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British Public Television Police Drama: an Ordo-Baroque Template for European Complex Governance (with a Case Study of the BBC Meta-Police Series Line of Duty)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2020

Caius Dobrescu
Caius Dobrescu*
Affiliation:
University of Bucharest/Faculty of Letters, 5-7 Edgar Quinet Street, Sector 1, Bucharest, 010017, Romania. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article, Elizabethan and Jacobean Baroque drama is considered as a comparative, structuring reference and as a control parameter for understanding contemporary British public television police drama as a genre in its own right. The argument for its autonomy and specificity lies not primarily with formal arguments, but with its intimate connection with representations on government and governance, as practices and world-models aimed at the management of complexity. Starting from the above, I premise that the public police drama format is highly relevant for Europe at large, not only as a fictional means of comprehending complex government, but as an emerging forum of actual public deliberation on the means and goals of complex government. The logical extension of the current study would be a future analysis of the manner in which the suggested template of police drama was absorbed in the continental television and government culture. For the moment the argument is restricted to pointing out the premises offered by the British original format for a poetics of complex order and of multi-level governance essential for the configuration of a European political imaginary.

Type
Focus: Crime Fiction as a Mirror of Europe’s Changing Identities
Information
European Review , Volume 29 , Issue 5 , October 2021 , pp. 660 - 671
Copyright
© 2020 Academia Europaea

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