by Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2024
Review
by Robyn Walton
Transnational TV Crime by Australian academics Sue Turnbull and Marion McCutcheon is a reader-friendly study that will be of value for students, researchers, policymakers, professionals in the creative industries, and people in allied industries. It will also interest many of the rest of us, the consumers of television drama series, if we’re fortunate enough to come across it; to that end, I suggest asking your local library to order a copy.
The authors supply a great deal of information about recent, popular Australian-made crime series. They offer informed critiques, take technology advances into account, celebrate successes, and put tough questions about what has been happening in screen production in this country in the last two decades.
As the authors explain, their book takes up the story of the evolution of TV crime drama that was initiated by Turnbull’s 2014 monograph, The TV Crime Drama. In her monograph, part of an Edinburgh University Press series on television genres, Turnbull took a useful survey approach to English, North American, and other crime dramas, beginning in the 1950s and analysing a diversity of programs while refraining from making generalisations or theorising.
Explaining the scope of their follow-up book, Turnbull and McCutcheon tell us they have focused on series that were produced this millennium, distributed transnationally, and made available on streaming services (as well as on free-to-air TV in some cases). In particular, they say, they have looked at how Australia has responded to the challenge of producing TV crime dramas that appeal to a global audience while retaining their ‘Australianness’, a descriptor they acknowledge is still tricky to define, despite decades of calls for recognisably Australian on-screen content and an Australian national identity. They’re also interested in the influence on Australian productions of successful drama series from the Nordic nations: hence the ‘Transnational’ and ‘Scandinavia’ in the title and subtitle. There has been emulation, they argue, of Nordic tropes and aesthetics by Australian drama-makers, even in series set in the outback.
By contrast to Turnbull’s monograph, this book sets up a framework for evaluating TV crime drama series (and by extension other productions). Wanting to identify ‘the total value of a cultural artefact’, the authors reject the notion of assessing a series’ economic value while excluding its cultural impacts. Following the approaches of Arjo Klamer (2016) and C. Allen et al. (2013), and taking in the Aristotelian principle of phronesis (maximising the greater or common good), they develop a framework for assessing an artefact across four dimensions: industrial, creative, cultural, and social.
Not all benefits accruing from a production for TV are easily quantifiable. Yet, the authors argue, all matter in the totality of things. So, for example, the non-monetary returns for the creators of a low-budget drama in a precarious economic environment constitute ‘psychic income’: the gratification of getting one’s message across, gaining critical praise, working with brilliant peers, making a difference, experiencing personal growth, and having a sense of achievement.
There’s plenty to consider and debate in this Turnbull-McCutcheon model of evaluation. I recommend a careful reading of chapter 2 and its references if you’re interested.
Chapters 3-6 are case studies of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The Kettering Incident, Secret City, and Mystery Road. Each series is discussed under subheadings along the lines of The Making of, Reception, Flow-ons, Cultural Impacts, and The Value of. Tables and graphs of data not readily accessible to the general viewer complete each study.
Any of these four chapters can be fairly easily understood by a reader who hasn’t viewed the series or the related dramas mentioned, hasn’t read any books that inspired the series, and hasn’t visited the locations used by the drama makers. Of course, though, the more familiarity you bring to the text, the better equipped you’ll be to take in and assess the authors’ analysis. Professionals in the entertainment industry and scholars in media studies will notice inclusions and gaps that I, as a general reader, didn’t.
Here for non-specialists are a few of the thought-provoking comments by the authors. The Miss Fisher Mysteries are ‘both regressive and progressive’: they effectively conceal Australia’s Indigenous history of occupation and subsequent patterns of migration, while Phryne Fisher is an unconstrained, cosmopolitan citizen of the world. The 2015 Swedish series Jordskott was a significant but unacknowledged influence on The Kettering Incident. Although reception of season one of Secret City was ‘subdued’, Foxtel management looked to the series as a ‘subscriber driver’ and expected future transnational deals to bring in revenue; in 2023 on Netflix the season was attracting 6,000 views a week, demonstrating it had ‘a long revenue tail’. The casting of Sofia Helin (of The Bridge fame) in season two of Mystery Road signalled the producers were looking to increase sales to markets that had a record of liking Nordic Noir and strong female actors.
In their closing chapter Turnbull and McCutcheon address some of the political and economic difficulties besetting the screen industry. Readers may be prompted to follow the news — or lack of it — on content quotas and expenditure percentages required of streaming services by federal and state governments. In answer to the proposition that on-screen Australianness be erased in the interests of making international sales, the authors assert their case studies demonstrate that series which are specific in their Australian locations, geo-politics, and stories can succeed in other markets.
I’ll close with a few points I thought could have been improved.
In the discursive opening chapter I’d have appreciated more clarification of content and terminology. For starters, I didn’t notice much of a rationale (in impressionistic or statistical terms) for why the observable Nordic influence was privileged by the authors over other non-Australian influences observable in Australian crime drama.
A characteristic of the study that could have been touched on at the outset is that the dramas assessed in the book were made in the English language in Australia (albeit some community languages were included, for example, Greek spoken by actor Alex Dimitriades); overseas sales then led to the series being dubbed and subtitled when later broadcast in other nations. In other words, this is a study skewed to English-language makers and consumers.
‘Transnational’: the authors often loosely substitute the words ‘international’ and ‘global’.
‘Scandinavia’: is usually understood to comprise only Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. After a mention of a so-called Scandinavian Invasion, the authors routinely use the word Nordic without clarifying that ‘Nordic’ refers to additional countries in the region and without sketching the history of the term Nordic Noir. Presumably, ‘Scandinavia’ features in the subtitle because it is more familiar to the reading and viewing public than ‘Nordic’.
‘Aesthetics’: used imprecisely. For instance, I was puzzled by the use of this word when the authors said Mystery Road ‘embraces the aesthetics of Nordic Noir in its use of a double narrative, strong female characters, slow pacing, and the frequent deployment of drone shots’.
Finally, there are some errors I wished the publisher had picked up. One instance: Steve Lewis was co-author of the novels named as the basis for Secret City. He exists on two pages as Lewis before being referred to as Steve Spicer. The index lists both Lewis and Spicer without noting all references. And the bibliography doesn’t include the Lewis-Uhlmann novels.
Publisher’s blurb:
This book offers an account of how the global popularity of the Nordic Noir wave of television crime drama such as The Killing/Forbrydelsen and The Bridge/Broen/Bron had a profound impact on the production of television crime drama in Australia. Through a series of case studies, including Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, The Kettering Incident, Secret City, and Mystery Road, the authors explore how the Australian television industry responded to the new streaming environment by producing shows with international reach and appeal.
Central to this analysis is the concept of ‘total value’, which expands the notions of cultural and economic value to account for how these crime dramas generate value for the Australian screen industry in general, their creators in particular, as well as the social and financial benefits that ensue for the communities in which they took place and audiences across the world.
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