Journal of European Popular Culture - European Identity in Popular Television Crime Series, Oct 2021

Our article focuses on a corpus of crime television series reflecting upon differences between western and eastern Europe – a phenomenon that we will address as the ‘West–East slope’. The series figure as instances of the struggle for recognition at the level of the social imaginary, between western and eastern Europe. Addressing the double logic of the western narrative on eastern Europe and the eastern narrative of western Europe, one of our main findings is that the recognition aesthetics of eastern Europe produced a multi-layered representation of the West varying from country to country. On the other hand in western productions, there is still a bias towards a more politically correct image of easternness, a state of affairs that is questioned by eastern European attempts to produce their original contents.

Interrogating two transnational television dramas – Crossing Lines (2013, 2014, 2015, the first season) and The Team (2015, 2018, the second season) – and employing critical, textual and production perspectives, this article investigates representations of national and European identity in the series. In this article, I argue that the series on the one hand picture a diverse Europe uniting when challenges arise, embodying the dominant European narrative of ‘unity in diversity’ and, seen from a certain point of view, facilitate a mediated cultural encounter. On the other hand, the diversity depicted is based on the use of a wide range of well-known cultural stereotypes that may be familiar to the audience, and which may facilitate smooth storytelling, but that does little to broaden the actual cultural knowledge and understanding of the viewer, resulting in stereotypical diversity. The series have different strategies regarding representations of nation states, cultures and languages. The implications of these strategies are analysed. Common ground is often found in ‘American’ crime drama genre tropes associated with a team of often-antagonistic specialists who are put together to solve a problem, including such iconic US series as The A-Team (1983–87), the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise (2000–15) and Scorpion (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017). The contribution ultimately finds that meaningful mediated cultural encounters are a challenge to transnational television drama, and that when it comes to television, ‘European’ and ‘transnational’ means little without ‘national’.

This chapter examines the case of Eurocops, a crime TV show produced by the European Coproduction Association – composed by one private and six public service broadcasting (PSB) channels of seven European countries – from 1988 to 1994 (71 episodes). Although it is one of the first European co-productions of its kind, Eurocops was a critical and commercial fiasco: what were its faults? Following Ib Bondebjerg’s methodology, this article aims at exploring the failure of this ‘Europudding’. The first section places Eurocops in the media landscape of the late 1980s and explains why this series can be considered as a ‘Europudding’ trying to enforce Europe’s cultural sovereignty against the North American hegemony. The second section analyses how the decentralized PSB production of Eurocops implied the use of an inconsistent narrative structure making the single episodes appear as part of a loose ‘collection’ of crime fiction. This partly explains the lukewarm critical reception of this television programme. The third section examines the cultural meaning of the series and is based on the analysis of the 48 episodes we had access to (through the INA French archives). The lack of transnational ‘encounters’ or dialogues – compared to other more recent cop shows such as The Team, The Killing and The Bridge – reveals the absence of a strong European identity at the time of production.