Community, Seriality, and the State of the Nation - British and Irish Television Series in the 21st Century

While the crimes are thus employed to emphasise both the ‘dark sides’ of the community as is inherent to the genre, and a more profound change towards an abstract society, the detectives represent a more optimistic attempt to reconcile the old with the new, to acknowledge change while retaining the moral core of the community. This is not obvious from the start: at first, Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller seem to be positioned as a clear contrast. She has a warm and affectionate personality, is well integrated in the local community, has a nice and loving family, and cultivates a good, friendly relationship with her colleagues. Alec is introduced as the typical ‘loner’ detective, grumpy, separated from his wife and daughter, and disinterested to the point of rudeness in his colleagues as human beings, who consequently call him “shitface” behind his back (S1/E7, 00:03). With regard to the community, the team of detectives thus seems to have one ‘insider’ and one ‘outsider’, corresponding to the cliché of good cop and bad cop. Even on the level of language, Alec is marked as an outsider by his Scottish accent.

However, after this contrast is initially exploited for comic effects and to introduce the characters, as well as the community, it begins to change as the detectives each take steps into the direction of their respective counterpart. Alec urges Ellie: “You have to look at your community from the outside now.” (S1/E2, 00:29) She starts to do this, willy-nilly, although she is feeling very uncomfortable (S1/E4, 00:21 and S1/E3, 00:12). At the end of the first series, Ellie temporarily loses her place within the community as her husband turns out to be the murderer and she inevitably shares part of the blame, and she is even estranged from her elder son Tom for a while. The second series then shows a gradual, painful process of reconciliation. These experiences force Ellie to reconsider her essentially positive view of humanity, which is a recurring point of discussion between her and Alec during the first series. While she claims that “most people have a moral compass”, he maintains that everyone has the potential to commit murder and that “compasses break” (S1/E2, 00:29). Alec refrains from rubbing it in, but the fact that her own husband turns out to be the murderer eventually proves his point. Alec, in his turn, becomes closer and closer to the Broadchurch community. He starts to care about the people, moves out of his hotel room and into an apartment in the second series, and even has his daughter come to live with him in the third series. When Ellie teases him by saying “I thought you hated it here”, he replies: “I do. Mostly.” (S3/E3, 00:28-29) These developments of the detectives serve to bring them together as a team as they meet somewhere in the middle and learn to respect each other’s attitudes.

At the most fundamental level, however, the moral values and emotional involvement of the two detectives are very similar from the beginning. Alec’s grumpiness hides great empathy, a strong sense of justice, and his responsibility for providing, or at least preparing, justice. This sense of responsibility far exceeds the call of professional duty, is distinctly personal, and verges on the religious: Alec claims that he took on the case in Broadchurch as redemption for the unresolved Sandbrook case, and that he has done his “penance” when the latter is finally closed (S2/E8, 00:34). He even believes that he is still alive despite his severe heart condition because he must fulfil his purpose (E2/S7, 00:04). Alec is driven by this quasi-missionary calling and by his rage and anger on behalf of the victims (E2/S7, 00:05), which also transgresses every code of professional detachment. When Ellie is frustrated after the verdict of ‘not guilty’ for her husband, he urges her to use her anger to solve the Sandbrook case with him (E2/S8, 00:06).

During their investigations, both detectives show a strong tendency to moral judgments as they unravel the smaller and bigger vices hidden in the community. In interviews, they frequently treat the suspects or witnesses to disapproving glances or remarks when, for example, sexual betrayals are revealed. In this, they represent the moral values of the community and enforce, or at least promote these values, which do not always correspond to their roles as police officers. At the same time, however, they generally show a high degree of professionalism in their investigations, diligently collecting details and pursuing leads and – as Alec never tires of telling Ellie – distancing themselves from the community to keep an open, objective mind. Mark Lawson emphasises that the series shows a “procedural realism unknown in classic detective fiction”, a “quasi-documentary presentation of best police practice”, which it combines with the “outlandish twists and cliffhangers” of crime drama. More intriguingly, I would add, the series combines this modern, empirical, methodical police work with the core values of the traditional community, in which everyone has a responsibility for everyone else and for the community as a whole. The detectives use the rational, modern methods of investigations as means of ultimately providing order and justice, but they always feel answerable to the basic moral prerogatives of the community and, if both happen to clash, they always prioritise the communal moral core over the procedural rationale. In essence, the detectives, in their self-doubts, struggles, and occasional defeats, embody the key conflicts of a community in transition, but they also represent a possible solution by combining the highest modern standards of professional rationality with an unalterable moral core of community values. It is not a simple solution, as the sufferings of the two detectives show, but it is a hopeful affirmation of the lasting values of the community that deserve to be protected. The series thus employs and transforms the convention of the troubled, suffering detective – a convention associated with Scandinavian noir,5 not with golden age English murder mysteries6 – to represent a troubled community that has to change with the times and defend itself against disruptive forces while trying to uphold its essential moral core.

Having viewed Broadchurch through the lens of Tönnies’ theory of communal vs. associational societies, it is important to highlight again the fact that Tönnies’ model refers to “ideal types and not categories of classification” ( Encyclopaedia Britannica ). Thus, my analysis does not aim to present the town as a traditional rural community of the 19 thcentury, refusing to face up to the challenges of 21 st-century England. It intends to show that the core values and the essential social structures of the town as presented in the series are that of a communal society in Tönnies’ terms, bound together by personal relations, natural feeling, and a traditional moral common ground. Neither the town nor the detectives who represent the conflicting facets of the community are averse to modern efficiency, rationality, and a professionalisation of institutional processes. What they resent and oppose is a change of the essence of the community, of a threatening transition from the essential will holding the town together to an arbitrary will.

The series skilfully employs both the ‘Englishness’ of golden-age crime fiction and the dark melancholy of Scandinavian genre traditions to produce an intriguing combination of nostalgia and hope, of social decline and a belief in the individual moral compass and the prevailing of personal human bonds in families and local communities. Alec Hardy tells Lee, one of the murderers of Sandbrook: “Ultimately, we’re all alone.” (S2/E8, 00:18) Later, Ellie corrects him: “I think you’re wrong, by the way […]. We’re not all alone.” Alec’s reply – “I hope you’re right, Miller” (S2/E8, 00:35) – sums up the tentative, doubtful optimism that the struggles of the community and of the detectives convey throughout the series. The very last scene of the third season shows Beth and Ellie and their children together, united by the bonds of family and friendship. Series two ends with a similar scene, but with Mark Latimer as part of the group. By the end of the third season he has left the town, unable to come to terms with his son’s death and his own sense of guilt. Throughout the series, the community is shown to uphold rather traditional gender roles, and within this framework, women have the central role of keeping together the family. Ultimately, the last scene suggests, it is their unspectacular daily practice of personal relationships and care that will keep the community alive.