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

The third part of the volume draws attention to how a variety of series portray “Crime and Social Decline in Urban Communities” to pinpoint crucial features of contemporary society. Set against the backdrop of Britain’s industrialised North, the crime drama Happy Valley (2014-) completely subverts nostalgic notions of pastoral ‘Englishness’ by showcasing a small-town community riddled by dysfunctional families, exploitation, and patriarchal violence. In her reading of the series, Caroline Lusin elaborates on how Happy Valley uses crime to display the break-up of traditional social structures and units, such as the family and the community, but ultimately celebrates the value of individual moral agency. The next two essays then shift the attention from the provinces to the metropolis. Starting from the premise that the council estate holds a stigmatised and marginalised position in the popular British imagination, Luis Özer discusses the filmic depiction of a London tower block community in Top Boy (2011-2013). As Özer argues, this Channel 4 drama oscillates between clichéd images of council housing reminiscent of the black urban crime genre and a more nuanced, social realist portrayal of community attachment and lived realities on the estate. The concluding essay of this section opens up the question of genre by analysing the connection between dysfunctional community structures in contemporary Britain and the figure of the ‘deviant’ teenager in Misfits (2009-2013). In this essay, Annika Gonnermann maintains that by caricaturing and subverting the conventions of the well-established superhero-genre, the series casts unsocial teenagers as unlikely superheroes: in its first two series, the protagonists fight villainous representatives of the system, such as neglecting parents, abusive social workers, or fraudulent priests, allowing the audience to explore the implications of community formation.

The fourth part, finally, combines three series that address different forms of “Vice and Virtue in Capitalist Communities”. In his essay on Broken (2017), Stefan Glomb analyses this series with a view to establishing links between its criticism of contemporary British society and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The targets of this critique are institutions and money, both of which are held responsible for the ever-widening gulf between system and life-world, as well as the increasing erosion of communal ties. In this reading, Broken performs an immanent critique of neoliberal capitalism, and, avoiding the extremes of methodological individualism and methodological holism, points the way towards a (partial) re-establishment of community. Focusing on the medieval concept of ‘psychomachia’, Monika Pietrzak-Franger then investigates the crisis of community as characteristic of contemporary society in the detective series Luther (2010-). Crime in this series serves a mirror to a largely dysfunctional society in which community in the sense of a healthy ‘warm place’ is largely missing. In this setting, the detective is a highly ambiguous figure, brilliant but flawed, struggling for some sense of community within a society characterised by neoliberal capitalism. Finally, the perspective shifts to the digital age with Laura Winter’s essay on the episodes “The National Anthem”, “White Bear”, and “Nosedive” of the media-critical anthology Black Mirror (2011-), in which omnipresent technology plays a similar role in terms of power relations as the state or the tyrannical corporation in the genre of dystopia. In revealing how a sense of community is only created through digital spectacle, and how individuals are addicted to online approval in an increasingly anonymous society, all three episodes propose that community in the digital age exists increasingly only as a media phenomenon.

All these recent productions are not just an excellent case in point for the popularity of the serial format; they also suggest that British and Irish television series are well established by now as a privileged medium for reflecting critically on issues related to community and the state of the nation. No doubt they will carry on with this task in the future. What with Brexit looming on the horizon, and nationalisms on the rise all over Europe, there will surely be no shortage of topics.

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