3 - The Shooting Family: Gender and Ethnicity in the New Dutch Police Series

Summary

A group of adults is seated in a kitchen. It is evening, the lights are low, and the atmosphere is intimate. They are listening to an older man who is explaining what really happened. “Such a shame”, says an older woman, as she pours them an afterdinner drink. The younger man, the Indonesian man, and the younger woman nod. BAANTJER'S signature tune begins and it is the end of another episode of the Netherlands’ most popular television drama series. BAANTJER is a police series that has been on the Dutch commercial TV station RTL4 since 1995. Episodes are based on an older book series – the cast has been updated to include a woman and a non-white man instead of just two white guys. The nation loves this (work) family headed by Inspector De Cock, whose team is served a meal by his wife at the end of each episode while he clears up their questions about the motive of the killer and how he nailed the culprit. We have seen grisly shots of the crime victims, we have visited nightclubs, gay bars and other unsavory locations, and now we are safely home with mum.

BAANTJER presents us with a number of ideologically loaded vignettes. For instance, it foregrounds a particular version of what might count as a “family”. The softly-lit warm family kitchen and a mother serving dinner suggest that we have time-traveled back to the 1950s, an era of the idealized nuclear family, real mums, and the colonial other as a well-behaved child. Does BAANTJER show us a country stuck in the 1950s? Or is it television's predilection for the family that obscures changing social mores? Might the nation's sense of identity be changing behind these beloved traditional television formats? And will the consequences be positive for those previously excluded because they chose other living arrangements, or chose to rewrite gender codes or have a sense of pride in not being white?

A closer look at representational practice in recent Dutch television should prove enlightening, especially since BAANTJER is not the only home-made highrated police series. Among them, the public and (the new) commercial broadcasters began producing some nine new police series in the 1990s.