Abstract
As a counterpoint to previous scholarship that has emphasized the visual, including the spectacular pleasures of crime drama and its locations, this chapter highlights the importance of sound to crime drama, and especially in terms of the work sound effects and music do in putting us in a particular space. Consideration of sound developed in reference to examples of recent UK/US crime drama, with extended attention to Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015) and Happy Valley (BBC 1, 2014–), underlines the various ways that such series ask us to attend to the specificities of place, of action, of violence and response.
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Notes
- 1.
Bignell’s other example, NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993–2005), is probably a hybrid of both poles, being striking in its camera movements and composition, all with the purpose of inhabiting an immediate and raw reality.
- 2.
Gorton (2016) underlines the connections between the programme and the kitchen sink dramas of the 1960s, especially in terms of the narrative and emotional trajectories of the angry young man archetype.
- 3.
Crime dramas do not always stick to the same narrative structures, playing with both strategies of suspense (when we know what has happened and are awaiting discovery) and surprise (when information is kept from the audience). Although both Happy Valley and Hannibal broadly follow the same kind of audience position throughout, at times this is reversed.
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Donaldson, L.F. (2018). Locating Sound in UK/US Television Crime Drama. In: Toft Hansen, K., Peacock, S., Turnbull, S. (eds) European Television Crime Drama and Beyond. Palgrave European Film and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96887-2_5
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