Peripheral Locations in European TV Crime Series

This book is a comprehensive study of peripheral locations in contemporary European TV crime series. Ambitiously, it covers the complete geography of Europe, and offers a nuanced image of a changing, dynamic, and unfinished continent. The chapters include analyses of the practical, creative approach to producing crime series in European peripheries and rural areas, evaluating a continent marked by an internal crisis between urban and rural Europe. The study includes readings of crime series such as Shetland, Bitter Daisies, Trom, Pagan Peak, and The Border, but presents such representative cases within broader tendencies on the European TV market, including challenges from streaming services, the influence of Nordic Noir, and changes within the cognitive geography of Europe. The authors position peripheral European crime series in a complex relationship between universal appeal and local recognisability and offer a comprehensive theoretical approach to theaesthetics of peripherality. Grounded in desktop production studies, the book presents an original scholarly approach to analysing European crime series from a continental point of view. Despite local differences, the spatio-generic orientations scrutinized in the book – Nordic Noir, Mediterranean Noir, Country Noir, Eastern Noir, and Brit Noir – show remarkable aesthetic similarities in series from territories otherwise normally unconnected in television production. Consequently, television crime series reveal a common tongue and voice for dialogue on a continent in a deepening crisis.
Kim Toft Hansen is Associate Professor of Scandinavian Media Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the co-author of Locating Nordic Noir: From Beck to The Bridge (2017), the co-editor of European Television Crime Drama and Beyond (2018) and has written extensively on Nordic and European television crime series.

Valentina Re is Full Professor of Film and Media Studies at Link Campus University, Italy. She is the editor of Streaming media. Distribuzione, circolazione, accesso (2017) and the PI of the research project The Atlas of Italian “Giallo”: Media History and Popular Culture (1954-2020), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (2022-25).