The purpose of the present report has been to uncover how the Danish crime series tradi-tion emerged, and to insert it into an international context in order to gather an understand-ing of why contemporary Danish series productions are being sought after internationally. In other words, it is a study of what underlies the Danish crime series tradition in an interna-tional context and this study is conducted on several parameters: first, the crime genre is defined in order to provide an understanding of the series’ genre. Second, the history of tel-evision up until the release of each individual crime series has been outlined, and third, the chosen crime series are closely analyzed through a neo formalist approach with the purpose of underlining the genre specific and technological developments that can be traced in the series. Furthermore, the series’ media coverage before, during, and after the series’ premi-eres are included, as the media coverage in the newspapers (including interviews with the actors) can be used as supporting evidence for the claims made in the analysis. Moreover, they contribute with perspectives in relation to the international influences that the series have been under.
This report is based on three crime series from the time before 1988. The three crime series are 1) Ka’ De li Østers? from 1967, Strandvaskeren from 1978, and 3) Een gang strømer… from 1987. The series encompass distinct international influences, which in Ka’ De li Østers? is shown through an intertextual reference to Lumière’s L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895). Strandvaskeren was produced through an international (Scandinavian) collaboration between Sweden and Denmark and is thus one of the first coproductions across borders in Danish television history. Finally, Een gang strømer... includes several in-ternational perspectives, as the series is partly filmed on location in multiple places in the world, but also stylistically in a fast paced editing style that is featured several times throughout the series – during car chases, amongst others.
These action elements are also what the series has recieved the most critisism for, alt-hough it was generally well received and is described as a reportage imitation. It is obvious that Anders Refn and Flemming Quist Møller have attempted to make the series emulate real life police work as much as possible in addition to having to find new ways (short sequences in some scenes, amongst others) in order to revive the audience’s interest in the otherwise well-known genre.
The genre was introduced by Leif Panduro in 1967 to the Danish viewers, and his pro-ductions have been characterized by a local environment and by the characters’ differences throughout his entire television career. Thus, already early on in Danish television history, there was an emergence of an internationalization that in the years from 1967 to 1987 pro-ceeded to become an Americanisation. The series in the beginning are characterized by en-vironment and characters, which could be in correlation with Panduro as an auteur, while the action-crime series, in a Danish context, occurs for the first time in 1987 with Anders Refn as director, and through this Refn is a part of initiating a new era in the Danish crime series tradition.