shot that opened the sequence. In the next shot, the corpse of a young woman is discovered in the woods. Sinister omens fill the environment: “The birds are going crazy, the trees are bleeding”, comments the local policeman Martial Ferrandis. Following the two police officers driving along deserted roads surrounded by forest, we see again a sign welcoming us to Villefranche. By focalising the narrative in Prosecutor Franck Siriani’s perspective, the opening sequence of Black Spot allows us to enter the narrative by situating us in a place that has a very distinctive atmosphere and very precise characteristics, which relates to both the authentically rural geography of peripheral France and to an intertextual scenogeography that is a generic blend of noir, fantasy, and western. The two identical long shots of wooded mountains that frame the opening sequence effectively express the overwhelming sense of being trapped and isolated in the small town of Villefranche, which is surrounded by dark and impenetrable forest making it difficult to reach other communities. These restrictions appear both physical, as it is difficult to use the impervious roads, and virtual, since there is no GPS or mobile phone signal, which lends an obvious interpretation of the French title Zone blanche, that is, the French term for a ‘dead zone’ or a ‘notspot’. As a journey narrative, the series also places the viewer in a narrative ‘zone blanche’ from which the viewer, following Siriani’s arrival in Villefranche, slowly uncovers the local community and violence-­ torn rural environment. As a shooting location and setting, the forest surrounding the fictional village Villefranche is located in the Vosges Mountains by the north-­ eastern border of France towards Germany and shares topographical similarities with the German Black Forest on the other side of the border. Almost 70% of the first season’s shooting (from June to October 2016) took place outdoors (Nurbel 2017) with aid and assistance from the local administration and especially support from La Région Grand Est, Eurométropole de Strasbourg, and Département Des Vosges (Grand Est

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2017; Agence culturelle Grand Est n.d.; Conseil départemental des Vosges n.d.). The shooting locations were mainly around the towns of Gérardmer and Xonrupt-Longemer, including various tourist sites in the area, for example, the Roche du Diable viewpoint. As one of the characters’ meeting places, Sabine’s bar is also located in France in the Schmalick tourist centre at the Grand Valtin ski resort in the area of Ban-sur-Meurthe-­ Clefcy, altogether maintaining a complex combination of bleak generic imagery and an attractive local tourist gaze. Indicating the co-production agreement behind the series, some interior locations such as the Courthouse of the unnamed ‘big city’ near Villefranche and the Villefranche library were found in Belgium in Brussels (Artana 2020). Although the Vosges region offers striking and gloomy summertime landscapes, it is worth noticing that the original appeal of the series’ location placement was a wild, exotic and snowy winter scenery. As producer Vincent Mouluquet argues: Originally, Mathieu Missoffe had proposed that this series unfolds in the snow. And for various and varied reasons, we have ruled out this possibility. The first impetus was to get closer to the corners of France where the snow cover was maximum. There was Jura, Vosges, Cantal. And we wanted to find more exoticism. The Vosges, when we shot there, local people told us that they had not seen anyone since The Wise Guys [Editor’s note: a 1965 feature film directed by Robert Enrico with Bourvil and Lino Ventura]. There was therefore this desire to bring another landscape in fiction. (Nurbel 2017)

As there is no real town called Villefranche in the Vosges, Missoffe explains that they chose that particular place name simply because “there are plenty of it in France” (Nurbel 2017), and that the series could have been set in any dark, mysterious forest that brings to mind fairy tales and the power of nature over man: “An isolated location that would be both familiar and strange,” stresses Misoffe, maintaining a combination of the particular and the universal in the location choices (Next Flicks n.d.): The idea is not to know where we are. We know that there is a city, a forest. We are talking about a big city but we will never name it. It is the place of institutions, a place that we cannot reach and that cannot reach us either. Behind, we have this community, this world and we had to subject it to tensions. We still wanted to talk about the world and in the first episode, there is this sawmill and its closure. And on the other side, there is the forest, it is the strange and all that we do not understand. We wanted unbalanced

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c­ haracters, never sure what will happen later. Then there are murders, phenomena. And the question of maintaining the community, but at what cost? We started from there and then we pulled the wires. (Nurbel 2017)

Nature and forestry in Black Spot embody all the major characteristics of Country Noir, including environmentalist concerns hybridised with fantasy. Firstly, a clandestine ecologist organisation called “Children of Arduinna” seeks to protect the forests around Villefranche from indiscriminate exploitation. The tension caused by the closure of the sawmill, the hub of the small town’s economy, appears representative of the devastating social impact on rural areas on the margins of the globalised economy and forgotten by national and transnational policies. Secondly, the murders committed in the town seem rooted in supernatural forces, expressed by nature’s profound, intrinsic ambivalence both as an ancestral force and vital resource and as a perilous threat to the community. In this way, the forest is portrayed as a living, fighting organism responding to damage caused by human activities, inscribing Black Spot as a popular television reaction to the contemporary trend towards the Anthropocene. In conceptualising Black Spot, the relationship between the horror genre and rural noir has been particularly emphasised with especially Twin Peaks (ABC 1990–91) frequently recurring in interviews with Missoffe and directors Despaux and Poiraud (Nurbel 2017). While the town sign from the opening sequence has no real toponymic referent, it establishes a strong intertextual relationship with David Lynch’s ground-breaking TV series (see Image 5.1). Missoffe acknowledges an influence, but still attempts to brand Black Spot by how it differs from Twin Peaks: That character that you see in the beginning, Franck Siriani, shares a number of DNA elements with Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks, but on the other hand he’s also a very classic archetype. You know, a stranger that comes into a town. So I don’t know if there’s a big Twin Peaks connection. I know the directors have a lot of fun with it, which is why we end up with a little stranger atmosphere. But I think if you watch the whole season, the show finds itself and is nothing like Twin Peaks. It’s impossible to do a small town, strange, atmospheric drama without going back to Twin Peaks. I think that, even unconsciously, it has to be somewhere in your mind. (Stewart 2018)

While the opening scene and the specific image of the town sign show the series’ visual debt to Twin Peaks, this type of imagery has become

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Image 5.1  In journey crime narratives with characters entering a small mysterious town, the scene with a car passing the town sign has become one of the most common ways of establishing a sense of place at the same time as acknowledging the legacy of Twin Peaks. The image shows openings from Black Spot (above, right) alongside similar imagery from Twin Peaks (above, left). The below images show comparable opening shots from the two Swedish series Jordskott (below, left) and Ängelby (below, right). All four series are set in fictional small towns and narrate a murder story with a mysterious supernatural twist in which nature, in different ways, appears as a force of agency

quintessentially tied to this particular mix of crime stories and supernatural mysteries. Siriani as the ‘out-of-town investigator’ is a highly recognisable archetype similar to the ones pointed out in several other European series, such as the Spanish O sabor das margaridas (Bitter Daisies, CTV 2018–20), the Norwegian Outlier (HBO 2020), or the Irish Blood (Virgin Media Television 2018-). Surely, the central character should be interpreted as a textual representation of the viewer trying to decipher a new, uncanny world, but Black Spot clearly differentiates from the other examples in how Villefranche is not a ‘village where nothing ever happens.’ Although Villefranche is a small, reserved community hostile to strangers, Siriani is sent there because the town’s homicide rate is six times higher than the national average. In Missoffe’s view, the Siriani character is important not

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only for the relationship with the viewer but also for his contrasting relationship with other characters: I wanted this guy to be so far from everything. He started very far from belonging to anything, so that’s why he’s allergic to pretty much everything. That’s why […] he’s a bureaucrat stuck in a place where nothing makes sense. People don’t really follow the rules because they’re surrounded by this forest and they have different institutions and all that. So it was interesting to me to have someone who really stands for everything that doesn’t make sense in that small town. In a way they’re all crazy, but in that area it’s consistent […]. So he ends up being the twisted element as opposed to all the others. (Stewart 2018)

Particularly interesting is the contrasting relationship between Siriani and the female protagonist Laurène Weiss, the Captain of the local police and dubbed The Major by her officers, and these characters’ opposing relationship with nature and their natural surroundings. While Siriani is “allergic to pretty much everything,” Laurène is described as “a big-­ mouthed country girl strangely connected to Nature” in Ego Productions’ synopsis for the series (Ego Productions n.d., our emphasis). Through the Laurène character, the visual and narrative impact of Nordic Noir on Black Spot appears explicit. She is a difficult, flawed woman, strong and fragile at the same time, dysfunctional in personal relationships, with a traumatic past and a powerful connection with nature and the forest. It is specifically through the Laurène character that a strong and peculiar sense of place emerges, associated with her emotional connection with nature in its ambivalent link to both ancestral powers and dark threats. Siriani is the out of town stranger journeying to Villefranche, while Lauréne is the in-town intermediary between understanding local community and estrangement. For the creatives, the sense and sentiment of nature that Black Spot stages and explores goes above and beyond the stylistic influence from Nordic Noir. “There are Nordic polars in the influences with the relation to nature”, explains director Despaux, continuing: “There are American western movies for the sheriff side” (Nurbel 2017). Director Poiraud adds, “The TV series which we agreed together is Fargo. Not so much for the influence of the image but for the crazy mix of a pretty black polar with humor, almost fantasy” (Nurbel 2017). Missoffe concludes:

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We’ve had reference shows for the look, whether it’s Scandinavian shows or The Killing, especially the American version which I really like. We talked about Twin Peaks, we talked about Fargo. These are all shows that have different lighting and different graphical grammar, but they all invested a lot into building their own visual identity. And we really wanted to highlight images and framing, and a lot of it comes from the Western structures and influence. (Stewart 2018)

Through these direct references to US culture and the Western generic heritage, Black Spot meticulously exemplifies Country Noir’s interest in natural environments in relation to wilderness topography, staging a US aesthetic approach which challenges and expands the scenogeography of European territories. “Netflix and new players attract viewers with increasingly innovative dramas”, producer Vincent Mouluquet explains. “Playing with the codes of Western and Fantasy, we make them travel to an ‘elsewhere’ while creating an addictive dimension” (Jaurès 2017). According to Missoffe, the western genre was a visual key to represent the forest as a living character, something perhaps similar to the dangers of the desert often portrayed in US westerns: It’s very easy on paper to say “and then the forest has to be its own character, and then it’s going to be like a western.” But then, when it came to actually shooting it, that’s where we were very fortunate to have these two directors, Thierry Poiraud and Julien Despaux, as well as DPs Christophe Nuyens and Bruno Degrave. They really put a lot of effort into trying to come up with the right reference material”. (Stewart 2018)

The second season changes the premise of the first season in a story that, instead, delves deeper into Villefranche’s Gallo-Roman past and Celtic traditions, which are prevalent components in  local culture. As explained by director Poiraud, the result is a change in the blend of genres and references: “In the first season, we were more into westerns and thrillers. In the second, we are more in adventure films, fantasy and epic. There is still a bit of darkness but thriller is no longer the story engine” (Nurbel 2019). In consistency with this new approach, the supernatural element is intensified by the mythological figure of Cernunnos, the old Celtic Horned God or the Deer God worshipped in the lands where the Romans founded the Villefranche community. Rather than implied contemporary environmental debates, the second season questions whether the mysteries of Black Spot originate from supernatural forces struggling to safeguard the

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environment from threats that have transpired over centuries, questioning the role played by ‘ordinary’ human encouragements like greed and power. In the second season, Black Spot continues to portray the massive and impenetrable forestry isolating Villefranche as an area on the margins of civilisation and society, excluded from progress, but it remains unclear whether exclusion is triggered by economic and technological inequalities in a globalised world or by the vigilance of an ancient god (Hell Greco 2019; De Vito 2022). References to Celtic traditions and the survival of pre-modern customs and rites in the rural peripheries of Europe lead directly to our next case study.

Der Pass, or True Detective(s) in the Alps Pagan Peak is an Austrian-German TV series co-produced by Austrian Epo-Film by producers Dieter and Jakob Pochlatko, and the German Wiedemann & Berg Film by producers Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg for Sky Deutschland and global distribution by Beta Film. Besides producing Dark (Netflix 2017–20), a series comprising country noir qualities too, and the Oscar-winning film Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others 2006), Wiedemann and Berg are by Drama Quarterly described as a couple responsible for recently “raising the bar for the German industry” in their television productions, but their complex backstory also embraces Tatort (Crime Scene ARD, 1970-), “the show that most symbolises Germany’s traditional TV drama output [and] sums up everything the German industry should be trying to get away from” (Edwards 2018). While Tatort may be the German long-running iteration of the Italian Montalbano model or the British Midsomer Murders model (cf. Chaps. 4 and 7), that is, a model to differentiate from, Tatort has been a model institution in Germany for regional production with ARD as the mother institution in collaboration with regional networks, including the Austrian ORF (Eichner 2018). In other words, Wiedemann and Berg have a combined interest in regional German production and series with transnational aspirations, such as Pagan Peak. Although Pagan Peak is based on the original Filmlance format The Bridge, co-creator Philipp Stennert, who created, wrote, and directed the series with Cyrill Boss, explains, “we didn’t want to just remake a series that’s already been remade twice […]. Apart from the premise of two countries working together and finding a body on the border, everything else is pretty much a completely new story” (Edwards 2018). Such a

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dialectic between adherence and simultaneous detachment from Nordic Noir is representative of other series analysed in this book as influenced by Nordic crime stories. As shown in relation to Spanish and Italian revisions of Mediterranean Noir (Chap. 4), a similar trend is conspicuous in Country Noir productions with a Franco-Belgian or Austro-German origin, which have employed Nordic Noir as a key innovative production strategy in order to elaborate the scenogeographic approach to convey and distinguishing sense of place. Producing a specific transnational sense of place, the original format departures from a body found on the literal border, in the original drama on the middle of the Øresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark, in Pagan Peak on a mountain pass between Austria and Germany, which is the geographical connection that gives the series its German title (the pass). Pagan Peak was filmed during wintertime from November 2017 to April 2018  in the high valley of Bad Gastein, the Bavarian Alp town Berchtesgaden, and the ski resort Sportgastein with the support of a substantial network of local institutions, including FilmFernsehFonds Bayern, Fernsehfonds Austria, Land Salzburg, Cinestyria, and Film Commission Graz. With its awe-inspiring, bleak beauty, the Alpine scenery at 2600 metres altitude is the fundamental ingredient in the modified visual identity of the Austro-German series: “The snow and the mountains are 40% of the show,” creator Philipp Stennert claimed. “Part of you thinks, ‘Oh no, we have to shoot in that again, it’s going to be really tough,’ but the other half is thinking, ‘This is going to look so good’” (Edwards 2018). As in Arctic Noir (see Chap. 3), the snowscape of these series produces a dangerous man versus nature topos in relation to the murder plot that sometimes departs into supernatural or magical sensibilities too. As in the other local adaptations of The Bridge (see also Chap. 7), the body on the border motivates a transnational investigation carried out by the German detective Ellie from Traunstein and her Austrian counterpart Gedeon from Salzburg. As in other iterations of the format, the investigation serves a metonymic opportunity to explore the relationship, firstly, between local cultural identities and national orientations and, secondly, between legal nation-states and translocal communities linked by ancient rituals and traditions. As in prior format adaptations, “landscapes and settings are used […] to reflect the tensions between these two main characters, as well as their inner worlds and states of mind”, but in Pagan Peak there is no trace of a “reversal of traditional gender stereotypes” (García Avis 2015, 133), which has become a distinctive feature of specifically this

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franchise and of Nordic Noir in general (Agger 2016). Rather, the pivot around which their identity construction and relationship revolve is nature, especially the hostile environment of the high mountains, which Ellie knows and respects from the outset, while Gedeon in contrast despises and refuses. “Gedeon’s given up, he’s cynical”, actor Nicholas Ofczarek expressed about his character. “He’s addicted to everything—alcohol, uppers and downers—and to pay for these addictions, he’s got involved in organised crime. He’s a good cop but he’s wasted” (Edwards 2018). Instead, his German counterpart, Ellie, gives the character “a perspective in his life and in his job, a faith in humanity,” added Ofczarek (ibid.): Unlike the heroine of Broen—Saga Noren, who is socially awkward to the point of showing traits of Asperger syndrome—Ellie is “very in touch with herself and the humans around her,” says Ofczarek. In Broen, the male detective Martin was the happy-go-lucky one. In Der Pass, everything is reversed. Ellie presented the biggest writing challenges. “It was very hard to write a character who is truly good but also interesting,” says Stennert. But over the course of the investigation, Ellie and Gedeon’s roles switch. (ibid.)

As defined above, Country Noir does not show an impulse towards bucolic settings and idyllic relationships with nature, which remains a deeply ambivalent, dark, and powerful entity. Consequently, perverse and pathological forms of connections with nature emerge through the subplot of the survivalist “Six Brothers” cult and the main crime plot about the “Krampus Killer.” Committing his crimes, the survivalist and tech-­ savvy serial killer wears a Krampus mask, a horned demon with animal features known throughout the Alpine region, a creature who accompanies St. Nicholas and punishes naughty children. In this regard, it is interesting to note that ‘pass’ in German is a polysemous term that, in addition to the main reference to a mountain pass, also designates a costume parade for St. Nicholas, angels and Krampus (Wallner 2019). Dressing up like Krampus, the serial killer presents himself as the man from the woods, embodying the myth of the wild man who lives outside a society that he deems corrupt, degraded, and close to collapse. Interestingly, the Krampus theme and the overall generic affinities of Country Noir recently entered Italian TV crime traditions with the recent crime drama Fiori sopra l’inferno—I casi di Teresa Battaglia (Flowers Above Hell—Teresa Battaglia’s cases, Rai 2023-) set on the border between Italy and Slovenia like La porta rossa (The Red Door, Rai 2017–2023), and like Black Spot and

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Pagan Peak the series incorporates the “Krampus” mythology into the storyline with a dark mountainous atmosphere as a result. Parallel to the so-called Truth Terrorist in the original Swedish-Danish series, who apparently commits murders to bring public attention to social injustices (his “five truths”), Pagan Peak’s Krampus Killer also applies his own “violent pedagogy” (Saunders 2017, 10). Through the execution of human traffickers, influencers, politicians, and corrupt industrialists, the killer announces “the beginning of the red season” and embodies an apocalyptic vision that sees the imbalance between man and nature as the cause of a perceivably imminent catastrophe. Like the figure of Cernunnos representating the Vosges territory in Black Spot, the Krampus allows the Alps to be shown from a primordial, mysterious, and mystical side that brings to light pagan rituals and archaic Alpine customs. The Alpine forests and the ‘wild’ border between Germany and Austria thus become a “liminal space” (ibid., 9), challenging social norms through a paranoid return to a primordial nature in which pre-modern traditions survive, triggering an interconnection between local legends of Krampus with global issues that show the porosity of borders and the “geopolitical (in)security” of border areas (ibid., 8). In this regard, the opening sequence of the first episode is particularly interesting in its stylistic destabilising and disorienting use of space. Reverting viewer expectations created by the series’ promotion, the story opens against the backdrop of a barren sun-baked plain. Two police cars stop behind a truck stopped by the side of a deserted road, and four policemen approach in sweat. As they force open the truck’s door, a swarm of flies pass them. After this, the series title card appears with the scenic profile of the mountains in the background, which takes the viewer back to the setting promised by promotional material, returning to the location where the first victim is found on the Austrian-German pass, a person responsible for the massacre of refugees to which the opening sequence refers. In the press, it was pointed out that the sequence alluded to the refugee drama of August 2015 when Austrian authorities discovered the bodies of 71 refugees and migrants in an abandoned refrigerated truck near the Austrian-Hungarian border (Wallner 2019), stressing the relationship between Pagan Peak and larger geopolitical issues represented through transborder migration. Like in Black Spot, it is important to note how the use of Krampus mask allows Pagan Peak to be placed within a broader intertextual and intercultural network that brings out the relationships with the Country Noir

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trend, even though the term never appears in empirical material about the TV series. On the one hand, the Alpine scenery mainly contributes to designating the series through categories like Alpine Noir or Alpine Thriller. “The genre may be described quite appropriately as ‘Alpine Noir’,” the German journalist Wallner writes for Die Presse. “It is especially the dark imagery of the winter Alps that gave the series the label ‘Alpine Noir’ even before it aired” (Wallner 2019). “Alpine thriller, psychodrama or noir? A bit of everything!” comments journalist Ude for Kleine Zeiting (2019). Based on the staging of the first victim on the border, however, Johnson states, “the new show Pagan Peak is the latest member of a very British subgenre that’s now making inroads into continental crime”: the method of dispatch and condition of the body indicate a connection to the folk customs and pre-Christian pagan rituals still practised by the locals in the thinly populated mountain fastness where the corpse was found, which means we’re drifting out of the strict confines of the crime procedural and into the murky realm of pastoral terror known as folk horror. (Johnson 2019)

“Folk horror,” Johnson continues, “generally deals with rural, often British settings where the scares come not from an intrusive outsider, but the revelation that the location itself, stripped of its benign daytime face, holds horrors, often tied to pagan religions, witchcraft, ancient curses and what have you”. Accentuating folk horror as a generic reference, including the display of macabre artefacts from ancient traditions retained today, Pagan Peak connects directly with True Detective (Maxwinter 2014) and may be read as “an Alpine, freezing True Detective” (Thomas 2019): “True Detective as a Scandinavian thriller in a snowy Alpine landscape: this is how the creators of the new Sky series Der Pass must have presented their project” (Wieseler 2019). Uncoupling the series’ second season from Folk Horror is also detected in the critical reception of the series: “Co-creators/co-directors Cyrill Boss and Philipp Stennert jettison the debut’s Folk Horror aesthetic and take a Noir approach focused on intergenerational secrets and conspiracies” (Tracy 2022). In this way, the second season stylistically returns to its original influence from a Nordic Noir format, including a gloomy scenogeography and troubled detectives. Through True Detective, Nordic Noir influences, and the Alpine landscape, Pagan Peak’s intertextual context represents an expressive

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intercontinental journey into the cultural geography of peripheral locations, a journey that shows the remarkable global ties and influence at play in the development of contemporary TV series (see Image 5.2). In 2015, Creeber interprets True Detective in light of Nordic Noir’s influence on global television production, based on the “sombre and meditative mood,” the partnership between “two diametrically opposed detectives,” the “often contemplative” tone, and especially the sense of place conveyed

Image 5.2  Images from three series show a remarkable common iconography that balances the influence from True Detective and inspiration from pagan cultures: Black Spot (above, left), Pagan Peak (above, right), and True Detective (below)

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by the “Louisiana’s post-Katrina coastal geography.” Referencing Nussbaum’s treatment in The New  Yorker (2014), he stresses that the “landscape of the drama also seems to echo the bleak, desolate and barren lives of its characters, our two detectives continually travelling through ‘piquant scenes of rural degradation’ (Nussbaum 2014)” (Creeber 2015, 30–31). Through a distinctive scenogeography of peripheral rural areas, True Detective facilitated the extension of Country Noir to television and, particularly, reinforced the image of the American Deep South as the ‘new West’ and an iconic example of socio-political marginality and cultural and economic underdevelopment where pre-modern beliefs and pre-social behaviours are likely to emerge or persist. In series like Pagan Peak, True Detective’s Country Noir hybridisation with Folk Horror has returned across the Atlantic to express the anxieties and struggles of rural and wild peripheries at the very heart of Europe—in the forests of the Vosges and the Alps. Based on Creeber’s points about Nordic Noir influencing True Detective, this impact has also been re-coupled in the more direct appropriation of the Nordic Noir aesthetics in the second season of Pagan Peak, stressing the complex and global routes of inspiration in developing popular crime series for television.

Capitani and Rural Microperipherality The two seasons of the Luxembourgian TV crime series Capitani were co-produced by the broadcaster RTL Télé Lëtzebuerg in collaboration with Luxembourg’s largest production company Samsa Film and the Belgian Artémis Productions. After airing on the local broadcaster, the series is now distributed worldwide by Netflix. The series’ first season was mainly filmed during summer 2018 in the Town Hall of Junglinster and especially in Bourglinster, a village situated in eastern Luxembourgian canton Grevenmacher that becomes the fictional Manscheid in the storyworld. Other locations include Lintgen, a small town on the banks of the Alzette river, Wiltz, a small commune in the north-western part of Luxembourg, and the towns of Bridel and Steinsel (Chakrabartty 2021). The locative dimension is the defining feature of the series, which is widely presented as the first Luxembourgian crime drama spoken in Luxembourgish, the country’s national language as well as the country’s first Netflix series, which underlines the international appeal of a production with such a distinctly local setting. The local focus is confirmed by the extensive financial support of the Film Fund Luxembourg, which

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contributed €2.1 million to the budget of the first season after supporting the script’s development with €50,000 in 2017 (Schülke 2019). In the past few decades, the production company Samsa Film has played a key role in the development of the Luxembourgian audiovisual sector. In 1989, the company produced the first full-length Luxembourgian film, the successful historical drama Schacko Klak (1989) by Paul Kieffer and Fränk Hoffmann, which “led to an unprecedented mobilisation of the industry and the professionalisation of its structures. […] Thirty or so years later, […] Félix Koch’s Superchamp Returns, the first superhero film made wholly in Luxembourg and buoyed by a budget of €3.5 million, smashed existing audience records” (Caillard 2021). Samsa Film’s Claude Waringo explained that in the beginning they wanted to produce a series for the Luxembourg market: We were wondering how to attract the Luxembourg public and how to keep them on our side until the end of the last episode. In the cinema, we had already done that with the success of Superjhemp Retörns. But television is different. So, when we saw the first audience figures, we were stunned. The mission was accomplished. (Carette and Delano staff 2021).

With a share of 29% of the population over 16, “the Samsa production Capitani has broken the records of any RTL fiction ever produced” (RTL 2020). The historically excellent domestic ratings not only encouraged producers to seek international circulation, but Claude Waringo also mentions the case of Belgian Noir as a reference point and production model for a small country looking to gain international attention: “Belgium was a bit ahead of us in terms of series. And when we saw that French-speaking Belgian productions, such as Unité 42 and La trêve, managed to make their way to French television, or even Netflix for the second one, we said to ourselves: Why not us?” (Carette and Delano staff 2021). The creators Thierry Faber (who developed the series’ concept), Eric Lamhène, and Christophe Wagner (who also directed it) had further international references in mind. Regarding the primary sources of inspiration for Capitani, Faber mentioned the British series Broadchurch (ITV 2013–17) and the Danish Forbrydelsen (The Killing, DR 2007–12) and especially emphasised how both narratives deal with a local, rural setting (although, The Killing does take place in urban Copenhagen), a murder of a child or teenager, and an investigation carried out by a duo of opposing detectives; in Capitani, the outsider detective who gives the series its title has to work

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with the young local police officer Elsa Ley, a sensitive and rule-­ focused woman. Based on domestic success and the experience with local production with a considerable international resonance, Claude Waringo travelled to Amsterdam to meet Netflix’s chief buyer: When they said yes, it was a very strong emotional moment. I’ve been a producer for 30  years. I have accompanied films like La Promesse by the Dardenne brothers or Une Liaison pornographique by Frédéric Fonteyne in festivals like Cannes or Venice. But on a personal level, this announcement is the greatest moment of my career. We owe everything to the qualities of this series. I have the impression that I have helped Luxembourg cinema to move forward. (Carette and Delano staff 2021)

Kai Finke, Netflix’s Director of Acquisition, embraced the purchase of Capitani, arguing, “even though it’s a local story, we’re near certain that it will resonate with international audiences. Brilliant stories really can unfold anywhere, and I’m delighted that our subscribers will soon be able to discover, for the very first time, a successful police series made in Luxembourg” (Caillard 2021). The motto “brilliant stories really can unfold anywhere” effectively sums up Netflix’s glocal strategy, that is, in more general terms, the model of “glocalization” as a combination of “universal themes with local settings” (Nilsson et  al. 2017, 4; see also Dechêne 2020), a sense of place to which Capitani perfectly adheres and a scenogeography that we refer to elsewhere as a somewhere that could be anywhere (see Chap. 6). Unfolding as a classic detective story with a strong sense of place and presented as the first series in a local and minority language to be distributed worldwide by Netflix (Atz 2021), Capitani has several traits in common with Bitter Daisies (see Chap. 4). In terms of storytelling, both series revitalise the topoi of ‘the sleepy town hiding a dark secret’ and ‘the out-­ of-­town investigator’ by establishing a visual experience of rural settings (Galicia, Northern Luxembourg) alongside flawed, difficult detectives, locations short of a ‘pre-packaged’ visual counterpart in the viewers’ imagination and, hence, perceived as authentic in their representation of ‘fresh’ specific socio-cultural contexts. This ‘situated’ reconsideration of the tightly knit community where all people know each other and hide secrets, emerges very clearly from Samsa’s online presentation of Capitani. The paratext opens with an introduction of a rather conventional murder plot,

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including a dead teenager and a twin sister that turns out to be missing much in line with the ‘dead girl show’ and ‘the missing child’ topos (Hansen 2020): “The lifeless body of the young teenager is found in the forest surrounding the village of Manscheid in northern Luxembourg.” (Samsa n.d.). In addition to introducing the protagonist, the following lines motivate and elaborate on the spatial anchoring to the small town of Manscheid and Northern Luxembourg: “Luc Capitani, the police officer assigned to the case, is from the mining south of the country and has a hard time dealing with the mentality of the locals.” (ibid.). Such lines establish a spatial surplus to a mere description of the opening of the story by using the setting as basic premises for both the plot and the origin of the protagonist, including his difficulty in connecting with the locals and the hostility from northern people towards those from the south. As a result, the series negotiates a ‘North-South’ divide in the representation of Luxembourg’s social and economic geography, showing the geopolitical complexity of even an extremely small state like Luxembourg which otherwise risks being dissolved into the hegemonic image of the institutional heart of Europe. When an Italian reviewer ironically comments, “yes, a Luxembourg province also exists” (Villa 2021), we should not underestimate the potential of crime dramas set in peripheral locations to change the visual imagery but also to challenge the cognitive geography of viewers. With an area of only 2586  km2, Luxembourg is the seventh smallest country in Europe. Although not comparable to microstates such as San Marino (61 km2) or Liechtenstein (160 km2), it is about three times smaller than a very small state like Cyprus (9251 km2) and about 10 times smaller than an Italian region such as Piedmont (25,387 km2), where Non uccidere (Thou Shalt Not Kill, Rai 2015–2018) was filmed, or Bitter Daisies’ Galicia (29,575 km2). Many peripheral crime series have been specifically developed based on the renegotiation of the stereotypes and cultural clashes of North-South divides that, on different scales, are immediately recognised by the viewer, for instance both on a national level in the Italian Rocco Schiavone (Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone, Rai 2016-) and, on a wider transnational level, some of The Bridge’s several local adaptations. In this respect, the concept for Capitani attempts to differentiate, which invites the viewer to ascertain that in small-state Luxembourg a North-South divide does exist and that Luxembourg is not just the geographical appellation of a ‘micro’ country hosting important European institutions but a country with its own specific socio-economic complexity just like larger nations where this complexity is

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normally widely recognised. Ultimately, we argue that Capitani discloses that Luxembourg—despite its extremely small size—has its own centre and multiple peripheries in addition to its predominant central position within the EU institution. In this respect, Capitani is a key example of how peripherality is constructed and negotiated at many different scales, including what we may regard as a specific kind of “microperipherality” (Blom 1998; Mehretu et al. 2000), defined as uncovering challenging geopolitical complexities in extremely small territories equated in common perception with hegemonic images which conceal inner distinctions and dynamics. One of the most notable representations of rural microperipherality in Capitani is the dark forest surrounding Manscheid where the teenage girl’s body is found in the beginning. The image of the forest may be interpreted from three different perspectives, including (1) the relationship between the forest and the main character, (2) the forest as a character itself, and (3) the series relationship with the fantastic. Firstly, commenting on the Ardennes as one of the last “wild spaces left in the country” and how the connection between the setting and the protagonist is established in The Break, Antoine Dechêne remarks that the series’ “poster displays a profile of Yoann Blanc [the protagonist, A/N], eyes closed, with light shining on his face and with the whole back of his body made of a black, horizontal forest” (Dechêne 2020, 51–52). Indicatively, the concept of the Capitani poster is vastly similar to that of The Break (see Image 5.3) where the foregrounded silhouette of Capitani is merged with a misty and threatening forest towards which a young woman in a red jacket is walking. The conclusion reached by Dechêne by comparing the posters of The Break and True Detective (season 3) may therefore be seamlessly extended to the comparison between The Break and Capitani: “The message is similar: the two series are based on tortured men surrounded by trees, digging for their roots, searching for themselves” (Dechêne 2020, 52). Trying to uncover one’s own past is symbolically tied to the uncertainties embedded in the misty landscape, which establishes a narrative relation and negotiation between character and nature. Besides connoting the protagonist as the “‘wounded’ and brooding guy who works alone” (Adelgaard 2022), the forest itself is, secondly, represented as an autonomous character. As already noted about Black Spot, the collaboration between writers and directors is crucial in outlining the scenogeography of the series, here interpreted in the critical reception of the series in Cineuropa:

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Image 5.3  The posters of Capitani and The Break compared Christophe Wagner successfully injects the series with a singular atmosphere, enhanced by sweeping yet oppressive camera movements. The forest, meanwhile, with its threatening and labyrinth-like woodlands, soon becomes a character in and of itself. In short, it all conspires to encourage the viewer to find out more about the sordid intentions and pasts of those involved in this sensitive case. (Caillard 2021)

As for Wagner, landscape, nature, and location as character-in-itself are very common metaphors for creatives with a wish to stress the significant or extraordinary importance of location choices and place strategies.

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Thirdly, when interpreting Capitani as Country Noir, the forest surrounding the small village directly connects the series with the generic qualities of fairy tales while distancing it from the fantastic dimension of Twin Peaks despite some common premises. “The story has something of the fairy tale; after all, the myths and monsters of our society come from the forest,” said creator Faber. “It is appropriate that director Christophe Wagner […] used drones to film the forest from above and let it dominate the shots” (Schülke 2019). Capitani’s story and iconography are imbued with fairy tale references, starting from the many references that Nadine Kinsch, the mother of the missing twins, makes to the fairy tales that she used to tell them when they were children, innocent and safe within the confines of their home. On a visual and narrative level, we may identify a specific subplot devoted to a grey wolf roaming in the woods, which is hunted down and killed at the end of the story, a subplot with no specific narrative purpose for the main crime plot and the progress of the investigations. It thus serves a predominantly allegorical function, consolidating the fairy-tale background of the events and activating an explicit reference to the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale. Finally, Little Red Riding Hood is also explicitly recalled by the red hooded jacket worn by both twins during the fateful night when one is killed and the other disappears; the same red coat that we see accentuated and centralised in the series poster above.

Rural Peripheries Left Behind The concept of Country Noir performs powerfully in investigations of rural peripheries at the heart of the EU, which has been demonstrated by the Belgian and Luxembourgian series mentioned in this chapter. The three crime dramas show different locative strategies to conceive and represent the natural wilderness that appears forgotten or marginalised in urbanised and geopolitically centralised Western Europe, including the association of natural wilderness with socio-political and economic marginalisation. From the fictional villages of Villefranche and Manscheid to the mountainous borderland between Austria and Germany, harsh contrasts and profound connections resonate powerfully between local conflicts and global issues. A significant advantage of the Country Noir category is highlighting how rural European peripheries can remediate and relocate the forms of representation and meanings of the Wild West (and Western) and the American Deep South, most notably present in Black Spot. In European

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productions, however, the US stylistic influence is fused with other continental influences such as folk horror (especially in Pagan Peak), fantasy and gothic in its regional and rural variants (mostly Black Spot), and folklore genres (fairy tales in Capitani). Moreover, the role of Nordic Noir distinctly emerges not only in relation to Pagan Peak, which is one out of five remakes of the original The Bridge, but it works as a three-way explanation of the international attraction of Nordic Noir embraced by many different production cultures, that is, (1) a more general reference model to innovate local/national production while simultaneously seeking international circulation; (2) as a possible way to combine a well-known classic and international genre formula with a distinctly local setting and with a recognisable visual identity, and (3) as a reference to elaborate the relationship between characters and environment through diversified strategies ranging from detachment/contrast (Capitani, Siriani, Gedeon Winter) to a deep emotional connection with nature (Laurène Weiss), and/or the small community living there (Ellie Stocker, Elsa Ley in Capitani). In all three cases, nature—and especially wild and gloomy woods and forests—is depicted as both a vital resource and a primordial, mysterious, and dangerous threat. The focus on rural ecosystems exploited by corrupt politicians and companies corresponds with contemporary anxieties about ecological crises and social inequalities, expressed through the “Children of Arduinna” organisation, the survivalist “Six Brothers” cult, the Krampus Killer. Outsider detectives confronted with the wilderness (Siriani, Gedeon, Capitani) are forced to investigate their troubled pasts and do so on the ‘margins’ of civilisation and in connection with popular supernatural beliefs and the persistence of ancient rituals and pre-modern customs. In line with Johnson’s above-mentioned acknowledgement of a certain British sensibility in folk horror, Hughes’ work on British Gothic indicates a range of further similarities in how folklore lies infused in landscape topographies: “Folklore and local legend are very much part of [these] imagined landscapes” (Hughes 2018, 40) “Even in a century that has advanced technologically far beyond the Victorian, such places retain their mystery, a perceptible distance from the centre that is effectively palpable before the uncanny events develop” (Hughes 2018, 29). Essentially, these “localised and distant geographies” (Hughes 2018, 28) as well as peripheral and marginalised locations in the majority of regional Country Noir variations show how “to travel in space is thus also to travel in time” (Hughes 2018, 23). In other words, Country Noir becomes a significant and popular cultural voice in a discussion about how ‘remnants’ of rural

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and ancient life, as a residual of economic and technological progress, may still destabilise the cognitive geography of urbanised and civilised Europe and a centralised urban way of life.

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 For all online references, the date of access is 1 December 2022.

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De Vito, Licia. 2022. La mitologia fa tendenza nello streaming. Il caso di Netflix Europa e altri esempi extra-continentali. The Walk of Fame. https://www. thewalkoffame.it/blog/la-­m itologia-­f a-­t endenza-­n ello-­s treaming-­i l-­c aso-­ di-­netflix-­europa-­e-­altri-­esempi-­extra-­continentali/. Dechêne, Antoine. 2020. Detective Storyworlds: Longmire, True Detective, and La Trêve. Crime Fiction Studies 1 (1): 41–58. https://www.euppublishing. com/doi/abs/10.3366/cfs.2020.0006?journalCode=cfs. Edwards, Nick. 2018. A New Crossing. Drama Quarterly. https://dramaquarterly.com/a-­new-­crossing/. Eichner, Susanne. 2018. Crime Scene Germany: Regionalism, Audiences, and the German Public Broadcasting System. In European Television Crime Drama and Beyond, ed. Kim Toft Hansen, Steven Peacock, and Sue Turnbull, 173–192. London: Palgrave Macmillan. García Avis, Isadora. 2015. Adapting Landscape and Place in Transcultural Remakes: The Case of Bron |Broen, The Bridge and The Tunnel. Series: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives 1 (2): 127–138. https://doi. org/10.6092/issn.2421-­454X/5898. Grand Est. 2017. Zone blanche, une série made in Grand Est, bientôt sur les écrans. Press release. https://www.grandest.fr/wp-­content/uploads/2017/08/04-­07-­ 17-­CPresse-­annonce-­diffusion-­Zone-­blanche.pdf. Hansen, Kim Toft. 2020. From Nordic Noir to Euro Noir: Nordic Noir Influencing European Serial SVoD Drama. In Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation, ed. Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen, and Jarkko Seppälä, 275–294. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Heholt, Ruth, and William Hughes, eds. 2018. Gothic Britain. Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. eBook edition. Hell Greco, Germano. 2019. [Quinto elemento]: Black Spot. Medium. https:// medium.com/m-­e-­l-­a-­n-­g-­e/quinto-­elemento-­black-­spot-­18a7d07a16c9. Hopewell, John. 2016. Belgium Noir Hit The Break Rolls Out First Sales. Variety. https://variety.com/2016/tv/news/belgium-­n oir-­t he-­b reak-­f irst-­s ales-­ 1201754960/. Hughes, William. 2018. Introduction. The Uncanny Space of Regionality: Gothic Beyond the Metropolis. In Gothic Britain. Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles, ed. Ruth Heholt and William Hughes, 17–51. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. eBook edition. Jacquelin, Alice. 2021a. Identity, Borders and the Environment New Political Issues in Contemporary French Noir. Academic Quarter 22: 112–123. https://doi.org/10.5278/ojs.academicquarter.vi22.6605. ———. 2021b. Genèse et circulations d’un genre populaire en régime médiatique: le cas du Country Noir. Belphégor 19 (1): 1–15. https://doi. org/10.4000/belphegor.3803.

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Jaurès, Cécile. 2017. Zone blanche, au cœur de la forêt profonde. La Croix. https://www.la-­croix.com/Culture/TV-­Radio/Zone-­blanche-­coeur-­foret-­ profonde-­2017-­04-­09-­1200838205. Johnson, Travis. 2019. Maypoles, Merriment and Murder: An Introduction to the Folk Horror Subgenre. SBS. https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2019/02/24/maypoles-­m erriment-­a nd-­m urder-­i ntroduction-­f olk-­ horror-­subgenre. Lardot, Fanny, and Hazard, Kevin. 2016. Le monde du cinéma et des séries en Luxembourg belge. Regards d'Ardenne. https://regards-­ardenne.luxembourg-­ belge.be/le-­monde-­du-­cinema-­en-­luxembourg-­belge/. Levet, Natacha. 2020. The Appeal of Local Noir in France: Local and International Crime Fiction. In Researching Transcultural Identity I: production perspectives, ed. Kim Toft Hansen and Lynge Stegger Gemzøe, 14–17. Deliverable for DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives. Mäntymäki, Helen. 2018. Epistemologies of (Un)sustainability in Swedish Crime Series Jordskott. Green Letters 22 (1): 89–110. https://doi.org/10.108 0/14688417.2017.1415159. ———. 2021. The Polar Bear in Fortitude. Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Change. Ecozon@ 12 (1): 150–165. https://doi.org/10.37536/ ECOZONA.2021.12.2.4391. Maxwinter. 2014. “No Redneck Is This Creative”: True Detective and the Horror of Folk Art. Press Play Video Blog. https://pressplayredux.com/2014/02/24/ no-­redneck-­is-­this-­creative-­true-­detective-­and-­the-­horror-­of-­folk-­art/. McChesney, Anita. 2014. The Case of the Austrian Regional Crime Novel. In Tatort Germany: The Curious Case of German-language Crime Fiction, ed. Lynn M. Kutch and Todd Herzog, 81–100. Rochester: Camden House. Mehretu, Assefa, Bruce Wm Pigozzi, and Lawrence M. Sommers. 2000. Concepts in Social and Spatial Marginality. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 82 (2): 89–101. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0435-­3684. 2000.00076.x. Nilsson, Louise, David Damrosch, and Theo D’haen, eds. 2017. Crime Fiction as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Nurbel, Jean-Christophe. 2017. Black Spot Season 1: A Crime and Fantasy Television Series [Review & Interviews]. Bulles de Culture. https://bullesdeculture.com/television-­review-­series-­interviews-­black-­spot-­season-­1/. ———. 2019. Zone Blanche saison 2: retour à Villefranche [Review & Interviews]. BullesdeCulture.https://bullesdeculture.com/television-­avis-­critique-­interviews-­ serie-­zone-­blanche-­saison-­2/. Nussbaum, Emily. 2014. Cool Story, Bro: The Shallow Deep Talk of True Detective. The New  Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/ 03/03/cool-­story-­bro.

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Ramm, Benjamin. 2021. The TV Shows That Reveal the Real France. BBC Culture. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20210505-­the-­tv-­shows-­that-­ reveal-­the-­real-­france. RTL. 2020. 158,000 People Saw Capitani on RTL, 90.4% Want To See the Story Continue. RTL Today. https://today.rtl.lu/culture/film-­and-­books/a/ 1474413.html. Saunders, Robert A. 2017. Geopolitical Television at the (B)order: Liminality, Global Politics, and World-Building in The Bridge. Social & Cultural Geography 20 (7): 981–1003. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1404122. Schülke, Sophia. 2019. Capitani: Luxemburger Krimiserie nimmt Zuschauer auf Mörderjagd mit. Luxemburger Wort. https://www.wort.lu/de/kultur/ capitani-­luxemburger-­krimiserie-­nimmt-­zuschauer-­auf-­moerderjagd-­mit-­5d9b 37cada2cc1784e34d1d3. St. Laurent, Marian. 2014. America as Afterimage in True Detective. Sensitive Skin. https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/america-­as-­afterimage-­in-­true-­detective/. Stewart, Red. 2018. Exclusive Interview—Black Spot Creator Mathieu Missoffe Talks Show’s Influences, Storylines, and the Future of Television. Flickering Myth. https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2018/04/exclusive-­interview-­ black-­spot-­creator-­mathieu-­missoffe-­talks-­shows-­influences-­storylines-­future-­ television/. Thomas. 2019. Review: Der Pass staffel 1. Leinwand Reporter. https://www.leinwandreporter.com/2019/review-­der-­pass-­staffel-­1-­blu-­ray/. Tracy, Eamon. 2022. TV Review: Bigger, Bloodier, and Better Than Its Predecessor, Pagan Peak Is Back for Another Bone-Chilling Season. Irish Film Critic. https://www.irishfilmcritic.com/tv-­review-­bigger-­bloodier-­and-­better-­ than-­its-­predecessor-­pagan-­peak-­is-­back-­for-­another-­bone-­chilling-­season/. Wallner, Anna-Maria. 2019. Der Pass: Was will dieser Krampus?. Die Presse. https://www.diepresse.com/5565315/bdquoder-­passldquo-­was-­will-­dieser-­ krampus. Wieseler, Max. 2019. Der Pass—Der bildgewaltige Alpen-Thriller ist zum Scheitern verurteilt. Movie Pilot. https://www.moviepilot.de/news/der-­pass-­das-­deutsche-­ true-­detective-­ist-­zum-­scheitern-­verurteilt-­1115169.

CHAPTER 6

Eastern Noir and the Borderscapes of Eastern Europe

In this book, we predominantly use ‘periphery’ as a conceptual reference to socio-geographically remote territories rarely screened through television series, while our main interest is to understand the increased creative motivation for and the aesthetic consequences of placing and producing television series in the territorial margins of specific areas. While we maintain that ‘periphery’ should be a scalable and flexible term (cf. Chap. 2), the concept may also be used to distinguish territories through market size, leading to a differently scalable model for smaller and larger peripheries differentiating the scope of the concept from the centre-periphery model (Szczepanik 2021, 27). Although Szczepanik’s model maintains a comparative geographical sensibility in acknowledging various “distinctions and groupings among small and peripheral markets” and holds a fine-grained perspective on the similarities and differences between the markets under scrutiny, our perspective—even though we do include a production perspective—is decisively more geographical and aesthetic than Szczepanik’s screen industrial market approach. Nevertheless, his perceptions of the East-Central European screen industries provide valuable insights that, firstly, explain overall tendencies in what Imre (2014) refers to as “postsocialist Europe,” and secondly offer explanations of the international flow of content on a broader European level. The overall post-socialist argument may explain “[l]ate professionalization and

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ambiguous professional identities” (Szczepanik 2021, 17) and why “the post-1989 regional media industries became even more provincial and peripheral than during the Cold War era” (ibid. 12), which produced markets and emerging creative industries with a more national and lesser transnational scope in production during the 1990s, a period in which Western European countries increasingly began to co-produce and collaborate across boundaries. As pointed out by Eichel and Keszeg, for instance, the film and television traditions in the neighbouring countries Hungary and Romania are culturally distinctive and rather related to country-specific circumstances after 1989 (Eichel and Keszeg 2021). This appears to share a range of similarities with Europe as an overall continent made up of separate and culturally diverse nations, cultures, and territories, but such local differences in combination with late professionalisation may explain the lack of attention towards television series from larger parts of Eastern Europe until very recently. Historically, debates have reflected “one-way transnational flows and cultural imperialism” (Szczepanik 2020, 159) into Eastern Europe from Western, predominantly US traditions, while the “export performance” of films from East-Central Europe makes it “the least successful EU region” (Szczepanik 2021, 22). The three-year H2020-project DETECt from which this book springs also located “enduring cultural, historical and economic lines of divisions across Europe”, including most predominantly an “East/West divide”, while the “potential of cultural economy in Eastern Europe” remains underexploited due to “constant stereotyping, profiling and banal discrimination” in Western imagery of the region (DETECt 2021, 4–5). This lack of successful circulation is reflected in EU’s funding practices for television programming too: In an evaluation of Creative Europe’s recent television programming scheme, Bengesser and Hansen point out that: Eastern European TV producers have not benefited from an international appeal of ‘Nordic Noir’ or the British dominance on the European TV market, limiting their potential for circulation. We also see Eastern Europe underrepresented in the applications to the scheme, though this region’s creative industries would instigate obvious application opportunities, because many Eastern countries were classified as low production capacity industries which received extra points in the evaluation. (Bengesser and Hansen 2022, 8).

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Backed by Szczepanik’s screen industry analysis, DETECt research, and Bengesser and Hansen’s evaluation of EU’s television scheme, different market and cultural circumstances may explain why Eastern European television series are still to a very little extent present in broadcasters and streaming services catalogues outside both the national and subdivisional boundaries of Eastern Europe. Szczepanik generally reveals East-Central European media as “digital peripheries”, which in line with the above may be broadened to include many Eastern European territories in general since 1989. Such a general peripheral status of Eastern Europe is also reflected in how Mrozewicz indicates that we, today, still see what she refers to as the iron curtain effect running vertically through the European continent, an effect that produces a stereotypical image of Eastern Europe as a joint region and a popular cultural image of Eastern Europe “which essentialise Russians and East Europeans as villains, victims, and ‘others’” (Mrozewicz 2018, 196)—an image of Eastern Europe described by Dobrescu et al. (2021) as “banal discrimination.” Yet, Mrozewicz highlights how this image “has been displaced from its hegemonic position, and now coexists with a multiplicity of other discourses” (ibid.). Consequently, in this chapter we read the changing discourses in Eastern European television crime series alongside a growing interest in international circulation of titles from creative industries in Eastern European territories. The most conspicuous international attention towards Eastern European television crime series has found its place in larger media conglomerates’ presence in Eastern European areas (predominantly from the US). As pointed out by Imre (2019, 175), for instance, “HBO Europe turned to making even more localised, original series, which have been successful in the national context and have also shown potential for transnational sales.” In 2022, Netflix opened an office in Warsaw with the intention of navigating the Eastern European markets. In an interview for Variety, Larry Tanz, Netflix’s EMEA vice president for original content, said the following: The Netflix office in Warsaw is a natural next step for us and will help build long-term cooperation in the region as well as deepen existing ties, creating new opportunities for content creators and producers […] The creativity and potential of the local industry make Warsaw a great place to base our business across Central and Eastern Europe. (Yossman 2022)

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Starting with HBO’s activities during the 1990s and now Netflix’s comparatively late direct engagement with Eastern European territories, the contemporary presence of commissioning streaming services indicates a dominant route towards wider international exposure of local content, including peripheral locations, across Eastern European territories. Since the 1990s, especially HBO has been able to mobilise especially local content, and for HBO Europe (now subsumed by HBO Max), television crime series have been instrumental in gaining access to local markets, producing content for local audiences with a wider European/global appeal, and guiding the productions towards the peripheries of nations and subdivisions of Eastern Europe. For that reason, this chapter on Eastern Europe explores HBO’s position and role in the Eastern European territories, ending in a discussion of the rationale behind what Imre (2018) refers to as “HBO’s e-EUtopia,” that is, the image/dream of a digitally networked European continent through televised content. We open the chapter by continuing the reflection on the tricky notion of Eastern noir and other noirs of Eastern Europe. Hereafter, we analyse three representative HBO Europe series: Firstly, the Polish series Wataha (The Border, HBO 2014–19—also distributed with the US title The Pack) has become incredibly relevant through its exposure of the Polish-Ukrainian border and the imbedded negotiation of the European frontier. Secondly, the Czech series Pustina (Wasteland, HBO 2016) shows remarkable affinities with Forbrydelsen (The Killing, DR 2007–12), a quintessential example of Nordic Noir, but through a murder case the series also debates a local town’s potential, post-industrial extinction in the wake of local coal mining. Thirdly, the German-Romanian series Hackerville (HBO 2018) indicates an Eastern European orientation towards co-production across traditional east-west divides, while it debates transnational identities through Romanian-­ German mixed identities in the Romanian city Timișoara, close to the Serbian border in Western Romania. These three cases represent different geographical orientations and challenges within Eastern Europe: the borderscapes of Poland and Ukraine, the peripheral ‘wastelands’ caused by Czech mining industries, and the supranational predicaments with digital crime. Surely, these series do not represent Eastern Europe in its complexity and entirety, but these series captivate a drift towards the peripheries in local storytelling motivated by the presence and development of HBO, a contemporary drift that has been continued by Netflix activities in Eastern Europe as well as other local broadcasters, especially in

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East-Central European territories such as particularly Poland (Majer 2018; Szostak 2012). This chapter is not as such an introduction to HBO’s European activities (for this, see Szczepanik 2020; Imre 2018; Hansen et al. 2021); rather, our intention is to read HBO’s decadelong Eastern European activities into the peripheralisation trend generally addressed in this book. Reading series produced for and now available through a transnational streaming service may indicate that such series and services may be moving Eastern European territories from out of Szczepanik’s digital peripheral status and into an increasing international exposure of Eastern noir. As we return to at the end of the chapter, however, HBO’s recent decisions to pull local content from Central and Nordic Europe and to cease the commissioning of new local content seriously  questions such local undertakings by private media conglomerates. In his article about Central-European noir, Palatinus stresses the difficulties imbedded in working with such a geographical reference: “Mapping out the typology of Central-European noir is indeed a challenging enterprise. Not only because the cultural history of this unique phenomenon covers almost a century, but also because it cuts across cultural, geographical and intellectual diversities” (Palatinus 2016). Szczepanik maintains a similar position when he highlights that his reference to east-central Europe “has the analytical advantage of carrying less ideological baggage and delimiting a more defined geographical area” (Szczepanik 2021, 2). However, we would stress that each subdivisional geographical reference, including of course also nations, carries with it ideological and historical discourses, but at the same time our scope and interest in this book is, in contrast to Szczepanik, the popular cultural imagery imbedded in specific references to regional noirs of Europe. Popular culture may habitually sustain the stereotypification that often comes with homogenising references to multicultural subdivisions, but we also see television series actively negotiate and displace these geopolitical discourses. In other words, our inclusion of a comprehensive chapter on Eastern noir seeks to avoid ideological constructions and, much in line with Mrozewicz, to acknowledge and confront the existence of the problematic discourses and present how the connotative semantics of Eastern noir may change through contemporary screen industrial approaches to crime narratives. One way to debate the subdivisional regionalisation of Eastern European territories is, rather, to consider how the overall region is reflected through existing spatio-­ generic, competing noir concepts that point towards different geographical orientations within and beyond Eastern Europe. Rooted in film noir,

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the attention towards Nordic Noir—rather than Scandinavian crime fiction—from around 2010 and onwards prompted a range of critical references to different regional noirs, which is the basic rationale behind the scope of this book in general. This includes subregional references to crime traditions in Eastern Europe that highlight a diversified representation of and reference to the territories, such as Slavic, Balkan, Central-­ European, and Baltic Noir (see Image 6.1). The Sine metu trilogy (2016–17) by the Slovak crime writer Dušan Budzak was, for instance, branded as ‘Slavic Noir’ on the frontpages of the novels, while the Russian series Мёртвое озеро (The Dead Lake, TV-3 2018)—a journey narrative with a supernatural twist about a St. Petersburg detective investigating crime in peripheral Murmansk in North-Western Russia—was scripted as ‘Slavic Noir’ too. During MIPCOM 2020, the Russian media service provider MTS Group presented a collaborative endeavour with the Russian production company Sreda to produce globally appealing Russian television series, an effort today surely impacted by

Image 6.1  Three threshold regions viewed through the perspective of noir: Baltic, Central-European, and Balkan Noir

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sanctions against Russia after the attack on Ukraine. However, producer and Sreda co-founder Alexander Tsekalo, for the magazine Prensario International, stressed that they “always focused on producing unique stories with global appeal, mastering various genres, including capturing detective thrillers that one may call ‘slavic noir’” (Prensario International 2020, 26). Like Nordic or Mediterranean Noir, Slavic Noir holds comparable transnational connotations, but as it entails a more linguistic and less geographical conception, it may be hard to use as a critical term. As another competing term, Balkan Noir refers to the European territory around the Balkan Mountains and the Balkan peninsula, a geographical reference debated regarding which areas and countries to include in the Balkans. As pointed out by Gallagher (1999), countries in this region, in his case with attention towards Romania, have struggled with whether they should identify with the Balkan topography or not, and how the region is marked by centuries of cross-cultural conflicts, including being the hotbed of the First World War breakout. This debate has also included whether Greece or Turkey, as in part topographically associated with the Balkans, should be defined as Balkan territories. In the end, the Balkans must be understood as a ‘threshold region’ between Western European, Mediterranean and Black Sea territories, basically contemplating the geographical status and unity of a specific region. However, the notion of Balkan noir highlights a popular cultural eye on Balkan locations, and to some extent, the idea of Balkan noir has been instilled as an external gaze onto the region. Most expressively, Dražen Kuljanin’s Swedish-­ Montenegrin crime film A Balkan Noir (2017) exploits noir as a master term in the title as well as the journey narrative as a motivation for the Swedish woman Nina who travels to Montenegro to investigate the disappearance of her daughter. For his novel, The Balkan Route (2017), the Welsh writer Cal Smyth used Balkan Noir as a self-reference to the exploitation of the Serbian capital Belgrade as the location for the novel. For the UK site on literary locations TripFiction (2020), Smyth highlights how he “wanted to write a crime series set in Belgrade as it’s a fascinating city and a perfect location for Balkan Noir.” Regarding Greece as a Balkan territory, Wills’ work on British travel narratives about Greece is fascinating. Firstly, he notes that travellers—in the light of the 2008 financial crisis— have derogatively ‘Balkanized’ Greece, since Greece, in this way, “is not— and never was—politically and economically fit to remain within the European currency family” (Wills 2015, 301). Secondly, he raises the point that, in the view of British writers, “Greece is transformed into

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American-style mean streets, in the style of Raymond Chandler, or indeed Athens’ own Petros Markaris. Paul Johnston’s series of crime thrillers featuring private detective Alex Mavros has helped to define this ‘Balkan noir’ genre” (ibid., 299). Additionally, before the UK Channel 4 premiered the Bulgarian television crime series Дяволското гърло (The Devil’s Throat, Nova 2019), the Irish newspaper Independent places the series in the wake of Nordic Noir: “After Nordic Noir, there now comes Balkan Noir” (O’Hanlon 2021), but in doing so, the journalist makes a critical twist in the geographical reference by marking the series quintessentially Balkan. As a series located around the peripheral Bulgarian town Smolyan and named after a legendary natural tourist attraction, the series is fittingly marketed through its usage of a peripheral Bulgarian location. However geographically and critically problematic it may appear, the above examples show that the notion of Balkan noir shares similarities with the way that Nordic Noir as a concept developed as an external view of the Nordics, but Balkan noir has not yet attracted the same degree of international attention. With geographical similarities with Szczepanik’s insights into East-­ Central European screen industries, Palatinus’ analyses of “examples of Czech(oslovak) and Hungarian fiction and film” as Central-European noir maintain ‘textual’ legacies from film noir, including how film noir “consistently disrupts the morally established categories of good and evil” (Palatinus 2016). In other words, his coinage of the term is not, as such, an established concept, but it shows how specific subdivisions of Europe may encompass certain geographical references in analyses of crime narratives. Another ensuing concept is Baltic Noir, used in a number of different contexts. The Latvian production company Red Dot Media (2022), for instance, refers to the historical crime series Krimināllieta iesāce ̄jam (Crime Solving for Beginners, LSM 2022) as Baltic Noir, while Mrozewicz refers to “[v]arious images of the Baltic—from idyllic beaches to story waves” and “[t]he ambiguity of the Baltic Sea” in Jesper Clemmensen’s Danish documentary Flugten fra DDR (The Escape, DR 2014) as Baltic noir (Mrozewicz 2018, 107f). In addition, Drama Quarterly makes a reference to the recent Polish crime series Odwilż (The Thaw, HBO 2022) as “this piece of Baltic noir” (Pickard 2022), which fits oddly with the fact that only Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are usually designated Baltic countries, three countries with different language cultures, but with a shared geographical position alongside the Baltic Sea. Of course, Poland shares a northern coastline with the Baltic Sea, which may be the rationale

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behind referencing The Thaw as Baltic Noir, but Poland is usually not dubbed a Baltic state. Often backed by a reference to the popularity of the Nordic Noir brand, we can also see how specific national crime series are dubbed as ‘noir,’ if productions from these territories reach some level of international attention, for example, Polish, Czech, or Romanian Noir, which are common journalist/critical concepts used in the wake of international distribution of, for instance, the Romanian film La Gomera (The Whistlers, 2019), the Polish series The Border, and the Czech series Rapl (The Fury, Ceská Televize 2016–19), three productions all produced at peripheral locations. Altogether, spatio-generic references to Slavic Noir, Balkan Noir, Baltic Noir, and Central-European Noir highlight the geographical and cultural complexities and diversity of Eastern Europe, stressing how generalisations may be reworked from both within and without, but at the same time we should not forget that these concepts surface also with an intent to brand specific series by way of their locations and regional settings, attempting to make these series successfully differentiate on a saturated market. These subdivisions of Eastern Europe and specific noir references may be regarded as ‘threshold regions’ in the way that the regions transgress other subdivisional territories and (ex)pose new frontiers for an Eastern European region and for the European continent in general. At the same time, we see drifts in how we should approach the notion of ‘Eastern Noir’, a reference that does not have its counterpart in the press but stems from Mrozewicz’s work with the negative, generalised image of Eastern Europe as a hotbed of villains and criminals. However, just as we have seen a neutralisation of the notion of Euro noir (Hansen et al. 2018, 7), Mrozewicz has already stressed how the negative image in Eastern noir has been shifting semantically towards, in our words, now merely meaning crime narratives from Eastern Europe. For instance, the Norwegian critic Kjetil Lismoen uses the concept as a mode of differentiation from Nordic Noir, although his pricing plays out much like a reference to industrial outsourcing: “Much suggests that the Eastern Europeans soon, nevertheless, assumes our momentum with their eastern noir, inspired by the Nordic success—and made for a fraction of the price” (Lismoen 2015). In her work on women’s roles in HBO’s eastern European originals, Keszeg also neutrally refers to Eastern noir as a generic conceptualisation modelled after Nordic Noir (Keszeg 2019, 46). Such a reference may still steer directly into generalisations that could be avoided by going deeper into subdivisions, but any topographical reference (naming) involves, at least,

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some ideological residues. In this chapter, though, our intention is to disclose how various subdivisional references may negotiate the negative stereotypes by positively branding series as, for instance, Baltic Noir, and by reading a drift towards and an interest in peripheral locations and issues in crime series from Eastern European territories alongside Western, Nordic, Mediterranean, and Brit crime narratives. This highlights a diverse cultural region, just like the four other regions are complex and composite geographical references to subdivisional territories in Europe.

Wataha and Europe’s Eastern Frontier The lack of human movement in the opening images of the Polish series The Border is remarkable since the series deals deeply with human trafficking and human transgression of the South-Eastern border between Poland and Ukraine. Before the opening sequence cuts to lengthy images of a stunning sunset across the Bieszczady mountains, the first images represent border guards’ surveillance footage of the mountainscape with a moose signalling the only physical movement. The observations, though, reveal overall establishing shots of the mountain setting, closing with a cut-in to refugees dramatically approaching the Polish border from Ukraine (see Image 6.2). However, the prioritisation of isolated mountain images in the opening and the continuation of similar images in the series’ locative title sequence in which a trail of water and blood passes through the remote landscape, indicates the series’ insistence on the importance of place in the drama. Surely, surveillance footage and blood insert hints of human agency, but the series’ lack of human representation in the first images incorporates a creative emphasis of the series’ scenogeography, which was also highlighted by most creatives and producers upon the launch of the series three seasons. In distributing the series internationally beyond the HBO catalogue, the locative approach to the borderscape was also foregrounded in the distributor ZDF Enterprises’ widely circulated ‘media kit’ presenting the series (ZDF 2014). The frontpage presents the characters with the mountain wilderness as a backdrop with a tagline reading, “There are borders to protect and boundaries to cross,” stressing the locative sensibilities in a double meaning of borders and boundaries. The first lines of the synopsis presented on the second page start from the location before dealing with the plot:

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Image 6.2  Refugees approaching the Ukrainian-Polish border in the opening sequence of the Polish HBO series The Border Filming for “Wataha” lasted almost four months. The series was mainly shot in the Bieszczady Mountains, a beautiful and magical place that has not been fully explored. The Bieszczady make a unique location for filmmakers with their undulating forested landscapes through which sunbeams shine and their pristine beauty. (ibid.)

Highlighting on-location shooting for the series, the material does not present the series from its dramatic plot around border control in a desolate territory, but it brands the series mainly through its original choice of peripheral locations. The mode of differentiation becomes obvious in highlighting how the location “has not been fully explored,” which is a perspective that turns up in many interviews about the production of The Border. In an interview for the Eastern European networking association Film New Europe, Bogumił Lipski, the Polish producer for the second and third instalments of the series and recently the producer of the peripheral Polish HBO series The Thaw, maintained attention towards the spectacular landscapes of Bieszczady upon the launch of the third season: “The Ukrainian border with Poland, which is also the border within the EU, keeps inspiring us. Our Bieszczady Mountains are just beautiful and fascinating, this is the only location for shooting the third season of The Pack”

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(Grynienko 2019). In an interview about the third season for The Hollywood Reporter, Johnathan Young, HBO’s VP of original programming and production, also highlighted how they were “delighted to be heading back to the unique setting of the Bieszczady Mountains for one of our most popular returning dramas,” and how the series “is set in a beautiful, but dangerous mountainous region where Poland borders Ukraine at the eastern-most point of the European Union’s boundaries” (Holdsworth 2018). With both Lipski’s and Young’s reference to how the series is set at the border of the EU, it appears highly probable that this sense of a European frontier in the drama’s sense of place has been a scripted and established intention behind the series—a series that continuously stages the drama on the literal border between Ukraine and Poland. The staging of the borderscape is so potent that the German broadcaster Sky Krimi entitled the series Wataha—Einsatz an der Grenze Europas, which translates into ‘Mission at the Border of Europe.’ Altogether, these references to how the series takes place at the geopolitical ‘edges’ of Europe and the EU appear, in this way, as a political negotiation of how we should define Europe and the political union from within and how a frontier between that which is not European and that which is. According to the series’ interpretation, the ‘edge’ is drawn, for the Eastern territories, in the borderscapes between Poland and Ukraine and, to a larger extent, alongside the peripheries of the EU.  At the same time, this political approach to the definition of Europe hinted towards by the series producers and distributors indicates how such a geopolitical imagination may shift quickly in the light of new territorial activities: the Ukrainian/Russian war has surely changed this geopolitical sensibility and has brought the contemporary imagination of Ukraine closer to being an imbued territory in the definition of that which is Europe. This negotiation of the imagined European community is, exactly, what Imre aims towards in her reference to HBO’s activities as “e-EUtopia”: In a European Union fraught with political and economic divisions, where the dream of a pan-European identity is receding farther and farther into utopian distance, the values associated with the HBO brand—quality, adaptability, and cosmopolitanism forged across local affinities—have conjured up what comes closest to a palatable and desirable European identification. (Imre 2018, 50)

The Border, which is the title of the drama for UK distribution, also maintains borderscapes as the theme of the drama, and determines that this

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border—through the Polish border control—is something that needs protecting. At present, this sense of protection has moved further to the east towards the current borderscape between Ukraine and Russia. The final page of ZDF’s branding of the series holds an image of a wolf, which refers to the Polish title Wataha (meaning ‘pack’), resulting in US distribution under the title The Pack. Throughout all three seasons, a wolf appears once in a while, and at times the main character Rebrow meets a wolf by himself, a theme that places him as a ‘lone wolf’ in the way that he, during season two, ends up being the hunted in the mountainous wilderness. The notion of ‘a pack’ also involves a reference to the border guards as a ‘pack’—a metaphor that refers to how wolfs are known to inhabit and patrol very large territories. Although the Polish and US title in this way embraces a spatial anticipation, the UK title is more territorial in the way that it refers to both personal and geographical borders, which is also highlighted in ZDF’s media kit that refers to the geographical border, the internal borders of a group, the border between the affluent and the underprivileged, ethical borders, the border between life and death, and personal borders (ZDF 2014). As a metaphor, this complex definition of a ‘border’ must be seen in the light of the above negotiation of the European frontier, which may also be viewed as a dividing line between the economically affluent and underprivileged, ethical borders of democracy, internal/external geographic group dynamics, and—for those attempting to enter ‘Europe’ as migrants—sometimes also balancing the edge between life and death. The tagline for the third season, “Your own borders are the hardest to cross,” stresses the personal borders, but the series’ choice of locations maintains close inspections of borderscape sensibilities. In unity, the ‘pack’ and ‘border’ references work as powerful political pointers towards the flexible, ever-changing geopolitical situation on the European continent. The Border represents the first significant shift towards HBO’s European production of crime drama and original productions. As pointed out by Hansen et  al. (2021), the early approaches to original productions in Europe were predominantly remakes of psychological and romantic dramas (Israeli formats), in this way using well-established formats for the development of local talent and TV industries. Only predated by the Czech historical miniseries Hor ̌ící keř (Burning Bush, HBO 2014), The Border was the first multi-season series to not be based on an international format, while it—together with the Romanian series Umbre (Shadows, HBO 2014–19)—set off a period in which HBO’s European activities focussed almost solely on crime series. Rather than remaking Israeli series,

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this period showcased how attention switched towards Nordic crime series with a range of local remakes of the Norwegian series Mammon (NRK 2014–16), a Romanian remake of the Norwegian series Øyevitne (Eyewitness, NRK 2014), and the Hungarian series Aranyélet (Golden Life, 2015–18) based on the Finnish series Helppo elämä (Easy Living, MTV3 2009–11). In this way, the years 2014–18 were a threshold period for local HBO activities with the Bucharest-based Shadows, the series Wasteland analysed below, and The Border being the only originally scripted series. Among the crime series commissioned by HBO, however, many have been based in Eastern European capitals, but in series like Valea mutã (The Silent Valley, HBO 2016), The Border, Wasteland, and Hackerville, we notice the interest in locating the series in peripheral locations. According to Dobrescu and Eichel, the movement of the Norwegian series Mammon into the remake The Silent Valley to “Transylvania follows a double logic: (1) scouting for land- and cityscapes resembling the original Nordic setting and (2) embedding the plot and its toleration agenda in new and distinctive socio-cultural milieus” (Dobrescu and Eichel 2020, 43), which stresses that the change of one peripheral location to another involves an opportunity to negotiate a different local socio-cultural situation. Altogether, The Border must be seen within this increased attention towards both crime series and peripheral locations. The idea that specific local milieus may produce a different geopolitical reading of the landscape through location placement reverberates through the scenogeographic intentions of creator Wiktor Piatkowski. In an interview with the Polish magazine Popmoderna, Piatkowski narrates how the very idea for The Border came out of actually travelling the borderscape between Poland and Ukraine: A few years ago, I very often crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border in all possible ways: by train, car, bus, plane, and on foot. Each time, I had the opportunity to observe the work of smaller and larger smugglers, the team controlling the queue waiting to enter Poland, but also the way the Border Guard operates. This was in 2007 and long before the revolution in Ukraine and the immigration crisis in Europe. Poles did not know much about the Border Guard, and the Bieszczady Mountains were slightly forgotten in the media. One day, together with Krzysztof Maćkowski and Kamil Chomiuk, we developed an idea for a series. This is how The Pack was born. (Major 2017)

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The peripherality of the location—a place popularly forgotten—runs through much paratextual material about The Border. In the same interview, Piatkowski highlights how, “from the very beginning, we wanted to invite the viewer to a completely different world” (ibid.), but most interestingly, the creator largely regards the experiences around The Border as a stepping-stone into Western TV industries. He notes how the series was “directed towards the viewer usually watching premium programs” (ibid.) and how the series was a learning experience guiding him towards activities in Western series production. In an interview for the Polish magazine K Mag about an upcoming Netflix series, he notices how he, with a background in Łodz Film School, lacked insights into serial production, and that he has “learned everything then by watching international productions many times, breaking them down into prime factors, analysing and then trying by hand,” but Piatkowski maintains that The Border today still has “its undeniable charm and authenticity” (K Mag 2021, our translation), a claim that reverts back to the location placement of the series in the authentic Bieszczady and the realistic approach to crime narratives about border control. In the interview for Popmoderna, though, Piatkowski refers to studies in Western capitals and training by US screen lectures and consultants as formative for his “name and position on the European market” (Major 2017), which resonates with how HBO in the Eastern European continent has played a decisive role in developing local raw talent to produce original HBO content (Hansen et al. 2021). This may signpost how the East/West divide has been running—and possibly still runs—through European TV industries’ approaches to content production, but for the scope of this book it is notable how the peripheral Bieszczady mountains and the authenticity of the series’ location placement have been able to market it as original, and how this also resonates with Piatkowski’s route from a local Polish talent to international collaboration across the East/West divide—something that, on a larger level, may create a level playing field for increased collaboration between creatives across the divide.

Pustina and the Industrial Wastelands of Bohemia While The Border represents one of the first European ventures of HBO into originally scripted local crime series, Wasteland represents a continued interest in television crime dramas and a direct influence from Nordic Noir in this period, including an evident inspiration from the Danish series

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The Killing (Hansen 2020). Or as noted by Durys, “Pustina not only clearly proves the transnational character of the Nordic noir formula, but also its operational value in a culturally different context” (Durys 2018, 155). With notable influence in form and narrative from the Danish series, the peripheral choice of location in Wasteland took the urban scope of much Nordic Noir TV material at that time and brought the narrative into desolate Bohemian landscapes in Czechia. Originally conceived as a border story in the Polish-Czech border area, Wasteland was filmed in various rural locations in Czech Bohemia, for instance locations in Kladne (closer to Prague) for the police station, in Hor ̌ovičky for the central pub and meeting place, outside Chomutov (also fairly close to Prague) for the barren industrial landscapes featured in the title sequence, and the Chateau Jezeří, location for the juvenile facility, in Northern Czech regions closer to the German border. For Tereza Polachová, the Czech HBO Europe producer, the result is a local setting and borderscape that could be anywhere, intentionally creating an ambience recognizable for audiences in many places: “It’s a powerful story that, though it’s local, is nonetheless a universal story and could take place anywhere in the world. You can find a godforsaken place like this anywhere” (Czech Film Center 2016). In its location placement and influence from Nordic Noir, the series resembles the German Netflix series Dark (Netflix, 2017–20), which also created a “translocal visuality” for what its creators referred to as a “somewhere that could be anywhere” (Hansen 2020, 286)—a visual strategy that seems to work well for local series with international ambitions. Nevertheless, the international ambitions of Wasteland as an HBO Original appear uncertain for the updated catalogue changes for the HBO Max platform, since Wasteland was temporarily removed from HBO Max, only to be relaunched in late 2022. Essentially, Wasteland represents a local, location-based Eastern European crime series under transnational influences, but it also shows how such specific localisation strategies may be sacrificed during prioritisations of global media conglomerates. In this paragraph, we focus on the location placement of the series, but we return to a general discussion of HBO’s European priorities at the end of the chapter. For the creatives, the translocal visuality of the series was a way to form a combination of recognisability and place-oriented dread, while underneath certain elements of authenticity resonate. In an interview for Czech Film Magazine, the series’ writer Štěpán Hulík underlined the familiar, yet indistinct placement of Wasteland:

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I realized together with my producers how much we are attracted to the possibility of creating our own world from the foundations up and in that world tell a completely original story. We tried to create Pustina as a place totally familiar to the viewer without being able to place it exactly. […] We asked ourselves: What excites us? What really interests us and what annoys us? What frightens us? And how to fit it into Pustina? I cross-examined a few mayors of small villages to find out what their work is all about. We conducted long interviews with criminal investigators; we visited juvenile delinquency centers and talked to local caretakers and their wards to soak up the atmosphere. (Czech Film Center 2016).

As the first original HBO Europe series not remade from a foreign format, producer Tomáš Hrubý’s production company Nutprodukce—the main company behind Wasteland—previously co-produced Burning Bush (HBO 2013), which was also written by Hulík. In other words, the Hulík-­ Hrubý-­collaboration finally unlocked the opportunity for HBO to produce local and original content with a significant ‘touch’ from local material, atmospheres, and socio-political issues. Asked about the veracity of Wasteland, Hrubý replied the following: It isn’t based on a fact, but I think it is based on the reality that we live in the Czech Republic. Of course the coal-mining area and this place has been a huge inspiration for the series. When we first went there and saw the desert that’s looming underneath the castle [Chateau Jezeří], it was a great inspiration in terms of what can happen to nature, to people’s homes. In Czech history there have been many stories of villages that just disappeared and we always found that fascinating, because you have a community that has lived for hundreds of years and suddenly it disappears and the place no longer exists but is somehow part of our history. That’s why we thought it would be a great setting for a longer drama. (Radio Prague International 2016)

Such foregrounding of place-based issues and claim to authenticity clearly produces what we have termed a translocal sense of place in the series, a local problem with metonymic resemblances to larger geopolitical, environmental, and topographical concerns elsewhere (cf. Chap. 2). Wasteland’s title sequence clearly frames the correlation between the rural setting of the series and its geopolitical concern with coal-mining industries in North Bohemia (see Image 6.3). Depressing images of decay, dark horizons, tiny humans in vast devastated landscapes, and signs of human overconsumption of natural resources express the widescale

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Image 6.3  In the locative title sequence, the relationship between desolate landscapes, the personal distress of the protagonist, the local decay, and the grinding coal-mining industry is a significant paratextual code for the comprehension of the series Wasteland

anthropocentric ‘wasteland’ left behind by the grinding brown-coal industries. Exploiting the Chateau Jezeří as the juvenile centre not only localises the series in North Bohemia; it also highlights the decay of local heritage overlooking a desolate landscape clearly marked by human extraction of coal. Besides the murder plot of the series, the image of Pustina’s town mayor in front of the exploited landscape by the side of the crossed-over town name is a major hint towards the criticism of the series, that is, the fact that local mining industries in the territory literally ‘undermine’ whole towns, thus creating Bohemian wastelands. The name of the town should not be confused with the real small town a few hours’ drive east from Prague called Pustina; the title and town name should rather be taken very literal. Pointing towards the series’ spatial characteristics, the actress playing the mayor and mother of the missing girl, Zuzana Stivínová, picks up this point in a quote from the sales book, stressing how ‘pustina’ means ‘wasteland’ in Czech: “Pustina = Wasteland = no man’s land, nowhere, on the edge of nothingness... very concrete and at the same time very abstract. The place definitely determines our actions and way of thinking” (HBO 2016, 3). Along similar lines of thought, Hulík reflects on the spatial reference imbedded in the title:

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In the beginning my colleagues and I thought about having the story take place on the Czech-Polish border, near Jeseníky. I looked at the map and found out that there are a lot of villages named Žulové (Ore Village), Jedlová (Fir Village), Písečná (Sand Village), Uhelná (Coal Village). It seemed right that our village too should have a name that already means something. That instantly evokes an emotion. The name Pustina (Wasteland), given the storyline, seemed absolutely perfect for our purposes. (ibid.)

In a joint statement in the sales booklet, producers Tomáš Hrubý and Pavla Janoušková Kubečkov insist on place and location placement as significantly meaningful for the series’ focus on mining, but places in a recognizable international context: Pustina is a story [that] takes place in a specific location, a coalmine in the former Sudetenland in northern Bohemia, where the ambiance and visuals are captivating. This makes the series purely Czech. But the basic storylines, ethical, moral dilemmas and conflicting ideas could just as well take place in any economically depressed region battling poverty and a landscape devastated by heavy industry—for example the Rust Belt in the US or the north of England. (ibid.)

In other words, this concrete, localised sense of place in relation to an abstract translocality is clearly a scripted perspective from the creatives, echoed throughout comments and press material and peritextually framed in the title sequence that emphasises place while only hinting towards the narrative contents of the series. Anticipated in a remark to the Czech online newspaper Aktuálne ̌ while the series was still in production, Hulík maintained that the series would be about: “[d]efunct Sudeten villages, ethnic conflicts, poverty, lack of job opportunities, a harsh landscape that seems to mark interpersonal relationships as well. Those places have amazing genius loci, we would like to capture their atmosphere” (Svoboda 2014). Knowing the narrative, the symbolic, yet locative title sequence obviously retells the storyline about the mayor’s ex-husband accused of murdering their daughter, about the coal industry’s destruction of the townscape, and the distress and grief that follows not only the murder of an innocent young girl, but also the emblematic relation to the demise of the rural landscape and township, clearly embodied by Hana, the mayor and mother. In relating Wasteland to The Killing as an influential series, the Czech series conflates the political and private plots into one person, which stresses the point about the deadly local mining industries: Hana

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battles both the mining industries and her own loss of her murdered daughter. In general terms, Wasteland represents a very local shift in the attention towards place-based issues, while it equally steers the translocal sense of place towards international recognition and a media institution with ambitions outside local territories for its original series.

Hackerville and the Digital Centre of the Romanian Periphery While The Border represents HBO Europe’s first multi-season serial production, and while Wasteland consolidates HBO’s European activities within original crime influenced by Nordic Noir, Hackerville epitomises HBO’s first bilateral co-production and a new phase marked by “territorial expansion and ensuing co-productions” (Hansen et  al. 2021, 605). The series is a one-off German-Romanian co-production between the German production company UFA Fiction and the Romanian production company Mobra Films for HBO Europe and the German cable-net TNT Serie (since 2021, Warner TV Serie). A local German service like TNT was needed, since HBO’s platform has been unavailable in Germany due to HBO’s long-term agreement with Sky (Clarke 2019). Hackerville indicates HBO Europe’s turn towards international co-production deals that cover two or more territories, but the series has been removed from the HBO Max platform during the institution’s reprioritisations across the European continent, which indicates a considerable decrease in local interests from HBO.  Although Hackerville maintains the local interests of HBO’s European original productions since its first local productions in the late noughties, the series appears—just like Wasteland—to be caught in a global media institutions’ reduction of local productions in Europe. We return to this issue after the analysis of the location placement strategies behind Hackerville. After the hacking of two large German banks, Lisa, a German-Romanian detective, is sent to her Romanian hometown Timișoara to unveil a powerful, local organisation of cybercriminals. Referred to as “a homecoming story and a culture clash story” by HBO’s Johnathan Young (Tizard 2018), the story not only tells a narrative about discovering young hackers and a criminal network in a peripheral place, but it also reveals Lisa’s backstory as a Romanian migrant in Germany who revisits her past, her family relationships, and explores her complex situation as a person with a

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cross-cultural background. Originally created for UFA Fiction by German producer Jörg Winger and German-based American producer Ralph Martin, Hackerville was initially pitched as an English-language series in the vein of Mr. Robot (NBC, 2015–19) (Lückerath 2018), but Young convinced the producers to seek local collaboration and produce the series in German and Romanian (Middleton 2018). Co-written by Steve Bailie, a scriptwriter with established background in British TV industries, the Winger-Bailie-Martin constellation had an already established international exposure through especially the historical series Deutschland 83, 86 and 89 (2015–20), while the benefits of local upcoming writers point towards strategic local HBO talent development (cf. Hansen et al. 2021, 609–12). Besides co-producing with producer Tudor Reu through Mobra Films, this includes dialogue consultancy by scriptwriter Tatiana Ionascu, the first co-writing credits to Laurentiu Rusescu, co-writing credits to the well-established scriptwriter Daniel Sandu, and story consultancy by Thomas André Szabó. As a Romanian writer residing in Germany, the employment of Szabó points towards a specific type of localisation in the Hackerville development process, which involves international partners grouping with local and cross-cultural expertise, a point also raised by Dobrescu and Eichel (2020). The co-director Anca Miruna Lăzărescuin is a Romanian emigrant living in Germany too, while the main actress and her father, Anna and Ovidiu Schumacher, likewise cast as daughter and father in Hackerville, share the director’s migrant background as a family that left Romania in the 1980s during the communist Ceaușescu regime. Through locative means as well as casting, the series not only embeds a fictionalised backstory about the history and consequences of the forcible Romanian administration, but it is also noteworthy how creatives behind and in front of the camera share the cross-cultural, embodied authenticity of the protagonist. Leaving room for multiple voices during production, Young from HBO Europe refers to this construction as a “layered cake,” linking this to the series’ authenticity claim in his reference to Anna Schumacher as “an absolutely authentic German-Romanian lead who is fascinating to watch. She flips from speaking German to Romanian, and I find that magic. It’s unfakeable” (Middleton 2018). Insisting that the protagonist should be German rather than US, Antony Root, HBO Europe’s exec VP of original programming, refers to authenticity as a broader prerogative for HBO, and maintains that HBO “defines itself by its localism” (ibid.), which in this case refers to both creatives and cast as well as the

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series’ sense of place. For Winger, especially the casting of Anna Schumacher “gives it a special grounding and authenticity” (Frank 2019). Conceptualised through the cross-cultural discussion about German-­ Romanians, referred to by the German producer Winger as “almost an invisible group” (Roxborough 2018), the authenticity claim behind Hackerville also reaches into the real story about the mountain town Râmnicu Vâlcea in South-Eastern Romania, notoriously famous as the real ‘Hackerville’ and dubbed by the cybersecurity firm Norton as The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet (2015) in documentary film with the same name. Although the series changes the original location to Timișoara, a Romanian city closer to the Serbian and Hungarian borders, it maintains Romania as a hotbed for cyber-criminality and sustains a built-in reason to localise and co-produce the series. Referring to Timișoara “as a dynamic and colorful place with a vastly unexplored history and present,” the German producer Winger argues that the series “will put Romania on the map of the international TV drama scene” (Tizard 2018), echoing the HBO intentions towards local talent and industry development through its local ventures at that time. Appreciating the unexplored character of the location placement and the cross-cultural composure of the creative crew, Romanian Mobra producer Reu also stresses the importance of the location as well as the series conspicuous drone aesthetics by director of photography Tomasz Augustynek, the Polish cinematographer also behind The Border: We’re shooting in a very beautiful and not yet discovered Romanian city […] through the eyes of our very good Polish D.P. (and his drone). […] The city of Timisoara in itself is a very cool location, a mix of Austro-­ Hungarian architecture with communist neighborhoods, industrial sites, the river and its bridges […]. Our locations reflect the mix of old and new and include graffiti-painted urban areas, an abandoned village, a functioning refinery, railways and the internet café where our younger characters gather. (Tizard 2018)

The location placement of the series speaks directly into the fictionalised storyworld of Hackerville and the series’ intentional utilisation of real cybercrimes, Romanian online webworks, and mixed background of creatives and cast, a combination that also points towards online spaces as a noticeable aesthetic choice in the series as well as deliberated background for the narrative.

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While Timișoara may be a peripheral location in Romania and a lesser used location for film and television industries, the Râmnicu Vâlcea story behind Hackerville highlights how a local and, for film industries, less known location may become a digital centre for cybercrime, which is directly inscribed in the cyber-influenced scenogeography of the series, including the digital reproduction of Timișoara and the digital metaphor incorporated in the locative, yet symbolic title sequence (cf. Image 6.4). The eye with reflections of digital coding focalises the opening of the title sequence, but the visualisation zooms out of the apartment into CGI-­ combined  (computer-generated images) drone perspectives of both Timișoara and Frankfurt from which Lisa travels with illuminated circuit

Image 6.4  Hackerville’s title sequence is at once very local in its combined references to Timișoara and Frankfurt and very conspicuous in its digital metaphor that indicates digital closeness despite remote geographical distances

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boards running through the streets, indicating wired connections from the apartment and outward. While the series tells a journey narrative that stresses the cultural and geographical distance between Frankfurt and Timișoara, the opening’s digital conflation of the Piat ̦a Unirii square in Timișoara with the Frankfurt skyline rising in the background highlights how digital means connect both culturally and geographically remote areas. In this way, Hackerville is an unequivocal comment towards cybercrime as one of the main challenges of today’s society, an issue addressed by Europol and Eurojust in the 2019-report Common Challenges in Combating Cybercrime (Europol 2019). Solving cybercrime is challenged by five main aspects, says the report, including loss of data, loss of location, loss of national control in a non-national, digital crime culture, obstacles to international cooperation, and challenges of public-private collaboration, all of which addressed in different ways in the series. Especially, loss of location is signalled through the digital conflation of main locations, while problems with national legislation and international cooperation are highlighted through the way the series establishes German-Romanian collaboration in the narrative. Loss of data and private-­ public issues lie at the heart of the narrative too, since the plot revolves around the hacking of a private bank being solved by a public, bilateral police force. Such articulation of an eroding national jurisdiction and the need for cross-cultural collaboration is clearly stressed in the metaphorical title sequence and its amalgamation of place, but it likewise reflects the series’ production scheme and its location placement strategies. The digital spatiality becomes significantly noticeable in how the production design for the series digitally reproduced larger parts of Timișoara for an imbedded digital online game used for cybercrimes by the perpetrators, which works as a visual way to spatialize the ‘invisible’ digital coding for the audiences. Addressing the digital strategy for the series, German producer Winger comments on its combination of familiar locations and the digital challenges represented in the narrative: ‘Hackerville’ is more familiar and noticeably located in Romania. We deal with the consequences of our digitally shrinking world, in which issues such as security and cultural identity are both local and global issues. We look at an important piece of contemporary European history and the fascinating world of today’s Romania. Did you know that Romania has one of the fastest internet infrastructures in Europe? And when it comes to digitization and computer science, some German students would be amazed at how far the teaching in Romania has progressed. (Lückerath 2018)

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In this way, Hackerville is also about borderscapes and non-existing online boundaries in gaming and hacking cultures. “The juxtaposition of what you see on the ground and where you can be in the online space is really interesting,” says Johnathan Young. “You can be in a basement on a computer, but in your head you could be anywhere in the world. That is a big part of the hacking and gaming story” (Middleton 2018). As highlighted by Pötzsch, borders have become digitised too, and for security-­ based purposes borders are also patrolled digitally, creating yet a new imagination around transnational borderscapes, as new “border technologies” create new associations between “bodies, networks, and machines” (Pötzsch 2016, 222)—a human-machine relationship and a reduction of distances clearly highlighted in Hackerville’s title sequence and its narrative focus on digital crimes and movement of bodies both physically and digitally.

Reaching HBO’s E-EU-TOPIA? Since the late noughties, the development of local Eastern European HBO productions has shown how an international, private media conglomerate may successfully establish a creative representation of local and peripheral locations for an international audience, and in doing so also institute creative hubs for talent development. Conspicuously, HBO has been able to utilize the built-in locative means of the crime genre to such an extent that most of the original HBO productions for HBO Europe may be dubbed crime narratives, as indicated through the three cases in this chapter. At the same time, however, the general HBO case clearly underlines that private endeavours into local content productions may be incredibly ephemeral and transient, because such media conglomerates lack policy obligations to represent—and keep representing—specific territories in their entirety like many especially Western European PSBs (public service broadcaster) are obliged to. Although HBO Europe has been successful in mapping different territories in Europe by commissioning local stories in collaboration with local TV industries, the institutions’ recent strategic reorientation has had severe consequences for HBO Max’s online catalogue, changes that have been attributed to the merger between HBO and the Discovery+ platform (which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery). The official statement from HBO regarding the merger quoted in, for instance, Variety, provides the scripted rationale behind the merger and the removal of content from the platform:

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As we work toward bringing our content catalogs together under one platform, we will be making changes to the content offering available on both HBO Max and discovery+ […]. That will include the removal of some content from both platforms […]. Our commitment to these markets has not changed […]. We will continue to commission local content for Warner Bros. Discovery’s linear networks in these regions and we remain substantial acquirers of local third-party content for use on our streaming services. (Ravindran 2022)

Consequently, HBO has stopped commissioning material from the Nordics, from Central Europe (including Eastern European territories), The Netherlands, and Turkey, while material from other territories has been removed as well. It may appear vaguely unconvincing that the HBO statement maintains that “commitment to these markets has not changed,” since these smaller language areas now seem as, at least, lesser attractive content markets. These strategic changes unmistakably switch the attention away from what Antony Root above refers to as “localism” to what appears to be a much more strategically global outreach of the streaming platform. Critically acclaimed series like Wasteland and Hackerville have been discarded with the consequence that, for example, Hackerville is no longer available for local audiences in Romania, while Pustina has recently reappeared in a range of local catalogues. In other words, this gives us the opportunity to examine HBO’s local European activities through the lenses of Eastern Europe, and highlight how the above analysed series are representative of HBO’s overall localisation strategies on the European continent. Even if that is the case, the merger and removal of content point towards critical consequences of leaving local development of industries and talent to larger, global, and private conglomerates. For this reason, we conclude this chapter by reflecting on how recent changes in the HBO portfolio signal the glitches of the contemporary streaming war, most predominantly among large US services like Disney+, HBO Max, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and others. During the past decades, most originals by HBO Europe have been easily circulated across the local territories in Europe through their own services (in different guises such as HBO Nordic, HBO Adria, HBO Spain or HBO Go for Central-European territories, and others all now subsumed under HBO Max), and the institution has been strategically seeking local productions that would have a simultaneous transnational appeal (Hansen et al. 2021). According to recent research, this has worked so

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well that HBO activities in Eastern Europe have reached a high level of attention, nearly designated a digital utopia. For instance, Batori suggests that the transposition of the crime genre onto Eastern European territories may introduce a newly developing cultural criticism less possible during the socialist era: What we witness this way, is the birth of a new post-socialist televisual collectivehood that translates and locates the American genre into an Eastern European social reality by reworking its specific historico-political trauma and collective problems, while focusing on the disintegrated institution of the family as a metaphor of the post-socialist, neoliberal crisis. (Batori 2018: 38–9)

Imre takes the desirability of the HBO model even further and claims that “HBO’s virtual map of European ‘territories’, parcelled up by nations and regions with a well-calculated recognition for the need to cater to national and regional identities, has brought to life a kind of e-EUtopia under the umbrella of a corporate brand” (Imre 2018: 52). In her view, HBO has successfully been able to establish “a digitally connected communication network” (ibid.: 54). She continues: HBO Europe is a perfect agent and platform for navigating a European landscape where media regulation promotes digital connectivity and yet undermines small nations’ competitiveness and effectively leads to the fragmentation of domestic markets. It has successfully broken down (or ignored) the seemingly intractable divide between national and supranational identifications. It has designed and implemented a pan-European approach that envelopes the European tradition of public service broadcasting, art film, and documentary in its elastic “quality” brand and offers stories, themes, characters, and styles that qualify as “originals” in specific national contexts while they travel easily from market to market precisely because they consist in shared European and global narratives that have become even more hybrid and homogeneous thanks to digital platforms of borderless internet distribution. (ibid., 62)

Imre’s idealistic approach may be attractive, and it appears reasonable to claim that HBO has, to some extent, almost acted as a local PSB through its local interests and quality brand, but such measures as digital connectivity, borderless distribution, and shared European narratives may not only be an overinterpretation of the presence of HBO in the

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continent. The recent reorientation of the platform, the removal of local quality content, and the diminishing interest in producing locally in Europe also signal how a global corporation with ease may depart from ‘utopian’ goals and activities with references to corporate expressions like “strategic and financial” (Ravindran 2022). As pointed out by Hansen et al. (2021), in this way HBO—through its development of under-developed territories and production cultures—rather navigates as a coloniser than a public service institution with clearcut political and local goals and obligations. As indicated by the readings of HBO’s activities in Eastern Europe, and its conspicuous use of Eastern Noir narratives, it has been very much possible for an institution like HBO, through localisation and strategic location placement, to come close to a market-based model for creating local content with a wider reach. HBO’s territorial strategies in Europe since the late noughties until recently make it obvious from where Batori and Imre reach a compelling argument that goes as far as, at least, Imre does. With obvious inspiration from public service series, for instance the successful series The Killing, HBO has reached the potential of producing local high-end series for wider, international distribution, while maintaining very local stories with recognisable location choices substantially establishing local settings, local production environments, and a sense of place that becomes exercised selling points for the series. In this chapter, this has been exemplified by three series with notable spatial metaphors in the titles—The Border, Wasteland, and Hackerville—and with a widespread sensibility towards local colour and local storytelling devices. Nevertheless, only the future will show whether the e-EU-topian hopes towards HBO turn into a market wasteland in the aftermath of the contemporary streaming war on the global market.

References1 Batori, Anna. 2018. The Birth of the Post-Socialist Eastern European Televisual Collectivehood: Crime and Patriarchy in Shadows [Umbre, 2014-]. AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 17: 37–48. https://doi.org/10.25038/am. v0i17.268. Bengesser, Cathrin, and Kim Toft Hansen. 2022. Scandinavian Success as European Policy Dilemma: Creative Europe’s Funding for TV Drama 1

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Co-Productions, 2014-20. International Journal of Cultural Policy 28 (6): 697–714. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2021.2022653. Clarke, Stewart. 2019. Sky and HBO Strike New Programming Deal. Variety. https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/game-­of-­thrones-­sky-­hbo-­programming-­ deal-­1203388088/. Czech Film Center. 2016. There Is No Better Place To Lose Everything. Czech Film 34. https://issuu.com/czechfilmcenter/docs/czech_film_magazine_-­_fall_2016. DETECt. 2021. Summary of DETECt’s main findings. https://www.detect-­ project.eu/wp-­content/uploads/2022/01/DETECt-­Final-­Document.pdf. Dobrescu, Caius, and Roxana Eichel. 2020. Transylvanian Location Aesthetics and Policies: Case studies Valea Muta ̆ and Hackerville. In Location Marketing and Cultural Tourism, ed. Cathrin Bengesser, Kim Toft Hansen, and Lynge Stegger Gemzøe, 47–54. Deliverable for DETECt: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives. https://www.detect-­project. eu/wp-­content/uploads/2020/02/COMPLETE_d4.1_final2.pdf. Dobrescu, Caius, et  al. 2021. A Game of Mirrors: Western/Eastern European Crime Series and the Struggle for Recognition. Journal of European Popular Culture 12 (2): 93–102. https://doi.org/10.1386/jepc_00033_1. Durys, Elżbieta. 2018. The Potential of Nordic Noir: The Pustina Miniseries as an Example of the Transnational Usage of the Formula. Literatura i Kultura Popularna 14: 155–172. Eichel, Roxana, and Anna Keszeg. 2021. Paths to Quality Television in Eastern Europe: Where Do Hungarian and Romanian HBO Series Come From. In Cinéma & Cie 21 (36/37), Glocal Detectives. Cultural Diversity in European Tv Crime Dramas, ed. Luca Barra, Alice Jacquelin, and Federico Pagello, 101–123. https://doi.org/10.13130/2036-­461X/16391. Europol. 2019. Common Challenges in Combating Cybercrime. https://www. europol.europa.eu/cms/sites/default/files/documents/common_challenges_in_combating_cybercrime_2018.pdf. Frank, Kerstin. 2019. “If We Are Not a Community of Neighbours, Then We Are Nothing”: Small-Twon Moralities, Social Change, and Social Cohesion in Broadchurch (2013-2017). In Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century, ed. Caroline Lusin and Ralf Haekel, 9–23. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH. Gallagher, Tom. 1999. To Be Or Not To Be Balkan: Romania’s Quest for Self-­ Definition. Deadalus 126 (3): 63–83. Grynienko, Katarzyna. 2019. Production: HBO Europe Preps Third Season of The Pack in Poland. Film New Europe. https://www.filmneweurope.com/ news/poland-­n ews/item/117552-­p roduction-­h bo-­e urope-­p reps-­t hird-­ season-­of-­the-­pack.

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Hansen, Kim Toft. 2020. From Nordic Noir to Euro Noir: Nordic Noir Influencing European Serial SVoD Drama. In Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation, ed. Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen, and Jarkko Seppälä, 275–294. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hansen, Kim Toft, Anna Keszeg, and Sándor Kálai. 2021. Globális szereplők Európában: HBO. Korunk 10: 28–33. Hansen, Kim Toft, Steven Peacock, and Sue Turnbull. 2018. Down These Mean European Streets: Contemporary Issues in European Television Crime Drama. In European Television Crime Drama and Beyond, ed. Kim Toft Hansen, Steven Peacock, and Sue Turnbull, 1–19. London: Palgrave Macmillan. HBO. 2016. Pustina. Official sales booklet. Holdsworth, Nick. 2018. Polish Drama The Pack Renewed for Third Season at HBO Europe. Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/ tv-­news/polish-­drama-­pack-­renewed-­third-­season-­at-­hbo-­europe-­1169981/. Imre, Aniko. 2014. Postcolonial Media Studies in Postsocialist Europe. Boundary 41 (1): 113–134. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-­2409694. ———. 2018. HBO’s e-EUtopia. Media Industries 5 (2): 49–68. https://doi. org/10.3998/mij.15031809.0005.204. ———. 2019. Streaming Freedom in Illiberal Eastern Europe. Critical Studies in Television 14 (2): 170–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749602019837775. K Mag. 2021. Wiktor Piątkowski opowiada o „Miłości do kwadratu” i współpracy z Netflixem. https://kmag.pl/article/wiktor-piatkowski-opowiada-o-miloscido-kwadratu-i-wspolpracy-z-netflixem-wywiad. Keszeg, Anna. 2019. Nőszerepek és nőkarakterek az HBO Europe kelet-európai sorozataiban. Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület 3: 43–52. Lismoen, Kjetil. 2015. Nordic noir—en utvannet nordisk merkevare. Aftenposten. https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/i/OEWw/nordic-­n oir-­e n-­ utvannet-­nordisk-­merkevare. Lückerath, Thomas von. 2018. Hackerville: Neue Serie von Deutschland 83— Machern. DWDL. https://www.dwdl.de/nachrichten/65612/hackerville_ neue_serie_von_deutschland_83machern/?utm_source=&utm_medium= &utm_campaign=&utm_term=. Majer, Artur. 2018. Quality by Design: Feature TV Series from Premium Television in Poland. In A European Television Fiction Renaissance: Premium Production Models and Transnational Circulation, ed. Luca Barra and Massimo Scaglioni, 262–274. New York and London: Routledge. Major, Małgorzata. 2017. Wywiad ze scenarzysta ̨ Wiktorem Pia ̨tkowskim (Wataha).Popmoderna.https://popmoderna.pl/wywiad-­ze-­scenarzysta-­wiktorem-­ piatkowskim-­wataha/. Middleton, Richard. 2018. Welcome to Hackerville. Drama Quarterly. https:// dramaquarterly.com/welcome-­to-­hackerville/. Mrozewicz, Anna. 2018. Beyond Eastern Noir: Reimagining Russia and Eastern Europe in Nordic Cinemas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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O’Hanlon, Eilis. 2021. Devilish Touch Enlivens Balkan Noir While Honeytrap Deceit Takes a Terrible Toll. Independent. https://www.independent.ie/ entertainment/television/tv-­r eviews/devilish-­touch-­enlivens-­balkan-­noir-­ while-­honeytrap-­deceit-­takes-­a-­terrible-­toll-­40752105.html. Palatinus, David. 2016. Haunting Legacies and the Tragic Sense of Central European Noir. Americana E-journal of American Studies in Hungary 12 (1). http://americanaejournal.hu/vol12no1/palatinus. Pickard, Michael. 2022. Thawed Hero. https://dramaquarterly.com/thawed-­ hero/. Prensario International. 2020. MTS: Content for National and Global Viewers. Prensario International 29 (396): 26. Pötzsch, Holger. 2016. Seeing and Thinking Borders. In Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making, ed. Chiara Brambilla et  al., 217–228. New York and London: Routledge. Radio Prague International. 2016. Threatened Czech Mining Village Focus of Ambitious Wasteland Series. https://english.radio.cz/threatened-­czech-­mining-­ village-­focus-­ambitious-­wasteland-­series-­8220762. Ravindran, Manori. 2022. HBO Max Halts Originals in Parts of Europe in Major Restructure. Variety. https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/hbo-­max-­europe-­ originals-­development-­1235308730/. Roxborough, Scott. 2018. Cyber Crime Thriller Hackerville Marks New Direction in European TV. Hollywood Reporter. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ tv/tv-­n ews/hbo-­e urope-­t urner-­t eam-­u p-­c yber-­c rime-­t hriller-­h ackerville-­ 1154118/. Svoboda, Martin. 2014. Mezi divákem Vyprávěj a voličem Zemana je jasná spojnice. Aktuálne ̌. https://magazin.aktualne.cz/kultura/film/rozhovor-­se-­ scenaristou-­stepanem-­hulikem/r~c2b81d36ae9311e386aa002590604f2e/. Szczepanik, Petr. 2020. HBO Europe’s Original Programming in the Era of Streaming Wars. In A European Television Fiction Renaissance: Premium Production Models and Transnational Circulation, ed. Lucca Barra and Massimo Scaglioni, 243–261. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2021. Screen Industries in East-Central Europe. London: Bloomsbury. Szostak, Sylwia. 2012. Poland’s Return to Europe. Polish Terrestrial Broadcasters and TV Fiction. View: Journal of European Television, History, Culture 1 (2): 79–93. https://doi.org/10.18146/2213-­0969.2012.jethc021. Tizard, Will. 2018. HBO Europe Begins Shooting Cyber-Crime Series Hackerville in Romania. Variety. https://variety.com/2018/tv/global/hbo-­europe-­begins-­ shooting-­cyber-­hackerville-­romania-­1202828801/. TripFiction. 2020. Talking Location with Author Cal Smyth—Belgrade. https:// www.tripfiction.com/talking-­location-­with-­cal-­smyth-­belgrade/.

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Wills, David. 2015. Reinventing Paradise: The Greek Crisis and Contemporary British Travel Narratives. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 39 (2): 286–230. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0307013100015391. Yossman, K.J. 2022. Netflix to Open Central and Eastern Europe Office in Poland. Variety. https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/ netflix-­open-­poland-­office-­1235217575/. ZDF. 2014. Wataha—The Pack. https://zdf-­enterprises.de/en/catalogue/international/zdfedrama/series/crime-­suspense/wataha-­the-­pack.

CHAPTER 7

Brit Noir and the Hinterlands of the British Isles

The opening sequence of The Tunnel (Sky Atlantic/Canal+ 2013–17), the British-French remake of the Swedish-Danish series Bron/Broen (The Bridge, SVT/DR 2011–18), commences with the discovery of the torso of a French EU critical politician and the lower half of a Welsh prostitute at the very middle of the Channel Tunnel underneath the Dover Strait, a site-specific peripheral location in the borderscape between France and England. The sequence consists of locative imagery shot on location around the tunnel area, including night-time images of anonymous, yet dynamic mobility and transport through the area (see Image 7.1). The opening images insist on transnational connections and interrelations, for instance a representative shuttle train entering the tunnel passing the logo of the railway service Eurotunnel Le Shuttle and the midway point where the two flags meet, a relationship put on hold and tested when police officers from both sides of the strait need to agree on how to approach the investigation. Addressing the female French police officer as Joan [of Arc], the British policeman quickly establishes an oppositional relationship between the French and the British, while linguistic prejudice from the French side is resolved by the French officer speaking fluent English with a British accent. In this way, the series—with very few means—establishes the British side of the police as wittily provocative, yet reliant on foreigners’ ability to speak their domestic tongue, while the French side—as we also instigate the sequence from the French side with reference to the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2_7

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Image 7.1  The locative opening of the British-French TV series The Tunnel clearly encompasses frontier cultures, boundaries as unity and separation, and mobility across borders, stressing the Euro Tunnel as one of the quintessential liminal peripheries in Europe

Euro-tunnel—is initially represented as more transnationally integrated (although, the murdered French politician is critical towards the EU). In only four opening minutes and through peripherally locative, linguistic, and historical references, this crime series pinpoints stereotypical ideas about the French as impolite and self-contained, and the British relationship to what is usually referred to as continental Europe as a somehow connected, yet detached in a self-image different from and superior to Europe. Generally, The Tunnel represents international influences in Brit Noir, the rationale of meaningful location placement, and a stark contrast to the drift towards rural and peripheral places in the region. In presenting the many Kent locations used during the production of the second season of The Tunnel, Kent Film Office—the local film commission that also co-financed the series—highlights that “East Kent is ideally situated with great transport links both to London and Europe. The area boasts a wealth of locations including industrial as well as historic buildings and beautiful coastal landscapes” (Kent Film Office 2018, our emphasis). This quote not only illustrates the historico-industrial location placement that opens the series as strategic, but it also demonstrates how common British tongue may separate the UK from Europe in the

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cognitive mapping of one end of the Dover underwater passage. As pointed out by Saunders (2017, 173), the series—placed on the literal, transnational border between England and France, hence the British Isles and the European mainland—debates “the larger securitisation structures that gird the Continent.” Stressing the morbid, banal pun from the end of the first season (“she comes apart like the Eurozone”), Saunders also draws attention to how representative of contemporary geopolitical disputes the series really is—even more so than the Swedish-Danish original version of the franchise. In addition to this, the opening sequence and episode underline the curious British reluctance towards direct integration into European continental mentalities. As pointed out by Troitiño et al. in their book on Brexit (2018), there is a long historical basis—going back to the Roman Age—for British reluctance to European integration, while the geopolitical imagination of the UK contains an establishment of what Mölder refers to as “the national own and the European other” (Mölder 2018, 163): “The United Kingdom (UK) has traditionally practiced more independent policy and distanced itself from the timely processes of continental Europe” (ibid., 153), stressing the complexities tied to displaying nationalism in a UK territory consisting of four internal nations. Rooted in the Napoleonic Wars, this British independence culture that eventually may have led to Brexit has been referred to as “British exceptionalism,” whereas the region’s topography—separated from mainland Europe—has been described as “splendid isolation” (Crozier 2020). In 2015, leading up to the Brexit referendum, the NatCen social research report Do We Feel European and Does It Matter? concluded that only 15% of people in the UK feel European. “The UK stands out from other European nations”, the report concludes, “as being particularly unlikely to embrace any sense of European identity” (Ormston 2015, 9). The opening sequence of The Tunnel, then, stands as an emblematic condensation of this complex outward cognitive geography of the UK and the British Isles in relation to the rest of Europe. At the same time, the inward cognitive geography of the British Isles is just as complex as UK’s relationship with the EU and the European continent, which is most clearly marked by how the post-Brexit geography of the five countries on the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland) presently contains an internal border between the EU and non-EU countries. Likewise, the history of the British Isles as a geographical region shows complex internal developments, while the global reach of Britain’s kingdom in which the sun once never set as well

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as outsiders’ influence through Roman, Celtic, Viking or Christian heritage provide different ‘takes’ on how to understand the geography of the region. Vested in historical circumstances, Kearney’s book The British Isles offers a “history of four nations”, since Northern Ireland as a country is still—from a historical perspective—fairly young, and hence included in his attention towards Ireland. Controversial as this point may be, Kearney then asks, “But who were ‘the British’?” maintaining, “there is no simple answer to this question” (Kearney 2006, 319). In his political history of the British-European relationship, Crowson asks a similar question: What does ‘Europe’ mean in British usage? At its most basic level it is used interchangeably with ‘continental’ to imply a geographical area across the English Channel that does not include Britain. This sense of European, Euro or continental difference from Britain can be used both positively and negatively, but always ultimately to denote difference. Its complexities and divergences are often emphasised, particularly by those warning of the dangers of trying to constrain Europe into an organisational structure. (Crowson 2011, 1–2)

It is not within the scope of this book to settle disputes over such politico-­geographical questions. Rather, knowing well that there are geographical, political, nationalistic, and cultural differences between different territories within the British Isles (just like any other European region analysed in this book), we departure from the appreciation of geographical proximity as an indicative factor when analysing TV crime series output from the British Isles, while the following sections will show how Brit Noir negotiates and debates the relationship between nations and regions as well as centres and peripheries across the British Isles. Below, we will highlight how regionalisation processes in British TV series production, including crime series, is conceivably the oldest and most enduring European tradition for negotiating geographical relationships between dominant production hubs and peripheral settings. For that reason, it is unmanageable to cover all aspects of the British crime series tradition, but we wish to close the book with a chapter on hinterlands and peripheries in Brit Noir, since British TV drama, in general, is the UK’s “most successful television exports” (McElroy 2017, 18) “with crime/ mystery counting among the most lucrative of finished television exports” (Brewer 2017, 170), while co-productions with British companies are the most distributed series within 12 dominant European countries producing

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television series (Bondebjerg et  al. 2017, 85). Brit Noir is one of main drivers—if not the main driver—of European television crime series both within the region and on the European continent in general. The successful model behind British television series, including a major share of crime narratives, is stressed by the Brit Box collaboration between the BBC and ITV, an SVoD service currently available internationally in the UK, the US, Scandinavia, Finland, Australia, South Africa, and Canada. Firstly, we introduce the notion of Brit Noir as a geographical term, while we trace peripheralisation in Brit Noir to build-in regionalism throughout the entire history of UK broadcasting, which forefronts UK television in relation to the rest of Europe’s subsequent employment of peripheral and regional locations. Secondly, we analyse three representative series—Shetland (BBC 2013-), Blood (Virgin Media Television 2018–2020), and Stay Close (Netflix 2021)—not only to illustrate the use of peripheral locations in crime series from the British Isles, but also to cover the changing production and distribution television landscape: Shetland is somewhat ‘traditional’ in its set-up as a private ITV Studios adaptation for BBC Scotland; Blood is an original commercial television series for Virgin Media in Ireland, later picked for US SVoD distribution through Acorn TV and an Indian remake exposure; Stay Close is a UK Netflix production and part of a larger, international adaptation deal made with the American crime writer Harlan Coben. In this way, these series represent internal exposure of British peripheries, commercial television interests in peripheral crime series, and Netflix’s encompassing interest in supplying global viewers with Brit Noir. Lastly, we conclude by investigating the changing geopolitical imagination of the British Isles through how the territories are exposed in television crime series, and how regionalisation processes are part of ‘keeping the UK together’ at a time when the cognitive geography of the British Isles is changing fast. In his influential pocket guide to Brit Noir, Barry Forshaw (2016) illustriously writes about how he ended up forsaking a mere geographical approach to mapping what he, in the title of the book, refers to as Brit Noir. Brit Noir as a concept has not been scrutinised to such a great length as Nordic Noir or Mediterranean Noir, so it is not easily traceable, but Forshaw’s book bearing the title has nevertheless been hugely influential in spreading the notion. Nevertheless, Brit Noir as a common critical notion predates Forshaw’s book, while the idea of ‘British Noir’ may be traced back to at least the 1980s (Miller 1994, 155)—a notion that has become shortened for the more idiomatic idea of Brit Noir. Although

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‘Brit’ or ‘British’ usually refers to someone or something from the UK, Forshaw makes the same move as Kearney in his subtitle reference to ‘the British Isles’ and by including a chapter on Ireland with a geographical subheading leading the reader to “The North and the Republic” (Forshaw 2016, 127). Forshaw’s approach to the common reader of crime fiction does not involve a set-up in which he would critically assess the geographical assertion implied in such a reference, but it leaves a flank open for critics and academics to accept a broader idea of the meaning of ‘Brit’ in the generic reference to Brit Noir. Although more local references to crime traditions—such as Irish Noir, London Noir, Tartan Noir, or even Celtic Noir—do exist, such spatio-generic notions are all sub-references imbued as deep variations of Brit/British Noir. As a major marker of the geographical breadth of the notion of Brit, the above-mentioned Brit Box service also includes titles from the whole isle region, including Ireland, underscoring the BBC and ITV promoting an inclusive semantic understanding of ‘Brit’. While it may certainly be politically and culturally controversial to refer to Irish traditions as ‘Brit’, the semantics of Brit Noir as a concept in this chapter entails the more neutral geographical implications of the British Isles, that is, the more than 6000 larger or smaller islands between the North Sea and the Atlantic Sea. Today, however, the critical press regularly uses the term Brit Noir descriptively as a reference to crime stories from especially the UK, while it may be used anachronistically to trace the ‘origins’ of Brit Noir like Triplow’s reference to Ted Lewis’ authorship as “the birth of Brit Noir” (Triplow 2018). Surely, spatio-­generic references like the ones offered in this volume are never truly neutral, and one of the most important points is—in both the overall book and in this chapter—that such notions reflect and nudge the cognitive geography in different directions, and that television crime series in the tradition of Brit Noir are also an important part of this ongoing semantic negotiation. Tracing peripheral locations in Brit Noir goes back much further than many other television traditions in Europe, which indicates an indebtedness in other European public service television policies to the history of regionalisation in BBC and UK television traditions. At first, the regionality of broadcasting from the 1920s and onwards was, writes Cooke, technologically “determined mainly by the availability of frequencies and the range of transmitters, rather than by any idea of shared community interests or indigenous regional identities” (Cooke 2012, 19). According to Cooke, the regional identity model mostly developed during the 1950s

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when the BBC started “to produce regional programmes” (ibid. 22), and more predominantly when the ITV network of regional companies was launched in 1955. In relation to 1960s telefilms produced by ITV, Bignell (2010, 62) identifies ITV’s focus on “making space ‘real’ on location” as a “maximisation of spatial resources” (ibid., 56), which is tied directly to new handy technology, making it possible to switch easily between backlot shooting, studio production, and the use of real locations. Stressed in Cooke’s description of “regional broadcasting,” this has mostly within the UK meant production and broadcasting of programmes “outside London”, which clearly highlights how London has been—and still is— the dominant, central production hub from which to be peripheral or regional from (Cooke 2012, 3). Cooke’s and Bignell’s analyses highlight how changes in the British media ecology in the 1950s and 1960s paved the way for intensified attention towards location placement and local representation. A competing term in the critical scrutiny of British television dramas is “local production”, which for McElroy and Noonan (2019, 3–4) marks a contemporary shift towards appreciating “the value of regional and local markers” by both a domestic and an international audience for British television series, that is, an intensified localisation process in British television drama. They distinguish between local production: production taking place locally, but not necessarily representing the locale, for example, Sherlock (BBC 2010–17), and local drama: dramas also set in the locale in which the production takes place, for example, Y Gwyll/Hinterland (S4C/BBC 2013–16). For them, the contemporary market situation, distribution landscape, and attention towards local drama at a time when larger global players attract the most attention show “a paradigmatic shift towards centering the sustainability of local production.” This is a tendency that highlights that the shift towards more local and peripheral locations analysed throughout this book has had a similar impact on Brit Noir television production, but McElroy and Noonan also stress that local production needs stimulation in order to maintain local ecologies and a sustainable sector challenged by “an outward flow of IP and few incentives to make local drama” (ibid., 157). Even so, Chapman highlights the recent shift towards peripheral settings in crime series too: It is significant that the police procedural drama on British television has shifted from the urban settings of Prime Suspects and Cracker in the 1990s to a preference for communities on the geographical peripheries of the

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United Kingdom: West Dorset (Broadchurch), Ceredigon [sic] (Hinterland), the Thames Estuary marshes (Southcliffe) and the Shetland Islands. (Chapman 2020, 142–23)

Piper mentions the BBC adaptations of Henning Mankell’s Swedish Wallander series Wallander (BBC 2008–16), filmed in southern Sweden, and “the remote Northumbrian landscape” in the Vera (ITV, 2011-) as quintessential turning points (Piper 2015, 117). Noonan and Powell note that “[s]uccesful content like Happy Valley (BBC 2014-) and Last Tango in Halifax (BBC 2013-) demonstrate that there is an appetite amongst audiences for content which is specific to a locale and based outside London” (Noonan and Powell 2018, 273). This reallocation of settings is—besides many BBC series set in London like River (BBC, 2015), Unforgotten (BBC, 2015-), Ripper Street (BBC, 2012–16), Collateral (BBC, 2018), Luther (BBC, 2010–18), and Bodyguard (BBC 2018)— also a shift away from the attention towards larger cities in well-known urban series like Taggert (ITV, 1983–2010) in Glasgow, Rebus (ITV, 2000–7) in Edinburgh, Love/Hate (RTÉ 2010–14) in Dublin, or Liverpool 1 (ITV 1998–99) in the Merseyside area. ITV has shown a simultaneous attention towards local production, for example, the long-running series Z Cars (ITV, 1962–78), set in a fictional rural town based on Kirkby near Liverpool, and the highly successful Midsomer Murders (ITV, 1997-) marked by countryside nostalgia, deep England sensibilities, and “rural landscapes” (cf. Bergin 2012)—a tradition owing much to the “Lost Idyll” and pastoralism in classic detective fiction (Bishop 2018). However, what we see in the recent shift in Brit Noir is also a reaction to the Midsomer Murders model with some similarity to the Italian reactions towards the Montalbano model: New attention towards peripheral locations may be viewed in the light of the overall European shift towards local on-location shooting as markers of authenticity (cf. Bondebjerg et  al. 2017, 243; Turnbull 2014, 10–14). At the same time, a significant and rising trend within Brit Noir has focused deeply on a claim to authenticity and true crime, for instance ITV’s loosely associated series of true crime miniseries produced from 2000 until the recent Welsh-based production of The Pembrokeshire Murders (ITV, 2021) (see Table 7.1), a series that also continues the significant interest in producing crime narratives in Wales such as Y Gwyll/Hinterland, Hidden/Craith (S4C 2018-), and Keeping Faith (S4C 2017–21) (cf. McElroy and Noonan 2016; Weissman 2018; Noonan and Powell 2018). As a result, the television drama and crime series

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Table 7.1  ITV’s loosely associated concept series of true crime adaptations implies a format suited for regionalisation as the individual series follows the original, authentic location of the true events. Not all instalments have been produced in peripheral locations, but it still indicates ITV’s policy focus on regional production and peripheral locations Title

Year

Shooting locations

2000

Yorkshire: Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield

2 3

This Is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper Shipman A is for Acid

4

The Brides in the Bath

5 6

See No Evil: The Moors Murders Appropriate Adult

7 8 9 10

Dark Angel In Plain Sight Little Boy Blue Manhunt

1

11 White House Farm 12 Des 13 The Pembrokeshire Murders

2002 2002

Yorkshire: Morley, Leeds Scarborough as substitute location for London 2003 filmed in Yorkshire: Bridlington, Filey, Scarborough to convey Weymouth 2006 Manchester 2011 Manchester as substitute location for Glouchester 2016 Yorkshire: York, Saltburn-by-sea, Hull 2016 Glasgow, Dunlop, Greenock 2017 Liverpool 2019- London (first season), Bristol (second season) 2020 Essex 2020 London 2021 Different locations in Wales, plus studio

tradition from the British Isles shows both a long history of local production and a recent shift towards an accentuation of peripheral locations—a tendency in which crime series’ conspicuous attention towards local environments has been an important go-to-genre for producers.

Shetland and the Hinterland Heritage of Tartan Noir The idea of ‘hinterlands’ was popularised within crime narratives by the English title for the Welsh series Y Gwyll/Hinterland, but it has a long history within geography as a reference to ‘the land behind’ (as the literal meaning of the word) a town/city by the shoreline and has, today, changed its semantics into a territory remote from urban living areas. For Roberts, what he refers to as a locative turn in British police procedurals constitutes “a more contemplative gaze whereby the spectator’s perception is cast

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towards the spaces that constitute what is within and (by negation) what lies beyond the frame” (Roberts 2016, 376). For him, “what might be thought of as the hinterlands of the British procedural drama are those that are not confined by a representational idea of landscape as a space that, of necessity, exists ‘within’ or as a product of a ‘frame’” (ibid., 368). A televised hinterland becomes not just a remote setting represented on the TV screen; it attracts a significant amount of attention and transgresses the aesthetic imagination as a sense of place that reaches beyond the screen as a marker of authentic landscape identities and spatial cultures, features that for Roberts are specifically constitutive for series like Broadchurch (ITV 2013–17) and Southcliffe (Channel 4 2013). In his interview with the location manager of Shetland, the US literary scholar and crime writer Frederick Weisel made a comparative reference to Vera and stressed that when he watches “reruns of that show, I often don’t remember the plot or who the killer is. But I do remember the locations. I remember specific houses or fields” (Weisel 2022). Indicating that something similar happens when he watches Shetland, his sense of a locative ‘takeover’ in contrast to episodic plot significance highlights a similar experience to the one theoretically described by Roberts in his understanding of screened hinterlands in British procedurals. Creeber refers to the “eerie landscape” and “rural scenery” in Shetland as a visual “attempt to expose the hidden worlds of their remote communities” (Creeber 2015, 27), which surely refers to how series like Shetland set in remote areas often thematise the veiled secrets and local riddles of small, isolated, and rural communities—a point also stressed by David Kane, main writer of the series, in BBC’s official media-pack for Shetland: For me, isolated places like Shetland are perfect for a crime story. As a policeman on Shetland said to me, (and I gave the line to Perez) ‘There is nobody coming over the horizon’. They have to deal with a major crime on their own—and if the weather is bad, the cavalry might not turn up. (BBC n.d.-a)

The use of the remote island location goes beyond the mere sense of isolation and tells a very local, yet universal story about the particularities of the Shetland Islands. As highlighted by the series’ producer Elaine Collins: “Shetland will feel quite different from other British drama. The storytelling has its own particular flavour, reflecting the distinctive environment of the Shetland Islands” (BBC n.d.-b). In other words, the

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official branding of the series stresses the unique characteristics of the location placement and signals an interest in embodying both the local colour and an overall hinterland heritage of a setting, a sense of place that appears to precede the screen with an intended impact on the viewer like the one experienced by Weisel, an experience signalling a landscape that achieves what Lefebvre refers to as having an “autonomous” status on the screen. In relation to landscapes on the screen, Lefebvre distinguishes between “two modes of spectatorial activity: a narrative mode and a spectacular mode” (Lefebvre 2006, 29). Forgetting the plot of Vera or Shetland, and claiming place and landscape as something meaningful beyond the screen, surely speaks to a significant rise in the spectacular mode in Brit Noir’s use of peripheral locations. Once again, the autonomy of landscapes and specificity, authenticity, and particularity of place meets a metonymic and universal sense of place that creates a generally recognizable local community and setting. Producer Collins ‘scripts’ the series by way of its authentic and original setting, yet with a distinct Scandinavian sensibility also aesthetically present in the series (cf. Creeber 2015; Agger 2020; Roberts 2016): “Influenced by both mainland Scotland and Scandinavia, but with very much its own identity—Shetland is a location like no other. The uniqueness and sense of place make it an ideal setting for traditional British crime drama with a unique twist” (BBC n.d.-b). Simultaneously, the writer Kane maintains a universal appeal of the show: “In a way, the police station in Shetland could be anywhere. It could be in Cornwall, anywhere in the UK. And I think that’s important. People recognise it […] has a sense of place but it’s not alien to them” (BBC n.d.-a). At the same time, the logic of place in Shetland complexly involves a very localised spatial sensibility and a translocal “somewhere that could be anywhere” visuality (cf. similar points raised in Chaps. 5 and 6)—a strategy that appears to be intended by the creatives, and which may appear understandable from a branding perspective of a series with a wish to travel outside its local territory. Following the local policeman Jimmy Perez, Shetland starts as episodic adaptations of Ann Cleeves’ series of crime novels taking place on the Shetland islands, but from the third season and onward the show switches to “character adaptations” (Hansen and Waade 2017) or “character-based series” (Agger 2020), including a change from a double episode series in the first two seasons to the following season’s serial structure with only one central crime plot per season. As mentioned by Agger, Hansen, and Waade, this follows a general shift towards serial drama in the wake of the

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spread of streaming and new binge-watching cultures fitting well with the longer serial narrative arches. However, Shetland is—as it still runs—somewhat traditional in its setup with ITV Studios producing the series for BBC Scotland, while today the drama has been widely available in many European countries in addition to Australia, New Zealand, and the US, now predominantly through the Brit Box streaming service. In this way, Shetland represents traditional British public service drama and contemporary public service obligations to cater local and regional audiences, speaking directly into the BBC’s constitutional basis in the Royal Charter (2017–27) where the institution is required to “reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom” (BBC 2016, 5). According to Cooke (2012), local and regional obligations, as opposed to the London dominance, arrived late in the history of British TV broadcasting and more like a reaction to the popularity of ITV’s local presence rather than an accurate interest in regional production. As noted by McElroy and Noonan, “the BBC’s commitment to the regions and nations is driven more by a public service agenda” (i.e. policy making rather than own interests), which “signifies the BBC’s historical view of itself as normatively London-based” (McElroy and Noonan 2019, 74). Produced by ITV Studios for BBC Scotland and broadcast simultaneously on BBC One, Shetland is implied in a drift towards the peripheries of the British Isles, while McElroy and Noonan rather place the series as one of many series with a conspicuous location placement strategy used as “a tangible resource to help put their place ‘on the map’, predominantly for tourists” (ibid. 133). In this way, Shetland also represents the charter’s obligation for the BBC to “reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world” (BBC 2016, 6), an obligation also present in a different guise in the former charter (2007–17) (BBC 2006, 2–3). Shetland fits this local-to-global model very well in the above-mentioned location strategy, which reflects an intention from the creatives to go local in its representation of Shetland (although much was produced around Glasgow) and Kane’s aim towards a representative sense of place that could be not only “anywhere in the UK”, but perhaps gaining access to a translocal visual style that would transgress the British Isles and attract interest outside the British region itself. Specifically for this reason, Spicer refers to public service institutions as placemakers with certain locative obligations tied to the media policy and the media ecology established on the back of such obligations (Spicer 2021). We would go as far as claiming that

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Shetland is an imbued part of creative placemaking with its ties to public service values as well as tie-in tourist activities clearly furthering the sense of place produced by the series for both a local, a national, and an international audience at once. In this way, Shetland’s time of production (2013-) crosses two charters where the local and international obligations are intensified, a period which sees the rise of streaming service maybe probing a change towards a serial structure (already instigated by “quality TV” usually associated with HBO), and an overall increased interest in producing series with a peripheral sense of place. The procedural structure of the crime drama is a normal go-to genre that flexibly fits and adapts to the shifting trends on the market, including a translocal conceptual style directly influenced by contemporary Nordic Noir but with a direct local sensibility. There are various spatio-generic references that lend themselves to Shetland and similar series taking place in Scotland, Ireland, or Wales, many of which would be threshold regions as they transgress and cross into other references like Brit Noir (cf. Chap. 6). Surely, the most local expression is Shetland Noir, which has become popularised by the local crime fiction festival in Lerwick, the capital of the Shetlands. In addition, Celtic Noir has become a popular press reference; as spotted by the journalist Malvern in The Times: “The latest batch of inquisitors with flawed private lives are equipped not with Scandinavian snow-boots and knitwear but waterproofs to repel the rain of Wales, Scotland and Ireland” (Malvern 2014), which by reference creates a threshold region across the UK and Ireland. While ‘Celtic’ refers to the ancestry from Celtic tribes and cultures around Europe, conflict with the Roman empire made the Celts retreat to the British Isles, explaining contemporary references to ‘Celtic’ as being mostly from the British Isles, although the Celtic language family is still alive in Brittany in France. Another known spatio-generic press reference is Gaelic Noir, which at root picks up the Celtic language family Gaelic as a reference to series often from Ireland or Scotland, like the Galway-based Jack Taylor (TV3 2-10-16) based on Ken Bruen’s novels (Kincaid 2010). Born as a locative description of Ian Rankin’s crime novels, Tartan Noir is a third, competing term, which specifically refers to the tartan knitwear often used for Scottish kilts, and—according to Sienkiewicz-­ Charlish—is one among many terms that switch from references to “outstanding sleuthing abilities” like the hardboiled detective story or the police procedural to “such issues as cultural background and national identity” (Sienkiewicz-Charlish 2014, 65) and specific “Scottish issues” (ibid. 78).

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All three references hold powerful politico-semantic connotations regarding identity construction and spatial community building, which is also a reflection of a way to manage or connote difference from other regional constructions like ‘British’ or spatio-generic references like Brit Noir. However, Shetland also holds an interesting stylistic and geographical influence from Nordic Noir, which was directly intended by the creatives. The series location manager Tim Maskell makes this double reference in the above-mentioned interview with Weisel: “The show is a kind of Scandinavian noir genre. The landscape and the locations really lend themselves to that,” he says, which also points forward towards the use of Norwegian locations in season 4 of the series. “If you’d written the same show, and it was just filmed in Glasgow,” he continues, “it wouldn’t have nearly the same appeal” (Weisel 2022). The Nordic influence and location similarities with recent Nordic Noir titles may be stressed by comparing the title screens of Shetland and the Faeroese series Trom (Viaplay 2022-), two series taking place on island regions far from British and Nordic mainland areas, placing Shetland geographically almost just as close to the Nordic as to Scotland (Image 7.2). Whether referenced as Tartan, Celtic or Shetland Noir, or judged by its influence from Nordic Noir, Shetland is a suitable example of the conceptual complexity in titles labelled under the common brand Brit Noir, of the placemaking activities emanating from BBC’s attention towards British peripheries in crime series, and of strategic location placement activities among creatives and producers of Brit Noir.

Image 7.2  The geographical proximity between the Shetland Isles and the Faeroe Isles is conspicuously present in similar title screens for the series, stressing a comparative island topography, but also signalling the translocal stylistic features of both crime series

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Blood and Family Noir from the Irish Periphery While Shetland displays a local spectacular landscape scenery, the Irish series Blood narrates a crime story from the much narrower perspective of the family and the home. The series shares a number of traits with the chamber play, but it is no less locative in the series’ spatial traits. Attention towards the family is nothing new within popular European crime narratives and owes much to recent US “quality television” series like The Sopranos (HBO 1990–2007), The Americans (FX 2013–18), The Affair (Showtime 2014–19) or Bloodline (Netflix 2015–17) (Canfield 2015, Højer 2015). The quintessential Nordic Noir series Forbrydelsen (The Killing, DR 2007–12) has, as a very dominant plotline, the grief and coping situation within the family after the loss of their daughter, while the British series Broadchurch—very much influenced by The Killing—also tells a family story about coping with sorrow after a murdered child. Based on Canfield’s introduction of the term family noir, Hochscherf and Philipsen read the staging of the Danish series Arvingerne (The Legacy, DR 2014–17) as “a world of dysfunctional social relations, lies, secrets and tragedies […], divorced families, adopted children, affairs, neglect, biological and non-biological sisters and brothers fighting for power and money” (Hochscherf and Philipsen 2017, 176). Whereas The Legacy is not a noir story as such (it has no crime or murder mystery), it was usurped in the spread of Nordic Noir in the wake of The Killing and distributed by the British film and television distributor Arrow Films as a “Nordic Noir Classic,” but the description of family noir still fits the storylines of the above-mentioned series and many more very well, including the Spanish series O sabor das margaridas (Bitter Daisies, Televisión de Galicia 2018–20), the Norwegian series Outlier (HBO 2020) or the Luxembourgian Capitani (RTL Télé Lëtzebuerg 2019–2022), all analysed elsewhere in this book. In an interview for the US entertainment magazine Assignment X, Sophie Petzal, the creator of Blood, highlighted how the very local family story in the series has both a certain Irishness to it as well as a universal appeal: There’s [something] about family secrets, and about how families deal with stuff, don’t really unpack it, don’t really discuss it, and how it toxifies and expands and can turn family members against one another, and how it all leads to three children within the same household, who grew up with the same parents, two of those kids have a fundamentally different view on a

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parent than the other child. I think there is something really universal about that, even though [in Blood], it’s created this unique and bizarre family dynamic. There is a real Irishness to it, but at the same time, I feel like anyone can watch it, and go, “Oh, my God, that reminds me of my cousin Barry.” (Bernstein 2020)

Petzal’s remark is significantly representative of creatives’ constant insistence on both local and universal appeal of a story, but her description of her inspiration for the plot also discloses an idea about family noir comparable to the one mentioned above. As a result of the focus on the family, the home territories become the spatial focal point with “socially matched representations of characters and homes” and three different potential functions, including (1) a place for contemplation, (2) a crime scene, and (3) a social image (Hansen and Waade 2017, 65). In many family noirs, all three functions work together in the chamber play around spaces of guilt, memory, and secrecy. In his history of the British procedural, Lamb notices that the home generally plays an important role in British police series: “A police officer’s, or detective’s, domestic space must strike a balance between the sense of order featured in the police station with the socio-­ economic pressures occurring in the other civilian homes within their community”, prompting attention towards “economic anxiety and social pressures” suffered by families (Lamb 2020, 8). As a homecoming narrative about Cat returning after the death of her mother, the series implies all three functions of the home in a chamber play that, as Cat suspects her father of murdering her mother, gradually unfolds and uproots unprocessed family issues such as homosexuality, violence, illness, secrets, and financial problems. Rather than locative titles like Shetland, Broadchurch and Southcliffe, or character-based titles like Jack Taylor, Vera and Taggert, titles within this trend signals attention towards family names in series like The Sopranos, blood-ties in Blood and Bloodline, or the hidden secrets in the Northern Irish series The Secret (ITV 2016) or Craith/Hidden. Just like the series in general, the title sequence includes overall symbolic references and no specification of locale, although the different sequences for the two seasons stress the rural setting of the series, including green fields and river landscapes. The small Irish town Kilcock was used as the setting for the series’ fictional town, including country scenery and nineteenth century architecture. Petzal reveals the location as both an urban proximity and a suggestive landscape: “You’re very close to Dublin. But the landscape is so

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different […]. The Midlands has this frontier town element. It’s very evocative” (Power 2018). With a production background in Midsomer Murders, producer Jonathan Fisher refers to the financial set-up of the series in its local-to-global strategy: “The project is co-financed. [The backers] saw the international appeal,” he says at first, but maintains that “[i]t’s a bit like Happy Valley, which feels very Yorkshire—it wouldn’t be quite the same anywhere else […] Hopefully this is the same—in that it feels very unique and specific” (ibid.). In other words, Petzal and Fisher both argue for a series with composite local, national, and international appeal and intention, which may be reflected in the title sequence’s attention towards general and symbolic references to the home of the family (and the crime scene), the farm as a rural setting for the second season, decay and, most importantly, the images of what appears to be a young girl’s memory of her past in the house. While the title sequence includes some symbolically locative means, some of which appear related to the crime plot only after watching the series, it promises more about revisiting a troubled past in a claustrophobic house in which memories of guilt, differences, and conflicts are reflected in the series’ many scenes taking place in or shot through doorways and threshold points in the house. The cinematography, darkened colour-grading, and psychologically representative production design stage the home as a place with reminiscences of the past and secrets that are merely waiting to be uncovered. Blood was produced for the Irish channel Virgin Media One in collaboration with the UK Channel 5, which may not appear as the most obvious place for broadcasting a series with major international ambitions, something also commented on by creator Petzal: “It was a tiny show that had broadcast on a channel in Ireland, and Channel 5 wasn’t know [sic] for its drama at all,” she says. “It could have just flown under the radar entirely and that wouldn’t have been surprising, so to not only do really well figures-­wise but the positive reaction felt like a really pleasant surprise” (Potts 2020). As the series produced for a smaller Irish channel and a UK channel with mostly drama experience from broadcasting US canned productions like the franchises CSI and Law & Order, Blood represents a shift in market attention not only towards TV series as a portfolio must-have, but also commercial television on the British Isles with an interest in producing crime series in less represented areas, including series like the Dundee-based series Jack Taylor, the rural homecoming narrative Smalltown (TV3 2016), and the crime series Traces (Alibi 2019-).

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In an interview published by Acorn TV, Blood’s US streaming service, producer Jonathan Fisher, emphasised the locative strategy behind the series in opposition to most Irish series set in Dublin: Blood was shot in several locations across County Meath and County Kildare, in the countryside west of Dublin. Capturing an authentic, small-town Irish feel was hugely important in helping to create a suspenseful and atmospheric tone for the series. We wanted this world where the characters live to have a kind of “frontier” feel to it. (Acorn TV n.d)

While the series presents an intentionally established countryside tone (complete with plenty of drone shots in almost any mobility scenes), Fisher maintains that the house and family setting is of utmost importance to the concept of the series: Yes, the house is central—the setting for pivotal family scenes in Blood as well as for the action that takes place around the garden pond. The house is located in a place called Larchill Arcadian Gardens in County Meath. It was scouted for us by our excellent locations manager, who worked hard to find a place that would fit with the ominous tone and the look we wanted for the series. (ibid.)

For its American streaming service, Blood is here presented to the audience as something atmospherically authentic with a special tie to something originally Irish, but once again Fisher maintains the international intentions and strategic appeal of the series: When writing Blood, Sophie was at pains to capture Ireland in vivid, authentic detail—through its scenery, small-town atmosphere, family values, and community warmth. However, we always wanted the series to appeal to as wide an international audience as possible. I think we succeeded. I believe its themes feel universal, and the story is one that audiences around the world can relate to. (ibid.)

It is not within the scope of this book to evaluate whether Blood really communicates something authentically Irish to the viewer; rather, it is the point here that a combination of a distinctly Irish sensibility in the series’ sense of place is conveyed alongside an outspoken interest in branding the series as appealing to viewers unable to recognise the quintessentially local environment exhibited in the series. In combining the local ­ family/

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community perspective with an appeal to a wider audience, the family noir configuration in Blood can be read as part of an overall trend towards serial storytelling about community in British and Irish television series. As noted by Lusin and Haekel, “contemporary television series tend to approach community through what it is lacking. […] In practically all cases […] community appears fragile at best,” they write while underlining that “[i]ndividual, local phenomena become emblematic of the state of the nation or ‘Condition of England’ as a whole” (Lusin and Haekel 2019, 12). Piper refers to this as “a strategy by which the local is made metonymic of the national,” or more precisely a way to have the “home” represent something grander than the isolated chamber play taking place in the house (Piper 2016, 180), which means that the very local perspective on family ties and community may make up what Lusin and Haekel refer to as “sociological observation” through readings of TV series taking place in homes and local communities (cf. Frank 2019; Haekel 2019). Placing drama in rural settings, notes Lusin in what she refers to as the subversion of nostalgia, “brutally undercut the nostalgic conception of Englishness associated with the rural scenery” (Lusin 2019, 175), which may be broadened to include much Brit Noir with focus on community, family, and the home as a place of painful memories rather than nostalgic longing. It is, after all, a significantly fitting description of Cat’s, and later others’, experience of the home in Blood. If it represents something distinctly Irish, it also breaks it open as a conflicted world where dysfunctional families may metonymically represent dysfunctional societies and the lack of cohesion on a much broader level.

Stay Close and Challenging Northern English Marginality In the title sequence for the British Netflix series Stay Close, the sense of a dysfunctional home is remarkably present through symbolic images of regular home objects exploding, including a picket fence, a front door, teacups, piano keys, photography on a wall, and a doorframe with the heights of children growing up. As a threshold text, the sequence ques the viewer towards family drama and a story about secrets breaking up the internal bonds tying together a nuclear family. The tile image for the series in the streaming service interface maintains the image of the main character Megan behind broken glass making her face appear in two guises,

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which points towards how the series slowly uncovers her past as a pole dancer, a past she has kept as a secret from her husband after having distanced herself from the environment when she found herself tied to a potential murder case. When the viewer enters the series, Megan lives a quiet suburban life with a caring husband and children with usual preteen or teen issues, stressing how the exploding household in the title sequence in all its banality represents how Megan’s life is about to blow up. Complete with a femme fatale and a wise-cracking police detective (portrayed through James Nesbitt’s Northern Irish accent), Stay Close narrates a suburban noir police procedural with a speculative murder plot rooted in Megan’s backstory and a style and narrative borrowing more from a global, spectacular serial killer topos than the authentic traits uncovered in many other crime series analysed in this book. While the title sequence is essentially local in its focus on the house, the scope of the series stays within Netflix’s ambition to cater a British crime audience with a series that simultaneously supplies a global audience with a recognisable plotline. Already the conceptual setup of the production signals a significantly international reach embedded in the local, yet global ambitions of the series. The series was commissioned by Netflix from the independent UK production company Red Production Company as part of a larger deal with the US crime writer Harlan Coben to produce 14 adaptations of novels with Coben as producer on each production (Ramachandran 2021), to be made available through the Netflix service as Netflix Originals. So far, Coben’s Netflix deal has spawned the three UK series Safe (2018), The Stranger (2020), and Stay Close, all filmed in and around the Merseyside area, the two Polish series W głębi lasu (The Woods 2021) and Zachowaj spokój (Hold Tight 2022), the Spanish series El inocente (The Innocent 2020), and the French series Disparu à jamais (Gone for Good 2021). While Coben’s novels are located in the US, the European adaptations are produced in territories identified as strategic areas for Netflix, epitomised by dominant regional Netflix offices in London, Madrid, Warsaw, and Paris, which signals an interest in adapting and localising a popular US crime writer in Europe. All three UK productions were produced by Red Production Company with the screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst as the main writer. According to him, his position in the production may be the reason why the three Netflix series based on Coben’s novel became mostly Merseyside and Manchester-based series: “I set everything here until I’m told not to. […] for me, unless there’s a good reason not to, my stories will always be based here. I know the area

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and I love it here” (Scullard 2019). In a podcast interview made by the production company with both Coben and Brocklehurst, Brocklehurst addresses the collaborative deal with Netflix, indicating a specific UK deal for the three series set in Northern England, but maintaining the attraction for Netflix as generic rather than locative: There is sort of a nice connection between Harlan’s books and what Netflix is doing, because I think that your [addressing Coben, ed.] books are almost like: what Netflix is doing for television Harlan’s already doing. The twists, the hooks to keep you reading, you know that kind of pacy thing, but also very character-full. And I think that chimes with Netflix. I think they appreciate the fact that what they want in television is to keep going and keep going like that and to enjoy the ride. And the books do that really well. (Red Production Company 2020)

As a partnership focussing much more on generic traits and narrative pace, the series producer Nicola Schindler stressed how “we’re not doing the North of England, we’re doing ‘Somewhere in the UK’. We think it works better to make it more generic” (Davies 2021). Here, we once again come across the somewhere that could be anywhere argument regarding the locative choices from a producer’s perspective, but the location placement does stay remarkably local based on Brocklehurst’s interest in producing in North-Western England, which altogether stays within global streaming services’ awareness towards both local and global traits; embracing a bestselling US author in a conceptual outline for 14 (until now only European) series also places this discussion within one that has to do with the global reach of both the crime novel and the Netflix service. There is an interest in locative means in series produced for Netflix, but it appears remarkably different from how the above-mentioned series for the BBC and Virgin Media was intentionally more authentically located. In communication about Stay Close or other European Coben adaptations, the authenticity claim is conspicuous by its absence. Set in the fictional suburban small-town community Livingstone, the location placement of Stay Close had a chance to choose locations in a broader North-West England area, including the Pleasure Beach in Blackpool, the recognisable Silver Jubilee Bridge across the River Mersey, and the Dream sculpture close to St. Helens among many others. Although the series is locatively quilted together by many North-Western locations, the easily identifiable Blackpool Pleasure Beach and Blackpool Pier area

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and the Dream sculpture stand out as the most used real landmark locations for the series, all three locations that should also be regarded as having prototypical tourist appeal. By using Blackpool and similar places in the North-West as noticeable locations for the series, Stay Close writes itself into a complex history of marginality in England, including Blackpool as ‘a Northern town’ and a discourse that revolves around working-class culture and the peripheral distance to London. According to Mazierska, Blackpool in popular culture works as “a counterpoint to southern English culture,” while Northern England becomes a popular home of traditional English cultures relating to mining, fish and chips, football, and regional accents (Mazierska 2020, 2–8). As one of the places most impacted by economic problems, Blackpool also becomes emblematic of “lost imperial glory,” or as noted by Mazierska: “Even if Blackpool still holds on to its reputation as Britain’s Las Vegas, various socio-economic indicators cast the town in an unenviable light” (ibid. 5). Even if that is the case, Urry sited the Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach—in his work on the tourist gaze—as the most popular English destination (Urry 2002, 6), but, according to figures from the Blackpool Council, 94% of tourists in Blackpool are domestic tourists rather than international tourists (Blackpool Council 2018). In other words, the Pleasure Beach and the Blackpool Pier are manifest British seaside resort areas with massive tourist appeal, but as it is less known to tourists outside the UK, it becomes a representation that would most ideally attract attention from British viewers. This indicates Stay Close as a series that, for Netflix, is guided towards marketing Netflix for British viewers first, while maintaining an opportunity to also imply a more international (or US) model reader through the known bestselling Coben books. For Stay Close, the choice of location peaks into a very complex relationship between North English seaside and socio-economic peripherality, tourist branding interests, and international exposure. At the same time, the tourist gaze embedded in the series is remarkably detached from the above debates about British socio-economic marginality, which is most obviously stressed by how the series style is, in comparison with other intentionally ‘authentic’ series, more glossy, brightly coloured, and ‘polished’ in the way that specific locations constantly reappear throughout all episodes. Viewed through soft-gliding drone imagery, the viewer repeatedly hovers above cars passing the Silver Jubilee Bridge, the large white Dream sculpture, or gently soars across the Pleasure Beach, while camera angles often carefully integrate Morecambe Bay as a dramatic or contemplative backdrop. By way of such imagery, the series

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comes comparatively closer to Urry’s tourist gaze, also developed by Urry and Larsen in their analysis of English seaside resorts, including Blackpool and Morecambe: The resorts offered some remarkable contrasts as the collective tourist gaze took improbable root in these places by the sea. These places came then to be re-made and re-seen as places of visual enticement, places ‘on the margin’ but increasingly central to the growing ‘economy of signs’ of an industrial economy. (Urry and Larsen 2011, 48)

In production, the tourist perspective is hesitantly touched upon by the producer Shindler, who rather relates the attraction of the North England area to finding countryside locations close to urban areas: “It’s not a tourist film but there are so many different locations. The fact that you can be in the city centre and then out in the countryside the same day to shoot is really exceptional to probably most cities outside of London” (Davies 2021). Referring to Daniel O’Hara, director of all three UK Coben series, she specifically refers to the splendour of Blackpool: “We got excited by the faded grandeur of Blackpool when Daniel O’Hara went there and said he could make it really beautiful and really strong,” said Shindler, and continues: In the book it was Atlantic City, New Jersey, so we looked for a place in the UK that was sort of close to giving us those things and I think Blackpool does […] Having that as our Atlantic City is great because there are ways of looking at Blackpool, which has only ever been filmed from the grotty side, that I don’t think have been seen onscreen. (ibid.)

The location manager, Mark O’Hanlon, stresses similar aspects of the location placement regarding Blackpool: “It’s got the seedier side, the rundown side. And yet there is a fun energy and a colour there. Life is lived there. […] The wide, wooden piers in Blackpool do feel very American in an Atlantic City way so that was brilliant” (ibid.) (see Image 7.3). The seedier, grittier side of Blackpool finds less screen time in Stay Close that focuses much more on the colourful side of the city. In her work on the popular cultural treatment of Blackpool, Mazierska describes two discourses attached to Blackpool as a location, which includes the above-mentioned view on North England as socio-­ economically depraved, and as a seaside urban area, meaning that for her

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Image 7.3  Originally, Coben placed the setting of Stay Close in Atlantic City, but the Netflix adaptation of the story is partly located in Blackpool, including the city’s main tourist attraction Pleasure Beach (the above image from Stay Close). Not only is this a locative choice that holds a range of evident visual similarities between the two locations; the choice of location also gives Stay Close a locative and generic textuality that embraces an influence from the US crime series Boardwalk Empire (HBO 2010–14) that re-established the Atlantic City pier are through VFX (the below image from Boardwalk Empire)

“Blackpool is condemned to one of two scenarios: negative representations, in the vein of ‘dark tourism’ or silence” (Mazierska 2020, 10). The careful tourist gaze portraying North-West territories north of the River Mersey by way of a mere visual appeal of the locations appears to fit neither of these negative and stereotypical discourses. Rather, Brocklehurst’s

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genuine interest in the area in combination with an interest from the producers—and most certainly also Netflix—to establish a view on Northern England as an attractive, scenic, and less gloomy location makes the difference. The gaze on Northern England is obviously very much rooted in glossy tourist location and landscape imagery, but perhaps—by way of a US-based global streaming service, making the series available in almost 200 countries—series like Safe, The Stranger and Stay Close may uproot or at least challenge the negative image of the North England territory. Surely, the less socio-economically problematic perspective on Northern England must be viewed in light of the creatives’ interest in a heavily plotted and generic series too, but in this way, crime narratives such as these may also be a popular cultural counternarrative to the usual portrayal of Northern England as a setting with socio-economic problems. As such, Netflix’s engagement with a British production company like Red Production Company also represents a shift from the British broadcasters’ orientation: Broadcasters think and produce locally, and then distribute globally (through Brit Box, for instance), but, in contrast to this, Netflix thinks and commissions globally, while they navigate locally in order to find collaboration and local anchorage.

Crime Series and Keeping the UK Together The different traditions for television crime series from the British Isles are huge, and much more could reasonably be and must be said about its different guises and styles. This chapter has merely scratched the surface of the many notable crime series appearing from broadcasters and streaming services on the British Isles, but in this way, we have attempted to peel off the first layer of debates within Brit Noir television series that negotiate the geographical imagination of the British Isles from both within and beyond. Rooted far back in local place policies in public service broadcasting and with different contemporary commercial iterations, we have highlighted how local tension, images of peripheries and the margins, and televisual placemaking activities are long-standing but fluid expressions of a much wider discursive process. While the interest in the margins of the British Isles goes back far, a recent change has been noted by researchers of British television series, that is, a switch towards a more locative and meaningful interest in rural and peripheral locations and, for some tendencies, a drift towards what is intended to be authentic senses of place.

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It is most certainly the case that the notion of Brit or Britain involves several substantial cultural, political, and geographical connotations, including what it means to be ‘British’ both as a territory and as a human being. Even if that is the case, we have also seen here that the semantics of ‘Brit’ may connote different geographical areas, including Ireland in Forshaw’s idea of Brit Noir. This does not fit in with all political or geographical demarcation lines set up in long-running wars, clashes, disputes, and deep tensions, and especially not in contemporary debates regarding UK integration (or lack thereof) in the policies of the European Union or even in the continental reference to Europe. In comparison with many other European television series traditions, the longer history of local production in the UK and on the British Isles must be viewed in the light of power within the UK and maybe even beyond, or what McElroy and Noonan refer to as “the complex mix of local and global forces at play in the television market” (McElroy and Noonan 2019, 155). Firstly, what Cooke names “the increasingly centralised and globally oriented national broadcasters” may find it hard to cater to audiences from the local to the global, while independent production companies—Cooke mentions Red Production Company as one significant example—“are often better positioned to produce regional drama” (Cooke 2012, 187), which explains the closer collaboration between broadcasters and independent production companies in all three above cases and several other Brit Noir series. Secondly, the historical drift towards the peripheries today also includes non-British commercial exploitation as seen through the Netflix example, which not only changes the way that marginal areas are treated in its scenogeographical approach, but it also shows how local television, including public service, is threatened by global services with a quick and wide reach across the globe—and with an interest in ‘tapping into’ successful brands such as Brit Noir. Thirdly, both the present fluidity of the geographical imagination surrounding the British Isles and the contemporary threat from and entrepreneurial opportunities in collaborating with global services like Netflix signal how the cultural value of television series, including crime series, should be read as implicated in a complex fight to ‘keep the UK together’. Internally, broadcasters seek local environments through visual representation and local production because popular culture remains a powerful voice in the public debate; this may perhaps not be a literal influence on specific debates, but series’ locative means become part of steady attention towards local milieus, regions, and nations within the UK.  Externally, Brit Noir (or British television drama in general) is a

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global brand widely distributed as part of a global popular cultural landscape in which English, as a popular lingua franca, works as an engine for wider appreciation. Similar to how Nordic Noir has worked as a common transnational reference to the whole Nordic region, the notion of Brit Noir works as a way to merge differences within “the history of four nations” (Kearney 2006) and into a common reference that, in geographical references like Brit Noir or Brit Box, includes the whole of the British Isles or even what Forshaw dubs “a world elsewhere,” indicating that Brit Nor may even take place at locations outside the British Isles. In other words, if the British Isles cannot be geographically European, other locations outside the isles may be regarded as British.

References1 Agger, Gunhild. 2020. Realistic and Mythological Appropriations of Nordic Noir: The Cases of Shetland and Ø. In Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation, ed. Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen, and Jaakko Seppälä, 17–36. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. BBC. 2006. Broadcasting: Copy of Royal Charter for the Continuance of the British Broadcasting Corporation. http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/ assets/files/pdf/about/how_we_govern/charter.pdf. ———. 2016. Charter and Agreement. https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/ governance/charter. ———. n.d.-a. Interview with Ann Cleeves and David Kane. https://www.bbc. co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/shetland/writers/. ———. n.d.-b. Shetland. https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/ shetland/. Bernstein, Abbie. 2020. Blood: Creator Sophie Petzal and EP Jonathan Fisher on Season 2—Exclusive Interview. Assignment X. https://www.assignmentx. com/2020/blood-­creator-­sophie-­petzal-­and-­ep-­jonathan-­fisher-­on-­season-­ 2-­exclusive-­interview/. Bignell, Jonathan. 2010. Transatlantic Spaces. Production, Location and Style in 1960s-1970s Action-Adventure TV Series. Media History 16 (1): 53–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688800903395460. Bishop, Nicola. 2018. Rural Nostalgia: Revisiting the Lost Idyll in British Library Crime Classics Detective Fiction. Green Letters—Studies in Ecocriticism 22 (1): 31–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2018.1431141.

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Blackpool Council. 2018. Tourist Performance Update. https://democracy. blackpool.gov.uk/documents/s36486/ITEM%2010%20-­%20Tourism%20 Scrutiny%20Report%20-­%20June%202018.pdf. Bondebjerg, Ib, et al. 2017. Transnational European Television Drama: Production, Genres and Audiences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brewer, Mary F. 2017. Exporting Englishness: ITV’s Poirot. In Contemporary British Television Crime Drama: Cops on the Box, ed. Ruth McElroy, 169–183. London and New York: Routledge. Canfield, David. 2015. The Family Noir: Introducing TV’s Newest Trend. IndieWire. https://www.indiewire.com/2015/04/the-­family-­noir-­introducing-­ tvs-­newest-­trend-­63472/. Chapman, James. 2020. Contemporary British Television Drama. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Cooke, Lez. 2012. A Sense of Place: Regional British Television Drama, 1956-82. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Creeber, Glen. 2015. Killing Us Softly: Investigating the Aesthetics, Philosophy and Influence of Nordic Noir Television. Journal of Popular Television 3 (1): 21–35. https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv.3.1.21_1. Crowson, Nicholas J. 2011. Britain and Europe: A Political History Since 1918. London and New York: Routledge. Crozier, Andrew J. 2020. British Exceptionalism: Pride and Prejudice and Brexit. International Economics and Economic Policy 17: 635–658. https://link. springer.com/article/10.1007/s10368-­020-­00469-­z. Davies, Alan. 2021. 10 Filming Locations of New Netflix Series Stay Close. The Herts Advertiser. https://www.hertsad.co.uk/news/21727386.10-­filming-­ locations-­new-­netflix-­series-­stay-­close. Forshaw, Barry. 2016. Brit Noir. The Pocket Essential Guide to the Crime Fiction, Film & TV of the British Isles. Herts: Pocket Essentials. Frank, Kerstin. 2019. “If We Are Not a Community of Neighbours, Then We Are Nothing”: Small-Twon Moralities, Social Change, and Social Cohesion in Broadchurch (2013-2017). In Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century, ed. Caroline Lusin and Ralf Haekel, 9–23. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH. Haekel, Ralf. 2019. Families in Gangland: Dysfunctional Community in Love/ Hate (2010-2014). In Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century, ed. Caroline Lusin and Ralf Haekel, 9–23. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH. Hansen, Kim Toft, and Anne Marit Waade. 2017. Locating Nordic Noir. From Beck to The Bridge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hochscherf, Tobias, and Heidi Philipsen. 2017. Beyond the Bridge: Contemporary Danish Television Drama. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

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Højer, Henrik. 2015. Family Noir. 16:9. http://www.16-­9.dk/2015/06/ family-­noir/. Kearney, Hugh. 2006. The British Isles: A History of Four Nations. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kent Film Office. 2018. The Tunnel: Sabotage (2016). https://kentfilmoffice. co.uk/filmed-­in-­kent/2016/03/the-­tunnel-­sabotage-­2016/. Kincaid, Andrew. 2010. “Down These Mean Streets”: The City and Critique in Contemporary Irish Noir. Éire-Ireland 45 (1): 39–55. https://doi. org/10.1353/eir.2010.0005. Lamb, Ben. 2020. You’re Nicked: Investigating British Television Police Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lefebvre, Martin. 2006. Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema. In Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre, 19–59. New  York and London: Routledge. Lusin, Caroline, and Ralf Haekel. 2019. “This is England”: Community, the State of the Nation, and Seriality in Contemporary British and Irish Television Series. In Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century, ed. Caroline Lusin and Ralf Haekel, 9–23. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH. Lusin, Caroline. 2019. Drugs, Sheep, and Broken Lives: Dysfunctional Families, Violence, and the Subversion of Nostalgia in Happy Valley (2014-). In Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation: British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century, ed. Caroline Lusin and Ralf Haekel, 9–23. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH. Malvern, Jack. 2014. How Celtic Noir Is Set To Make a Killing. The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/how-­c eltic-­n oir-­i s-­s et-­t o-­m ake-­a -­ killing-­vvbngfd27q0. Mazierska, Ewa. 2020. Introduction: The Changing Fortunes of Blackpool. In Blackpool in Film and Popular Music, ed. Ewa Mazierska, 1–26. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McElroy, Ruth. 2017. Introduction. In Contemporary British Television Crime Drama: Cops on the Box, ed. Ruth McElroy, 1–24. London and New  York: Routledge. McElroy, Ruth, and Caitriona Noonan. 2016. Television Drama Production in Small Nations: Mobilities in a Changing Ecology. Journal of Popular Television 4 (1): 109–127. https://doi.org/10.1386/jptv.4.1.109_1. ———. 2019. Producing British Television Drama: Local Production in a Global Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Miller, Laurence. 1994. Evidence for a British Film Noir Cycle. In Re-Viewing British Cinema, 1900-1992: Essays and Interviews, ed. Wheeler W.  Dixon, 155–164. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Mölder, Holger. 2018. British Approach to the European Union: From Tony Blair to David Cameron. In Brexit: History, Reasoning and Perspectives, ed. David Ramiro Troitiño, Tanel Kerikmäe, and Archil Chochia, 153–173. Cham: Springer. Noonan, Caitriona, and Sian Powell. 2018. Public Service Television in Wales. In A Future For Public Service Television, ed. Des Freedman and Vana Goblot, 272–274. London: Goldsmiths Press. Ormston, Rachel. 2015. Do We Feel European and Does it Matter? NatCen Social Reseach. London: ESRC. Piper, Helen. 2015. The TV Detective: Voices of Dissent in Contemporary Television. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2016. Broadcast Drama and the Problem of Television Aesthetics: Home, Nation, Universe. Screen 57 (2): 163–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1527476418777838. Potts, Michael. 2020. Blood Writer Teases Series Two with Adrian Dunbar "caught in a s**t Storm. RadioTimes.com. https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/ blood-­series-­2-­sophie-­petzal/. Power, Ed. 2018. There Will Be Blood: New Thriller Hopes To Put Small-Town Ireland on the International Stage. Irish Examiner. https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/arid-­30873622.html. Ramachandran, Naman. 2021. Eddie Izzard, Jo Joyner, Andi Osho Join Cast of Harlan Coben Netflix Drama Stay Close. Variety. https://variety.com/2021/ streaming/global/eddie-­izzard-­andi-­osho-­harlan-­coben-­netflix-­stay-­close-­ 1234899116/. Red Production Company. 2020. Harlan Coben and Danny Brocklehust—Red Production Company. https://www.redproductioncompany.com/interviews/ harlan-­coben-­danny-­brocklehurst-­red-­production-­company-­podcast/. Roberts, Les. 2016. Landscapes in the Frame: Exploring the Hinterlands of the British Procedural Drama. New Review of Film and Television Studies 14 (3): 364–385. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2016.1189712. Saunders, Robert A. 2017. Geopolitical Television at the (B)order: Liminality, Global Politics, and World-Building in The Bridge. Social & Cultural Geography 20 (7): 981–1003. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1404122. Scullard, Vickie. 2019. From Tameside College to Writing for Netflix  - How Danny Brocklehurst Conquered Television. Manchester Evening News. https:// www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/tv/danny-­brockleburst-­tameside-­ college-­netflix-­15944345. Sienkiewicz-Charlish, Agnieszka. 2014. Tartan Noir: Crime, Scotland and Genre in Ian Rankin’s Rebus Novels. In Crime Scenes: Modern Crime Fiction in an International Context, ed. Marek Wilczyński, 65–80. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH.

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Spicer, Andrew. 2021. Public Service Broadcasters as Place-makers and the Politics of Relocation. Keynote delivered at New Frontiers? Channel 4’s Move out of London; One Day Symposium; online, UWE Bristol; 7 July 2021. https:// uwe-­repository.worktribe.com/OutputFile/8175717. Triplow, Nick. 2018. Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir. Harpenden: No Exit Press. Troitiño, David Ramiro, et al. 2018. First European and Pan-European Integration Efforts and British Reluctance. In Brexit: History, Reasoning and Perspectives, ed. David Ramiro Troitiño, Tanel Kerikmäe, and Archil Chochia, 3–20. Cham: Springer. Turnbull, Sue. 2014. The TV Crime Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage. Urry, John, and Jonas Larsen. 2011. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage. Weisel, Frederick. 2022. An Interview with Tim Maskell, Location Manager for Shetland. CrimeReads. https://crimereads.com/an-­interview-­with-­tim-­maskell-­ location-­manager-­for-­shetland/. Weissmann, Elke. 2018. Local, National, Transnational. Y Gwyll/Hinterland as Crime of/for All Places. In European Television Crime Drama and Beyond, ed. Kim Toft Hansen, Steven Peacock, and Sue Turnbull, 119–138. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion: Negotiating European Peripheries in TV Crime Series

In conclusion, we return to where we began with Europe coming out of a pandemic, facing a devastating war on the European continent, and a perplexing streaming war challenging the global media landscape—and with the representative new season of the Danish series Borgen (DR/Netflix 2022) premiering only days before the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Serving as a suitable ‘wrap-around’ for the whole book, numerous concerns materialise from out of these critical circumstances, also as pointers towards future enterprises in working with peripheral locations. The fourth season of Borgen confronts a number of pressing geopolitical issues from both a literal point of view and on a more symbolic level, leaving an interpretation open for the viewer. As noted in the first chapter of this book, the series holds a threshold position between traditional European public service broadcasters (DR) and the new television landscape influenced heavily by streaming services (Netflix), a ‘frenemy’ situation symbolically pointed towards as ‘bedding the devil.’ The subtitle for the new stand-alone season is Power and Glory in English and Riget, magten og æren in Danish, which translates to ‘the kingdom, the power, and the glory,’ in both cases an obvious reference to The Lord’s Prayer. On the one hand, this subtitle continues creator Adam Price’s interest in religious sensibilities from the series Herrens veje (Ride Upon the Storm, DR 2017–18), but on the other hand, eliding the spatial reference to ‘the kingdom’ in the international title for Borgen indicates an international © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2_8

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attention towards the political focus on maintaining power and individual praise as a politician, while the Danish title sustains a gentle reference to the spatial disputes negotiated and narrated throughout the plot regarding Greenlandic independence and rights to natural resources. In this way, the Danish title refers not to the kingdom of God as such, but rather it involves a critical allusion towards the fluidity and negotiation of the boundaries of the Danish ‘kingdom’ that still holds the foreign political ‘power’ over Greenland. Nevertheless, the subtitle may also imply a ‘pointer’ towards how global warming, geopolitical conflicts, and changing international relations between national offices are coming out of human control, as no one (but a divine entity?) really appears to have the ‘power’ to maintain the ‘glory’ of controlling the ‘kingdom.’ In one of the final scenes of the fourth season, the newly appointed Danish ‘Arctic ambassador’ drinks a gin & tonic, regrettably served without ice, and writes his Greenlandic ‘fling’ that “the temperature of gin tonics in Copenhagen is poor,” upon which she replies: “You know where the ice is.” Of course, this exchange resolves a conflict between the two that has been a subplot during the whole season (in Greenland, they have been drinking gin & tonic with natural Greenlandic ice), but on a larger scale, the reference to the natural prevalence of ice holds a much more dystopic resonance, asking the question: At a time with melting inland ice, for how long do we ‘know where the ice is’? In this way, Borgen is ‘wrapped’ in local narrative issues with a larger symbolic significance that points towards how tiny parts of dialogues in contemporary European television series (for instance, ice in a gin & tonic, or a one-liner performatively bedding the devil in a series with a Christian reference in the subtitle) may be read as indicators of an interest in not only global, geopolitical conflicts, but also how spatial implications are negotiated in a long line of television series. While Borgen confronts the debated politics directly, many series create much more subtle references to conflicts, quarrels, and aggressions tied to the location/locations of the series, which are no less geopolitical in their reach. In a Danish review of the fourth season, a journalist writes that: Borgen anticipated what Russian aggression has shown us: climate politics is security policy […]. The first episode of the season of Borgen, finalised Sunday on DR1, premiered February 13. Ten days later, Russia invaded Ukraine and clarifies what we so far would rather not acknowledge: Our reliance on fossil fuel is not only bad for the climate. It has tied us to

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­ artnerships that we are not proud of, crippled our chances to demand p change, and undermined the credibility of our values. (Rasmussen 2022)

Indicating the overall argument of this book, Borgen performs as an exemplary wrap-around illustration of how contemporary television series may be deeply imbued with disputes about spatiality, territoriality, and centre-periphery issues, while it also shows the present changes in the media landscape with dominant streaming services also trespassing traditional national/regional boundaries through web-based solutions. At the same time, the series is not as such a crime story (although the first season starts with someone dying, while the fourth season does include a potential murder), but it has nevertheless been instrumental in the wider spread of the notion of Nordic Noir, stressing also how porous the pragmatic boundaries are between genres and styles. On the one end of the spectrum, series like Borgen—or some cases analysed in this book such as Wataha (The Border, HBO 2014–19), Hackerville (HBO 2018), and Trom (Viaplay 2022)—all directly discuss specific geopolitical issues such as Polish-Ukrainian migration issues, digital challenges to border control, and commonwealth disputes within complex ‘kingdoms.’ On the other end of the spectrum, we find series that more suggestively point towards larger issues through metonymic usage of family relationships and small distant communities in series like Blood (Virgin Media Television 2018-), Pustina (Wasteland, HBO 2016), Capitani (RTL Télé Lëtzebuerg 2019–2022), and O sabor das margaridas (Bitter Daisies, TVG/Netflix 2018–20). In such cases, the storyline is situated in a peripheral setting, a setting peripheral to something, such as the European peripheries in The Border, the peripheries of the Danish realm in Trom, the Galician peripheries of Green Spain in Bitter Daisies, and the Romanian peripheries as a ‘digital centre’ in Hackerville’s plot about digital crime. Representing broader issues in Europe and different geographical sensibilities, the series analysed in this book work as ‘samples’ of much larger trends and tendencies on the market that, during the past decade, has drifted towards various European peripheries with an increased attention. As highlighted in the first chapter, this does not replace crime narrative’s century-long interest in urban settings, but through journey narratives—characters going to or travelling back to specific places—have been a dominant trend during the past decade supplementing a globally successful genre with ‘fresh’ imagery from local, national, or regional locations. Moreover, the Italian cases show that within this trend even more

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‘traditional’ urban settings such as Genoa in Petra (Sky 2020-) and Turin in Non uccidere (Thou Shalt Not Kill, Rai 2015–18) may be interpreted as ‘peripheral’ when compared to famous art cities and common tourist destinations like Venice, Florence and Rome, and therefore can be used to challenge the ‘stereotypical’ image of a country and renegotiate the ‘tourist gaze.’ Strategic location placement establishes new devices for storytelling, implies new practical funding opportunities, and performs as televised placemaking activities that may negotiate or even change the peripheral status of places used as locations. As the samples taken for this book are mere illustrations of a larger trend in Europe and beyond, they have been carefully chosen to represent as much of Europe as possible and, within each subdivisional region, also a broad representation of that region. In addition, exemplary analyses also epitomise the broader spectrum from direct spatial discussions to indirect symbolic demonstrations of larger geopolitical concerns. In this way, we have been able to comment on peripheries on a continental level (Europe vs. not-Europe), on a subdivisional level (e.g. the Arctic region or threshold regions such as the Balkan area), on a national level (e.g. Galician Noir or Tartan Noir), and on a transnational level (e.g. the borders between Poland and Ukraine or the Säpmi region in Northern Europe). Even so, it is infeasible to reach a level of exhaustion in our examples, which illustrates that the trend towards peripheral locations analysed in this book is a broader tendency than may invite more than one book. Therefore, we invite researchers and students to follow similar paths and find related or new ways of negotiating peripheries, transborder activities, and other localised issues tied to broader global anxieties and affairs.

Translocalism: The Particular and the Universal The attention towards peripheries from national broadcasters and global streaming services is based on a creative choice to seek out a spatial expression that would differentiate the look, the sense of place, and the narrative of a specific series. In data for the five analytical chapters, we very often come across creatives’ reference to how a certain series differs from other series, based on choices of location, which is commonly used afterwards to brand the series as unique as well as market the series’ locations. In debates about the political status of certain peripheral territories or in subsequent tourism or placemaking activities, the televisual portraits of certain places often become usurped in marketing practices not directly planned as part

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of the production as such, but it may be embedded deeply within the financial plan for producing a series, including tourist agencies’, local municipalities’, or larger regional funding intermediaries’ involvement in or funding for the production or both. In this way, television series may become a ‘voice’ through which it is possible to renegotiate the cognitive geography tied to places and larger territories, while the trend towards producing television series at peripheral locations becomes part of a larger counternarrative about the marginality of tainted or less recognised locations across a European continent in constant flux. When the EU, then, brands the union as a ‘unity in diversity,’ claiming attention towards unique qualities of European peripheries may be viewed as part of the European diversity discourse, a discourse that may finally also point out how little diversity there may be in a centralised and still increasingly urbanised continent where—in the voice of a range of series, such as Zone blanche (Black Spot, France 2/RTBF 2017–19) or Wasteland—rural peripheries may appear forgotten or run the risk of disappearing. Series voicing the oblivion of small European communities and even traditional local cultures, for example, Der Pass (Pagan Peak, Sky Deutschland 2019–2023), rather question the EU’s diversity claim by highlighting how urban centres lose sight of original or traditional ways of living. In such series, creatives may often emphasise the unique qualities of the location placement, frequently in coherence with a panorama or drone imagery of larger natural landscapes in stark contrast to urban spaces, stressing the particularity of the locations used in a series. At the same time, the stylistic similarities between many European series across the continent as well as the creative approach to location placement reveal a different picture of international influence and intertextual indebtedness to profiled style trends on the market. While creatives may highlight the distinctive features of some location, claiming ‘freshness’ in the imagery, the stylistic treatment of localities has become remarkably similar in European television crime series. In many cases, creatives claim a universality of the locations, a somewhere that could be anywhere, which appears to be a sought-after strategy for services and producers with international ambitions. We see this in the choices of locations that may represent a larger territorial spatiality, such as the Arctic sensibility in Ivalo (Arctic Circle, YLE 2018-), the extended idea of forestry in Black Spot, or the Northern English peripheral regionality in Stay Close (Netflix 2021). The specific treatment of the locations in a recognisable aesthetics of peripherality and the much-used journey narrative trope underlines how

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similar many crime series taking place in the peripheries really are. The locations may be original and may brand series and specific places as something particular, but the aesthetics—including extensive drone imagery, panoramic landscape imagery, mobility sequences through the settings, and often a bleak, monochrome colour-grading—maintain a universal ‘vocabulary’ that establishes influential relationships between Italian, Spanish, Czech, English, French, or Norwegian series otherwise not associated through production or creative collaboration. The simultaneous local and universal treatment of plots, locations, and different European topographies establishes a significantly translocal style or a common scenogeographic approach in European television series that, in the end, never really hides the influences that also come from especially US crime series such as True Detective (HBO 2014–) or the first seasons of Twin Peaks (ABC 1990–91). As a more universal aesthetics of European television crime series, the translocalism ties in with the unity discourse in the EU slogan ‘unity in diversity,’ which is not as such a naïve invitation towards the idea that a diverse and conflicted European continent may be united through television crime series. As we have seen in many crime series analysed in this book, borders are retained, transnational conflicts still disturb coherence and collaboration, and major differences impede closer collaboration between and beyond nations. On a much more subtle level, the translocal aesthetics in contemporary European television crime series provide an opportunity for viewers to have a serialised glance into environments and cultural relations that are rarely sourced outside popular culture. Surely, this does not mean that all such series are viewed by a massive European audience, but the stylistic and narrative similarities between many European series indicate that there is a flow of influence across the continent that shows points of contact that very well could be enhanced and exploited even further. In television aesthetics, translocalism should in this way be understood as a certain relationship between universality (transnational or even global) and particularity (the local and specific), which appears significantly manifest in the way that location placement treats places along the parameter between specificity and generalisability.

Nordic Noir from Nordification to Avoidance The production of the new Finnish crime series Korvessa kulkevi (Evilside, Elisa Viihde 2023) embraces many features of producing crime series in peripheral locations. It takes place in a small fishing town in Northern

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Finland, investigates a brutal murder of a teen boy, and was filmed in various Säpmi locations, following the trend towards Arctic locations outlined in Chap. 3. Ani Korpela, the chief content officer for the service Elisa Viihde, stresses that the series “is set in a small community in the archipelago, but its universal theme of feeling excluded is relatable around the world”—once again stressing the relationship between the particular and the universal from a broadcaster’s perspective (Balaga 2022a). The director Jussi Hiltunen, who directed Arctic Circle among others, shows an increasing trend in recent drama production both within and beyond the Nordic region. The interviewer for Cineuropa specifically asked the following: “Many people working on Finnish shows at the moment keep underlining that they are done with ‘Nordic noir’. But you seem to embrace it quite openly here, don’t you?”—a point indicating how producers of crime series in general show an increasing avoidance of association with Nordic Noir as a style that has become so conspicuous that it is something to evade in the branding of new series. Referring to both the remoteness of the setting and the generic qualities of the development, Hiltunen’s reply to the question is indicative of how creatives both stay attached to, yet still avoid direct association with Nordic Noir: That’s an interesting question because I also agree that, lately, there have been too many Nordic noir series. But it wasn’t what I was focusing on when thinking about this project. I knew it was going to be set in this remote village by the sea and that there would be a murder case, but there are many other elements, too—the characters and their backgrounds were the key ingredients. I was much more interested in these people, even though we do get to know this community and their relationships through this crime. (Balaga 2022b)

The point is that Nordic Noir has been incredibly influential during the past decade and has had a considerable impact on crime series all over Europe, as we have seen throughout this book’s analyses. The impact has, though, been so extensive that producers of new titles increasingly avoid direct association with the spatio-generic reference, much in line with how Hiltunen expresses his genre approach. Approaching a new television crime series, the stylistics of Nordic Noir appears comprehendible enough for the journalist, the director, and the potential reader of Cineuropa as a casual reference that needs no qualification; it has become something that may influence someone, or something to avoid.

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Through the analyses in this book, the influence of Nordic Noir has become obvious, even to such an extent that it has become possible to produce Nordic Noir outside the Nordic context. At the same time, we have seen a ‘nordification’ of location choices and aesthetics, which basically means that a number of non-Nordic series move to locally Northern locations and use a bleaker visual style, lighting and colour-grading, for instance Italian series like Thou Shalt Not Kill and La porta rossa (The Red Door, Rai 2017–2023), a Spanish series like Bitter Daisies, the UK series Shetland (BBC 2013-) and others. In general terms, the Nordic Noir style may be understood as an instigator of a translocal aesthetic turn in how a certain style became a wider used framework for the ‘look’ of television series. As a result, series produced at many European locations, then, share a common visuality in addition to the shared treatment of places that may have started from how Nordic Noir, for many years, had a significant interest in setting crime series at specific and often authentic places, including the weighty tradition for both urban and rural crimes in written crime fiction. This does not mean that other European crime traditions have had no affiliation with the detectives’ hometowns or surrounding environments. In fact, Mediterranean Noir traditions—at least the conceptual reference—outdate references to Nordic Noir, while French, UK and US rural crime fiction traditions share many traits with the roots of Nordic Noir. However, the commercial impact of successful Nordic Noir series paved the way for the spread of a common and recognisable international crime series aesthetics. That may be the reason why we see creatives, like director Hiltunen above, attempt to maintain, yet avoid an inclusion in a stylistic vocabulary that has become so recognisable that recent series like Fallet (The Case, SVT 2017) and Post Mortem (Netflix 2021-) are able to parody Nordic Noir’s focus on quirky main characters, social critique, and unnecessary darkness. In late 2022, news broke that the ‘spoofers’ behind classic parodies like the Naked Gun film series and the Scary Movie franchise, David Zucker and Pat Proft, have set out—in collaboration with stand-up comedians—to make yet another Nordic Noir spoof co-produced by the BBC’s Nordic department, entitled NoPoFo, which parodically refers to “Nordic Police Force”. Head of BBC Studios Nordics, Jan Salling, commented on this specific project for Variety: “I love that Nordic Noir is now so firmly embedded in the global consciousness that it’s ripe for spoof—and, as is demonstrated by ‘NoPoFo,’ able to attract the best ‘spoofers’ in the business” (Keslassy 2022). This idea of Nordic Noir “embedded in the global consciousness” reverberated throughout this

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book’s approach to case analyses of series from each five subdivisional European territory. We see in each chapter how Nordic Noir is a source of inspiration for some creatives during the past decade, but it also becomes understandable why such a style becomes something to avoid when spoofers have started making ridicule of a clichéd style and narrative form. Based on a three-year project from 2018–21, however, it becomes reasonable, when writing a book such as this one, that productions and sourced production data and interviews from the latest decade has some latency. In contrast, we should also regard European production ecologies as enterprises that may take some time in ‘turning the ship’ once a style has become a commercially feasible approach. As highlighted by Hansen and Waade in their book on Nordic Noir, “[a]lready in 2013, head of drama Piv Bernth stressed DR’s intention to move in new directions […], while in late 2016 she said that DR was now searching for ‘that which can replace Nordic Noir’” (Hansen and Waade 2017, 230). Now, a decade later we are still able to discuss Borgen fourth season, a noirification of DR’s family Christmas series (Kallehauge and Overgaard 2018), trending aspirations towards Nordic Noir styles in Southern Europe, and significant influences from Nordic Noir across the European continent. Our analysis of Pagan Peak and other series also show how the US series True Detective may have been influenced by the Nordic style, but now the influence has reverted from the US to recent European series in the vein of Country Noir. Influence is not a mere one-way street; rather, influence, intertextual affinities, and productional inspiration is a considerably complex and dynamic relationship between creatives, producers, viewers, broadcasters, streaming services, funding channels, and reviewers and writers on television series. Deeply embedded in this pragmatic relationship, we have seen Nordic Noir surface as one of the most dominant styles during the past decade, but it is very clear that there are other trends and tendencies that cross each other at the same time.

The Future of Peripheral Locations In its harmonious alliteration, the spatio-generic reference to Nordic Noir called attention to something spatial within the crime genre rather than the common allusions towards the type of detective character, such as hardboiled detective fiction or police procedural. This shift paved the way for a plethora of spatio-generic concepts that may be more or less influential. Among others, this includes Arctic Noir, Brit Noir, Balkan Noir,

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Galician Noir, Tartan Noir, or Baltic Noir to name but some of the concepts mentioned in this book. This does not mean that Nordic Noir created the surge of peripheral locations in television crime series, but the door to enhancing the spatial dimensions of crime narratives was only cracked open at the time when Nordic Noir kicked the door in. This happened at a time when new technology made it possible to produce series in increasingly desolate areas, when the screen size of the home television grew to fit the large landscapes, drone aesthetics, and panoramic imagery of townscapes, and when new digital broadcast technology challenged traditional viewer habits, which then paved the way for what we, in Chap. 1, referred to as the content arms race. Growing out of the dynamic complexity of these new market tendencies, the crime genre is a wide recognisable form that may be easily adapted to local environments and interests, while still maintaining its wider generic familiarity. Gazing into the future is always dangerous. The next routes for peripheral locations may be uncertain, but from the analysis and points raised in this book it is evident that some regions and territories enjoy more attention from broadcasters, streaming services, and viewers, while others—still most predominantly Eastern European territories—are still waiting for the final far-reaching increase in producers’ and viewers’ attention. The European market is still dominated by large players, including the UK, and a few minor players pushing above its weight, including the Nordic region, while momentary attention towards others, such as Belgian or Luxembourgian peripheries, may emerge. However, the European television landscape is still not just a marketplace where influential producers gain attention; it is a battlefield where a stream war is happening right now, and where there is an ongoing combat between large and powerful commercial players, older and dominant public service players, and an abundance of new players—in production, in broadcasting, in streaming—trying to enter the market. One type of ammunition for these players has become location placement, which has become a fiscal part of a tendency towards more and more high-end-aspiring budgets for European television series where the quilted funding plans for a TV series are becoming increasingly complex. As the complexity grows in funding television series, while large global services like Netflix enter with an ability to commission television series with a much simpler budgetary composition, it would be a safe bet that the threat towards traditional television and public service broadcasting, even though such broadcasters have a conspicuous presence online, will grow even more in the years to come. With players

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such as Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, and others on the market, location placement will most certainly continue to be an asset on a saturated market marked by digital abundance, but—as we have seen in series like Stay Close or the Netflix series Dark (Netflix 2017–20), from which the expression somewhere that could be anywhere stems—there is a chance that the dominance of global conglomerates will seek towards a decreased recognisability in the series’ location placement, since their position on the market pushes them towards a broader reach than traditional and national public service broadcasters usually cater to. As part of their built-in rationale, public service has obligations to perform noticeable national and local placemaking, even though placemaking is rarely used as a direct description of their activities. If the battlefield turns into triumphs for global streaming services, there must be a chance that we, in the future, will see less obvious placemaking activities based on local television drama production. The use of peripheral locations in dramas produced for streaming services and series produced for or by public service broadcasters is conspicuously similar, but there is a certain tendency towards a decreased specificity of place towards more generic spaces in series for streaming services. A tendency that we also see affecting series made for traditional broadcasters such as Arctic Circle, Black Spot and Pagan Peak that, despite their local attachment, still articulate a more general Arctic, forestry, and Alpine space. This tendency points towards a future in which we may see a spatiality of television series described much more like peripheral spaces rather than peripheral places. So, as we write at a time when a global pandemic has loosened its grip on the world, and when the geopolitical situation in Ukraine affects us all greatly, although most of us indirectly, it is evident that places increasingly matter. A post-Brexit EU, a continent affected deeply by global migration, a continent noticeably paralysed by some states’ unilateralism in matters of human rights, a climate crisis making all matters even worse, and a war on the doorstep to Europe (wherever the borders between that which is Europe and that which is not may be) all point towards issues tied to place. One additional issue is the gradual snowballing urbanisation, which loses sight of peripheral areas and marginal localities across the continent. Besides being a call to arms in the content arms race, television series with attention towards peripheral locations—be they particular or universal—is part of a much broader cry for attention on a continent that may be breaking in two, not as much across traditional east-west and north-south divides, but rather internally through the neglect of peripheral places and

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marginal areas across the whole continent. The television series trend towards peripheral locations is a voice that speaks into a deep political crisis, but television drama speaks in a heavenly voice through the surprising beauty of bleak portrayals of stunning, yet sometimes almost forgotten places.

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Index

A ABC, 128, 220 Acorn TV, 187, 200 Aesthetics of peripherality, 12, 19, 26, 27, 39, 41, 63 Affair, The, 197 Agarwal, Sheela, 21 Agger, Gunhild, 134, 193 A is for Acid, 191 Åland, 52 Alhaique, Michele, 99 Alibi, 199 Aliprand, Timoty, 99 Almandoz, Koldo, 92 Alpine Noir, 136 Altibox, 56 Álvarez, Iván Villarmea, 26, 27 Amazon Prime Video, 91, 96, 176, 225 AMC, 121 AMedia, 56 Americans, The, 197 Anderson, Kay, 27, 82

Andreatta, Eleonora, 96 Andreotti, Furio, 106–108 Ängelby, 123, 129 Antena 3, 89, 91, 93 Antenne 2, 10 Appropriate Adult, 191 Arctic, 2, 218 Arctic Circle, 53–56, 58, 70, 74, 76, 219, 221, 225 Arctic Noir, 54, 55, 58, 67, 75–76, 133, 223 ARD, 118, 132 Arias, Raquel, 93 Arrow Films, 197 Arte, 60, 103 Artémis Productions, 138 Attention scarcity, 5, 6 Audiovisual Media Services Directive, the, 44 Augustynek, Tomasz, 172 Aurø, Helene, 75 Austria, 117, 121 Austrian Noir, 14

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 K. Toft Hansen, V. Re, Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series, Palgrave European Film and Media Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41808-2

251

252 

INDEX

Authenticity, 57, 70–75, 89, 190, 191, 204 Autonomous landscapes, 29 Ávalos, Diego, 94 Avezzù, Giorgio, 31, 87 B Badley, Linda, 88 Bailie, Steve, 171 Balkan, 218 Balkan Noir, 157–158, 223 A Balkan Noir, 157 Balkan Route, The, 157 Baltic Noir, 13, 158–160, 224 Baltic region, the, 13 Baltic Sea, 14, 52 Bambú Producciones, 93 Barinaga, Eduardo, 91 Barra, Luca, 99 Bartlett, Alicia Giménez, 84, 105 Bartlett, Giménez, 107 Baschiera, Stefano, 124 Basque Noir, 89, 91 Batori, Anna, 177, 178 Bavaria Fiction, 65 BBC, 51, 187–190, 196, 203 BBC’s Royal Charter, 194 Beeton, Sue, 21 Belgian Noir, 14, 139 Belgium, 120, 224 Benediktsson, Karl, 33 Benelux region, 117 Bengesser, Cathrin, 43, 152 Berg, Kristine, 55, 70, 73 Berg, Quirin, 132 Berggren, Arne, 55, 58, 70, 73, 75 Bergin, Tiffany, 190 Bergman, Kerstin, 54 Bergren, Arne, 72 Bernth, Piv, 223 Beta Film, 132

Bignell, Jonathan, 189 Bishop, Nicola, 190 Bitter Daisies, 28, 89–96, 129, 141, 197, 217, 222 Black Spot, 120, 135, 137, 142, 144, 219, 225 Blom, Thomas, 142 Blood, 129, 187, 201, 217 Bloodline, 197, 198 Blue sky crime, 53 Boardwalk Empire, 206 Bodyguard, 190 Bondebjerg, Ib, 187, 190 Bondi, Liz, 27 Bong, Jörg, 118 Borderland, 118 Borderscapes, 19, 26, 29, 40, 43, 57, 58, 65, 122, 163, 166, 175, 183 Border series, 119 Border, The, 11, 33, 39, 154, 159–165, 170, 178, 217 Bordertown, 40 Borgen, 3, 11, 52, 62, 215–217 Boss, Cyrill, 132, 136 Breaking Bad, 121 Break, The, 34, 35, 120, 142–143 Brexit, 1, 12, 185, 225 Brides in the Bath, The, 191 Bridge, The, 37, 40, 119, 132, 133, 141, 183 Brimnes, Niels, 62 Brit Box, 188, 194, 207, 209 British, 186 British exceptionalism, 185 British Isles, the, 13, 15, 209 Brit Noir, 13, 209, 223 Broadchurch, 41, 192, 198 Brocklehurst, Danny, 203 Bruckner, Maximillian, 68 Bruen, Ken, 195 Bruneau, Milla, 65

 INDEX 

Buonanno, Milly, 85, 99 Burch, Noël, 29 Burning Bush, 163, 167 C Caldiron, Guido, 118 Caldwell, John T., 24, 25 Calenda, Giulia, 106 Campbell, Joseph, 34 Campbell, Robert, 31 Canal+, 125, 183 Capital cultural capital, 6 economic capital, 6 spatial capital, 6, 7 Capitani, 121, 144, 145, 197 Carabinieri, 99 Carretero, Nacho, 93 Cascajosa Virino, Concepción, 84, 87, 88 Case, The, 222 Casoli, Sara, 89 Castro, Teresa, 31 Catch and Release, 54, 56 Cattleya, 104 Celtic Noir, 188, 195 Centre-periphery, 20, 26, 32, 151 Chalet, The, 119 Chandler, Raymond, 158 Channel 4, 10, 103, 158, 192 Channel 5, 199 Chapman, James, 190 Christensen, Jørgen Riber, 22, 89 Cinestyria, 133 Cityscape, 32 Cleeves, Ann, 193 Climate change, 12 Coben, Harlan, 187, 202 Cocaine Coast, 93 Cold War, the, 152 Collateral, 190

253

Collins, Elaine, 192 Colmeiro, José, 26, 28 Comarex, 94 Commissaire Magellan, 118 Content arms race, 3–8, 124 Cooke, Lez, 188, 194, 208 Cooke, Phil, 21 Corbucci, Claudio, 98 Corbucci, Sergio, 101 Corporación Radio e Televisión de Galicia, 94 Council of Europe, 121 Country Noir, 13, 53, 117–146, 223 Courage, Cara, 40, 41 Court of Justice, 121 Coviello, Massimiliano, 4, 86, 101 Craith/Hidden, 198 Creative Europe, 43, 60, 152 Creeber, Glen, 102, 137, 192, 193 Crime genre, the, 3, 8, 12, 13 Crime Solving for Beginners, 158 Crovi, Luca, 84 Crowson, Nicholas, 186 CSI, 199 CTV, 129 Cybercrime, 172–175, 217 Cyber-security, 12 Czech Noir, 159 D Dall’Asta, Monica, 3 D’Amelio, Elena, 104 Damrosch, David, 140 Danish Commonwealth, 2 Danish Realm, the, 58, 75 Dark, 132, 166, 225 Dark Angel, 191 Davidson, Joyce, 27 De Chiara, Arianna, 85, 105 Dead Lake, The, 156 Dechêne, Antoine, 142

254 

INDEX

Deep Europe, 124 Deep South, 121, 138, 144 Degrave, Bruno, 131 Denmark, 51, 133 Département Des Vosges, 126 Des, 191 Despaux, Julien, 125, 128, 130, 131 Deutschland 83, 171 Deutschland 86, 171 Deutschland 89, 171 Devil’s Throat, The, 158 D’haen, Theo, 140 Digital peripheries, 153, 155 Discovery+, 175 Disney+, 176 DNA, 34, 35 Dobrescu, Caius, 20, 153, 164, 171 Donck, Matthieu, 120 Dorrian, Mark, 30 Double marginality, 19, 22 Doyle, Waddick, 5 DR, 3, 28, 37, 38, 51, 52, 62, 75, 119, 139, 158, 197, 215, 223 Dresner, Lisa, 95 Drone aesthetics, 16, 32, 35, 64, 172, 219 Dry Water, 93 Duan, Siying, 29 Durys, Elżbieta, 166 Dutch Noir, 14

Ego Productions, 125, 130 Eichel, Roxana, 152, 164, 171 Eichner, Susanne, 132 Ein Schwarzwaldkrimi, 120 Elia, Carmine, 101 Elisa Viihde, 65, 66, 220 Élite, 91 El Príncipe, 84, 91 Emily in Paris, 125 England, 185 Ennis, Rikke, 55, 75 Epo-Film, 132 Escape, The, 158 Estonia, 13 ETB, 91 Eurocops, 10 EUROMED, 82 Eurométropole de Strasbourg, 126 European Central Bank, 121 European Commission, 121 European Council, 121 European Parliament, 121 European Union (EU), 1, 12, 39, 117, 119, 121, 144, 162, 184, 220, 225 Europe, concept, 1, 12, 121, 162–163, 186, 218 Europol, 174 Europudding, 10 Evilside, 220 Eyewitness, 164

E East-Central Europe, 151, 155 Eastern Europe, 13, 44, 151–178, 224 Eastern Noir, 13, 14, 16, 69, 151–178 Easy Living, 164 Ecological crises, 123 Eco noir, 123 Economic crisis, 88 Eén, 119

F Faber, Thierry, 139, 144 Faeroe Isles, The, 52, 64 Family noir, 201 Fantasy, 131 Fargo, 130, 131 Fernsehfonds Austria, 133 FilmCamp Norway, 55, 70, 71 Film Commission Graz, 133

 INDEX 

Film Commission Torino Piemonte, 100 FilmFernsehFonds Bayern, 133 Filmfond Nord, 55 Film Fund Luxembourg, 138 Filmlance, 132 Finke, Kai, 140 Finland, 52, 70, 221 Finnish Film Foundation, The, 66 Fiori sopra l’inferno – I casi di Teresa Battaglia, 134 First World War, 157 Fisher, Jonathan, 199, 200 Floodlands, 119 Folk Horror, 124, 136, 138, 145 Forgive Me, God, 89 Fornäs, Johan, 11 Forshaw, Barry, 13, 81, 187, 208, 209 Fortitude, 22, 54, 76 FOX, 38 France, 117, 121 France 2, 34, 119, 120, 125, 219 France 3, 120 Frank, Kerstin, 201 Fremantle, 97, 102 French Noir, 14 Frozen Dead, The, 119 Frye, Northrop, 34 Fury, The, 159 Fusco, Maria Antonella, 88 FX, 197 G Gaelic Noir, 195 Gagliardi, Giuseppe, 98, 99 Galician Noir, 89, 90, 92, 93, 218, 224 Gallagher, Tom, 157 García Avis, Isadora, 133 Germany, 117, 121 Give Us a Kiss, 121

255

Global warming, 2 Glocalization, 140 Golden Life, 164 Gone for Good, 202 Gothic, 124, 145 Gott, Michael, 9, 38 Gravino, Filippo, 104 Greece, 157 Greenland, 2, 52, 58, 216 Green Spain, 89, 96 Guilty landscapes, 75, 94 H Hackerville, 35, 154, 164, 170–176, 178, 217 Haekel, Ralf, 201 Halle, Randall, 38, 82 Hammer, Jón, 59 Hammervik, 53 Hansen, Kim Toft, 3, 21, 22, 26, 28, 36, 39, 43, 44, 51, 60, 67, 88, 89, 96, 102, 141, 152, 155, 159, 163, 166, 170, 176, 193, 198, 223 Happy Valley, 190, 199 Hassan, Nihad A., 24 HBO, 3, 28, 44, 93, 121, 129, 158, 175–178, 195, 197, 206, 220 HBO Adria, 44, 176 HBO Europe, 44, 153, 170 HBO Go, 176 HBO Max, 44, 56, 154, 166, 170, 175, 176, 225 HBO Nordic, 56, 176 HBO Spain, 91, 176 Healey, Patsy, 21 Heholt, Ruth, 124 Hentula, Jarkko, 65, 68, 69 Herbert, Daniel, 21 Hero’s journey, the, 34

256 

INDEX

Hesmondhalgh, David, 21 Hidden/Craith, 190 Hierro, 33, 39, 93 Hijazi, Rami, 24 Hills, Matt, 42 Hiltunen, Jussi, 221 Hiltunen, Kaisa, 54, 68 Hine, Christine, 23 Hinterland, 192 Hochscherf, Tobias, 197 Hoffmann, Fränk, 139 Hold Tight, 202 Hollman, Verónica, 31 Hom, Stephanie Malia, 87, 88 Homecoming narrative, 35, 57, 58, 60, 70, 76 Hønneland, Geir, 62 Hrubý, Tomáš, 167, 169 Hughes, William, 124, 145 Hulík, Štěpán, 166, 168, 169 Hungary, 12, 152, 172 I Ice Cold Murders: Rocco Schiavone, 34, 86, 141 Il re, 98 Imre, Aniko, 151, 153–155, 162, 177–178 Influence, 28 Innocent, The, 202 In Plain Sight, 191 Inscribed spaces, 42 Inspector and the Sea, The, 53, 118 Inspector Coliandro, 85, 88 Inspector Dupin, 118 Inspector Montalbano, 83–85, 132 Intertextual consciousness, 89 Ionascu, Tatiana, 171 Iordanova, Dina, 20 Ireland, 195

Irish Noir, 188 Isaksen, Jógvan, 60, 62 Italy, 86, 117 ITV, 187, 188, 190–192, 198 J Jack Taylor, 195, 199 Jacquelin, Alice, 119, 120, 122 Jákupsson, Torfinnur, 59 Jensberg, Kjetil, 72 Jensen, Ole B., 30, 32 Johnson, Paul Michael, 82 Johnston, Paul, 158 Jordskott, 53, 123, 129 Journey narrative, 16, 19, 37, 58, 74, 76, 173, 217, 219 Jugée coupable, 118 K Kálai, Sándor, 44, 155, 163, 170, 176 Kallehauge, Mathilde, 223 Kane, David, 192–194 Kearney, Hugh, 186, 209 Keeping Faith, 190 Keszeg, Anna, 44, 152, 155, 159, 163, 170, 176 Kieffer, Paul, 139 Killing, The, 28, 35, 51, 103, 131, 139, 154, 166, 169, 178, 197 Kincaid, Andrew, 195 Korpela, Ani, 221 Kubečkov, Pavla Janoušková, 169 KVF, 60 L Lamb, Ben, 198 Lamhène, Eric, 139

 INDEX 

Landgraf, John, 4 Landmark, 43 Land Salzburg, 133 Landscape, 34 La nuova squadra, 101 Lapland Film Commission, 55 La Région Grand Est, 126 Larsen, Jonas, 83, 205 Larsson, Stieg, 51 La squadra, 97 Last Tango in Halifax, 190 La Une, 34, 120 Lavarone, Giulia, 21 Law & Order, 199 Lawrence-Zuñiga, Denise, 42 Lăzărescuin, Anca Miruna, 171 Lefebvre, Martin, 26, 29, 30, 193 Legacy, The, 197 Levet, Natacha, 3, 121 Liminality, 16, 30, 40, 82, 86, 135 Linda e il brigadiere, 98 Lipski, Bogumił, 161 Little Boy Blue, 191 Liverpool 1, 190 Lives of Others, The, 132 Lobato, Ramon, 44 Local Noir, 124 Locatelli, Massimo, 89 Location studies, 22 London Noir, 188 Lotman, Yuri M., 20, 26 Lotz, Amanda D., 4, 21 Love/Hate, 190 Low, Setha M., 42 LSM, 158 Lucarelli, Carlo, 85 Lukinbeal, Chris, 26 Lusin, Caroline, 201 Luther, 190 Luxembourg, 121, 141–142, 224 Lynch, David, 128

257

M Macchia, Ilaria, 106, 107 Macek, Jakub, 20 Majer, Artur, 155 Mammon, 164 Manetti, Antonio, 88 Manetti, Marco, 85, 88 Manhunt, 191 Mankell, Henning, 51, 190 Mäntymäki, Helen, 123 Manzini, Antonio, 86 Maritime Subarctic, 59, 76 Markaris, Petros, 158 Marshall, Gordan, 20 Martin, Ralph, 171 Martínez, Ghaleb Jaber, 93 Martini, Annaclaudia, 42, 107 Martin-Jones, David, 20 Maskell, Tim, 196 Mazierska, Ewa, 204, 206 McChesney, Anita, 121 McElroy, Ruth, 186, 189, 190, 194, 208 McNutt, Myles, 7 Mediterranean Noir, 13, 110, 117–118, 133, 157, 187, 222 Mediterranean region, 82 Mehretu, Assefa, 142 Mess You Leave Behind, The, 92 Microperipherality, 138–144 Midnight Sun, 33, 38, 39, 56, 74 Midsomer Murders, 132, 190, 199 Mieli, Lorenzo, 97 Migration, 10 Mikos, Lothar, 89 Milani, Raffaela, 88 Miller, Laurence, 187 Minca, Claudio, 42, 107 Missoffe, Mathieu, 125, 127, 129–130 Mittell, Jason, 84 Mobility, 34, 64, 220

258 

INDEX

Mobra Films, 170, 171 Molaioli, Andrea, 104 Mölder, Holger, 185 Money Heist, 91 Monster, 34, 57 Montero, Carlos, 92 Montero, Eligio, 93 Morley, David, 11 Morreale, Emiliano, 85 Morsch, Thomas, 4 Moschillo, Maria Teresa, 22 Most Dangerous Town on the Internet, The, 172 Mouluquet, Vincent, 125, 127, 131 Mouths of Sand, 91 Movistar+, 91, 93 Mrozewicz, Anna, 14, 15, 68, 69, 153, 155, 158, 159 Mr. Robot, 171 Murder by the Lake, 118 My Brilliant Friend, 98 N Narratives of challenge, 86 Narratives of choice, 108 Narratives of identity, 85 Nationalism, 10 NBC, 171 NENT Group, 56, 60 Nestingen, Andrew, 34, 88 Netflix, 2, 3, 44, 52, 57, 62, 90–92, 94, 96, 119, 121, 125, 132, 138, 140, 153, 166, 176, 187, 197, 202, 203, 207, 208, 215, 219, 222, 224 New Pope, The, 98 Nicodemus, Anne Gadwa, 41 Nilsson, Louise, 140 1992, 98 Noirification, 89

Noonan, Caitriona, 189, 190, 194, 208 Nordic Noir, 2, 13, 44, 76, 81, 88, 90, 95, 99, 102, 103, 110, 119, 123, 130, 133, 136, 145, 152, 154, 156, 158, 159, 187, 195–197, 209, 220–223 Nordification, 89, 220–223 Nordisk Film & TV Fund, 60, 65 Norskov, 22 North Africa, 81 Northern Film & Media, 43 Northern Ireland, 185 Norway, 67 Nostalgia, 36 NRK, 34, 57, 71, 164 NTV, 40 Nuyens, Christophe, 131 O Occupied, 11 Ofczarek, Nicholas, 134 O’Hanlon, Mark, 205 O’Hara, Daniel, 205 ORF, 10, 38, 118 Ottaggio, Michele, 105, 106, 108 Outlier, 55–57, 75, 76, 129 Overgaard, Pernille Dahl, 223 Ozark, 121 P Pagan Peak, 119, 137, 145, 219, 223, 225 Pagello, Federico, 3, 89 Palatinus, David, 155, 158 Panorama, 32, 36, 219, 224 Peacock, Steven, 159 Peak TV, 4, 58 Pembrokeshire Murders, The, 190, 191

 INDEX 

Peripherality, 4 Peripheral locations, 45 Peripheral spaces, 225 Periphery, 22, 151–152 Peroni, Lorenzo, 91 Perrotta, Marta, 89 Petra, 28, 87, 89, 109, 218 Petzal, Sophie, 198, 199 Pezzotti, Barbara, 84 Philipsen, Heidi, 197 Piatkowski, Wiktor, 164–165 Pigozzi, Bruce Wm., 142 Pillow shot, the, 29 Piper, Helen, 201 Placemaking, 16, 45, 108, 195, 218 Plastic Sea, 89, 91 Pochlatko, Dieter, 132 Pochlatko, Jakob, 132 Poiraud, Thierry, 125, 128, 130, 131 Polachová, Tereza, 166 Poland, 12, 154 Polish Noir, 159 Polter, Moritz, 65 Postcolonialism, 62, 64 Post Mortem, 222 Pötzsch, Holger, 175 Pousin, Frédéric, 30 Powell, Sian, 190 Presumed Guilty, 91 Production studies, 21 desktop production studies, 26 Profiling, 125 Proft, Pat, 222 Propris, Lisa De, 21 Public Enemy, 120 Public service, 225 Punathambekar, Aswin, 21 Q Quo vadis, baby?, 104

R Rai, 10, 25, 34, 85, 86, 96–97, 218 Re, Valentina, 3, 4, 39, 86, 96, 101, 104 Realism, 8 Rebecka Martinsson, 57, 58 Rebus, 190 Red Door, The, 25, 86, 101, 222 Red Dot Media, 158 Red Production Company, 202, 207, 208 Regionalkrimi, 121 Regional Noir, 124 Reijnders, Stijn, 42, 74, 94 REinvent Studios, 55, 59, 70 Renga, Dana, 85 Republic of Ireland, the, 185 Reu, Tudor, 171, 172 Reynolds, Michael, 81 Ride Upon the Storm, 215 Rinaldi, Lucia, 85 Ripper Street, 190 River, 190 River, The, 56 Roberts, Les, 26, 102, 192, 193 Robins, Kevin, 11 Roda, Claudia, 5 Romania, 35, 152, 154, 157, 171, 172, 176 Romanian Noir, 159 Romanzo criminale – La serie, 84 Root, Antony, 171, 176 RTBF, 120, 125, 219 RTL Télé Lëtzebuerg, 121, 138, 197 Rural Noir, 124 Rusescu, Laurentiu, 171 Russia, 2, 65, 68, 76, 162 RÚV, 52, 57

259

260 

INDEX

S Safe, 202, 207 St. Laurent, Marian, 122 Salling, Jan, 222 Samsa Film, 138, 139 Sand, Stine Agnete, 71 Sandu, Daniel, 171 Säpmi, 33, 65, 67, 74, 76, 221 Saunders, Robert A., 26, 27, 37, 38, 40, 88, 135, 185 Scenogeography, 16, 19, 27, 55, 84, 106, 118, 126, 131, 133, 136, 140, 142, 160, 164, 173, 208, 220 Schindler, Nicola, 203 Schumacher, Anna, 171 Schumacher, Ovidiu, 171 Scotland, 185, 195 Scott, John, 20 Screen Yorkshire, 43 Secret, The, 198 See No Evil: The Moors Murders, 191 Seppälä, Jarkko, 88 Serbia, 172 S4C, 189, 190 Shadows, 163 Shaw, Gareth, 21 Sherlock, 189 Shetland, 187, 196, 222 Shetland Noir, 195 Shindler, Nicola, 205 Shipman, 191 Showtime, 197 Shuuto Arctics, 56, 57, 70, 71 Sienkiewicz-Charlish, Agnieszka, 195 Silent Valley, The, 164 Sine metu trilogy, the, 156 Sky, 22, 28, 54, 84, 87, 96, 104, 119, 132, 162, 170, 183, 219 Slavic Noir, 156–157 Slovenia, 86 Smalltown, 199 Smith, Susan, 27, 82

Smyth, Cal, 157 Sommerdahl Murders, The, 53 Sommers, Lawrence M., 142 Sopranos, The, 197, 198 Southcliffe, 192, 198 Southern Europe, 81, 223 Spain, 86, 88, 117 Spatial capital, 88 Spatio-generic, 13, 14, 16, 110, 155, 159, 188, 195, 196, 224 Spicer, Andrew, 194 Spiral, 125 SRF, 35, 38, 119 SRG, 10 Stankov, Uglješa, 31 Stay Close, 187, 207, 219, 225 Steenberg, Lindsay, 89 Stennert, Philipp, 132, 136 Stivínová, Zuzana, 168 Stout, Janis P., 34–36 Stranger, The, 202, 207 Stream war, 224 SVT, 37, 38, 52, 53, 119, 123, 222 Sweden, 51, 52, 133 Swiss Noir, 14 Szabó, Thomas André, 171 Szczepanik, Petr, 20, 151, 152, 155, 158 Szostak, Sylwia, 155 T Taggert, 190 Tanz, Larry, 153 Tartan Noir, 188, 191–197, 218, 224 Tatort, 132 Tax incentives, 6 Team, The, 38, 39 Telecinco, 84, 89, 93, 107 Telemadrid, 91 Televisión de Galicia, 28, 94, 197 Televisión Española, 10 Territorial stigmatization, 20, 41

 INDEX 

TF1, 125 Thaw, The, 158, 161 Thicker Than Water, 52 Thin Ice, 52 This Is Personal: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, 191 Thomasson, Bjørn, 38 Thou Shalt Not Kill, 28, 89, 96–104, 141, 218, 222 Threshold region, 13, 156, 157, 159, 195 Tini, Maurizio, 102 TNT Serie, 170 Tognazzi, Maria Sole, 87, 106 Topic, 66 Tourism, 41, 218 Tourist gaze, 110, 127, 205, 207, 218 Tozzi, Riccardo, 105 Traces, 199 Transitional, 38 Translocal, 7, 11, 12, 16, 19, 28, 29, 63, 64, 68, 76, 133, 169, 170, 194, 196, 218–220, 222 Transnational, 41, 45, 64, 82, 110, 133, 175, 176 Trapped, 52, 56, 60 Traveller, The, 120 Travelling style, 89 Triplow, Nick, 188 Troitiño, David Ramiro, 185 Trom, 52, 55, 64, 75, 196, 217 True crime, 191 True Detective, 122, 136–138, 142, 220, 223 TrueNorth, 60 TrustNordisk, 55 Tsekalo, Alexander, 157 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 42 Tunnel, The, 185 Turkey, 157 Turnaturi, Gabriella, 81 Turnbull, Sue, 159, 190 TV 2, 22, 34, 53

261

TV 4, 52, 57 TV3, 56, 199 TVG, 89 Twin, 57 Twin Peaks, 35, 129, 131, 144, 220 U UFA Fiction, 170 UK Film Council, the, 43 Ukraine, 1, 154, 160 UK, the, 13, 185, 208, 224 Unauthorised Living, 93 Undercover, 119 Undertaker, The, 119 Unforgotten, 190 Unity in diversity, 219 Un posto al sole, 97 Urry, John, 83, 204, 205 V Valhalla Murders, The, 57 Vera, 190, 192 Verasani, Grazia, 105 Viaplay, 3, 52, 53, 60 Victim Number 8, 91 Vidal, Belén, 20 Virgin Media One, 199 Virgin Media Television, 129, 187 Vogler, Christopher, 34 Voiceless, 22, 104 Vordal, Thomas, 71 Vtm, 38 W Waade, Anne Marit, 3, 21, 26, 27, 32, 33, 36, 51, 54, 60, 67, 88, 102, 193, 198, 223 Wacquant, Loïc, 20 Wagner, Christophe, 139, 143 Wales, 185, 195

262 

INDEX

Wallander (BBC), 53, 190 Wallander (TV 4), 53 Wallonie Brussels Federation-RTBF Fund, 120 Waringo, Claude, 139 Wasteland, 28, 154, 164–170, 176, 178, 217, 219 Weissman, Elke, 190 Western (genre), 120, 131, 144 Western Europe, 14, 117–146 Whistlers, The, 159 White House Farm, 191 White Sands, 41, 53 Wiedemann, Max, 132 Wiedemann & Berg Film, 132 Wilder, 35, 119 Wildside, 97 Winger, Jörg, 171, 172, 174 Winter’s Bone, 121 Witnesses, 118 Wolfsland, 118

Woodrell, Daniel, 121 Woods, The, 202 Y Yellow Film & TV, 66 Y Gwyll/Hinterland, 189–191 Yle, 40, 52, 66, 219 Young, Johnathan, 162, 170, 171, 175 Young Pope, The, 98 Z Zahrádka, Pavel, 20 Z Cars, 190 ZDF, 10, 38, 53, 60, 66, 118, 120, 163 ZDF Enterprises, 39, 160 Zone Blanche, 125–132 Zucker, David, 222