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

[a]t its most basic level, narrative complexity is a redefinition of episodic forms under the influence of serial narration – not necessarily a complete merger of episodic and serial forms but a shifting balance. Rejecting the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic form, narrative complexity foregrounds ongoing stories across a range of genres. (Mittell, “Narrative Complexity”, 32)1

What distinguishes the most recent successful series in general is, furthermore, a return to a more authorial mode with a mastermind or showrunner who acts as the main writer, favouring the more recent American over the established European model of serial narration. Thus, the showrunner is more important than the director, which also explains the tendency to introduce narrative twists that at times come across as unforeseen and even shocking. In effect, sophisticated television series are, according to Mittell, increasingly metafictional in that they reflect on their own form and development as the programme proceeds.

The characteristic feature of self- or meta-reflexivity – i.e. “an intensive tendency toward self-observation in serial narratives” (Kelleter 18, emphasis in original) – links Mittell’s investigation of American television series to a more general theory of seriality. Seriality is opposed to, and contests, an aesthetics which considers art in terms of finite structures – in a word: as works. Set against this traditional and still standard way of looking at culture and art as distinct and complete structures, seriality highlights their open and performative character, which also includes audience interference in the creative process: “[S]erial aesthetics does not unfold in a clear-cut, chronological succession of finished composition and responsive actualization. Rather, both activities are intertwined in a feedback loop.” (Kelleter 13) Regarded from this perspective, television series are no longer passive ‘works’, but become part of a dynamic network of cultural practices.

In a more general vein, i.e. not restricted to the genre of contemporary television series, seriality can thus be described as a key attribute of modern art’s focus on innovation and originality and even of capitalist modernity at large, as Frank Kelleter maintains:

It is not a coincidence, then, that starting in the mid-nineteenth century, seriality has become the distinguishing mark of virtually all forms of capitalist entertainment. Serial storytelling seems to be a central praxeological hub in the shaky yet traditionally potent alliance between market modernity and the idea of popular self-rule. This is so because serial media, interactive from the start, embody what may well be the structural utopia of the capitalist production of culture at large: the desire to practice reproduction as innovation, and innovation as reproduction. (Kelleter 30, emphasis in original)

According to Kelleter, then, the concept of seriality illumines key elements not only of popular culture but also of modern society and modern, i.e. post-Romantic, art. This general observation leads us back to the topic of this volume: community in British television series. Seriality can be described as an apt form of discourse that highlights the openness and ritual nature of modern society, which is characterised by a structural contingency. The genre of the television series is therefore an ideal object to investigate the subject matter of community, which, on the story level, looks at modernity from a similar angle. Community often suggests a nostalgic and conservative view of society, which, in turn, emphasises the fact that this notion of togetherness is an unreachable ideal and always already a thing of the past. Thus, the British and Irish television series investigated in this volume shed a light on contemporary society in flux – and they reflect this in their very form.

That being said, there is of course a wide variety of serial formats and genres. Whilst some series like Top Boy or Happy Valley are openly critical of society, this criticism is merely a side effect in shows like Luther (2010-) or Love/Hate (2010-2015). Despite their individual differences, all of them are characterised by narrative complexity and astonishing aesthetic quality. Many of them are revisionary; Broadchurch reinvents the traditional crime show, Peaky Blinders and The Village revise the genre of the period drama, Misfits (2009-2013) questions the fundamental traits of the superhero genre, and the anthology format of The Street (2006-2009), Accused (2010-2012), and Black Mirror (2011-) undermines the serial format by consisting of a series of television plays connected by a unifying topic.

This volume proposes to investigate serial narration as an exemplary means of cultural, social, and national self-discovery and self-assurance. Focussing on questions of genre, narrative form, and serialisation, the individual essays examine the variety of ways in which British and Irish television series broadcast after 2010 negotiate the concept of community as a key component of the state of the nation.

The first part of the volume, “Family, Morality, and Communal Cohesion”, centres on the concept of the family, which functions in many series as a micro-unit of society giving revealing insights into contemporary conceptions of community. In her essay on the Birmingham-based Peaky Blinders (2013-), Sina Schuhmaier examines the position of community within the tension between tradition and modernity that defines the 1920s setting of the series, arguing that Peaky Blinders pictures its protagonists, the Shelby family, as an open, non-normative community. The series thus answers the sense of upheaval of the interwar period with a caution against potentially totalitarian forms of community – a lesson of renewed relevance today. Moving to a more contemporary setting, Kerstin Frank then shows how the crime drama Broadchurch (2013-2017) creates a traditional small-town community in the sense of Ferdinand Tönnies’ definition of the term, and how this community is threatened: by the crimes and the revelations during the police investigations, but also by more profound social changes that challenge the very core of the community’s values. In the final essay of this part, Ralf Haekel shifts the focus to Ireland by investigating the gritty crime drama Love/Hate (2010-2014), which is set in gangland, i.e. Dublin’s criminal underworld. The massively successful programme’s five series depict Ireland as a society in which traditional forms of community, most prominently the family, are severely under threat. Focusing on the lives of petty criminals dragged down into the world of corruption and drugs, Love/Hate , which is very much influenced by US American films and crime series like The Wire (2002-2008), sheds a bleak light on society in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

The second part, “Nostalgia and the Search for Community”, explores how a number of series – affirmatively or subversively – negotiate a nostalgic sense of Britain’s historical past as a repository of a more coherent sense of community. The comedy programme Detectorists (2014-2017) presents the prosaic life and conversations of a group of men as well as their mundane hobby, metal detecting, which functions in this series as a very literal means of searching the past. Focusing on the social underdog’s small-scale perspective on history, Wieland Schwanebeck illustrates how the series presents a nostalgic and quite conservative portrayal of community in England at the time of Brexit. The following essays then examine two period dramas from a revisionary point of view centred on the notion of plurality. Lisa Schwander explores the tensions that govern the narrative of community in Indian Summers (2015-2016), which is set in India in the last decades of the British Raj: while the series’ approach to colonial society demonstrates its desire to distance itself from community concepts based on essentialised notions of belonging, Schwander shows how by exoticising Indians as England’s inferior ‘other’, the series reinscribes the very notions of belonging and community it attempts to criticise. The essay contextualises this tension with fundamental shortcomings of a contemporary society that imagines itself as borderless and pluralistic. Set even further back in the past at the time of World War I, The Village (2013-2014) offers a revisionary look at heritage television and period drama. Focusing on the form and function of cultural memory in a rural setting, Lucia Krämer investigates how the series presents community from the point of view of peasants and the working class, which differs decisively from the upper-class perspective dominating many programmes that portray the same period, such as Downton Abbey . In her argument, Krämer concentrates on the role of World War I as a catalyst in the transition of a modern form of civic community centring on individual autonomy and plurality.