Taking Place, Screening Place: Studying Locations in Television Drama Production

Abstract

We introduce location studies as a new empirical approach to screen studies. Location studies represent an interdisciplinary perspective, including media, aesthetics and geography, and reflect a growing interest in places in a global media and consumption culture. The chapter reads the recent Danish television drama The Legacy (2014–) as an exemplary case. This study is based on interviews with key informants as well as quantitative and qualitative textual analyses of television drama series, the geographical places, and related policy and funding practices. The overall ambition is to shed light on a practical and tacit part of screen production practices, namely locations, and furthermore develop location studies as a methodological approach within the field of production studies (Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), and thus reflect the relations between places and screen productions more in general (Tinic, On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015) and as an interdisciplinary field described as ‘cinematic geography’ (Hallam and Roberts, Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014; Lefebvre, Between Setting and Landscape in the Cinema. In M. Lefebvre (Ed.), Landscape and Film (pp. 19–60). New York/London: Routledge, 2006). The Legacy is, as a television series, a conspicuous series that deals with location in a very practical as well as symbolic manner. Based on methodological perspectives and empirical material, the chapter underlines the demand for further attention towards locations as a practical and expressive matter in screen production research.