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European Television Crime Drama and Beyond pp 41–60Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Rise of ‘Bright Noir’

Redemption and Moral Optimism in American Contemporary TV Noir

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Part of the book series: Palgrave European Film and Media Studies ((PEFMS))

Abstract

This article explores how some recent American TV crime dramas that can be specifically labelled as noir address the issue of hope and redemption by undermining one of the main thematic and ideological features that both spectators and critics tend to assign to noir narratives: the logic of hopelessness, of no way out. In what I have coined as ‘bright noir’, several recent, influential and popular TV noir series (such as Justified or Fargo) offer stories in which brave protagonists achieve a positive outcome and defeat evil while fulfilling a higher purpose or attaining an honourable end.

Lou Solverson: We’re just out of balance.

Betsy Solverson: You and me?

Lou Solverson: Whole world. Used to know right from wrong. A moral centre. Now…

(Fargo, ‘Fear and Trembling’, season 2, episode 4)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This volume focuses mainly on European crime fiction, but nonetheless, the two main examples analysed in this article are American TV series. The raison d’être for their appearance in a book on European crime fiction is the notion of transnational television drama and its relevance in the definition of a genre. As Weissmann points out: ‘Audiences increasingly participate in the transnationalisation of television content as they congregate in online spaces which themselves are usually transnational. Here, genres are formulated by audiences that constantly draw on international comparisons and hence define genres as transnational entities’ (2012, 12).

  2. 2.

    Here, ‘narratives’ are understood in a broad sense that includes, following Mark Currie, ‘non-fictional domains of experience (representations, conversations, explanations, memories) alongside the plethora of fictional narratives that populate the contemporary world’ (2010, 2).

  3. 3.

    The debate is even present in daily major newspapers, such as the New York Times or The Guardian. See Burkeman 2017.

  4. 4.

    Three examples can support this affirmation. Low Winter Sun (AMC, 2013) was meant to receive the baton of Breaking Bad as edgy, antiheroic ‘Quality TV’, but it was cancelled after its first season; it received mediocre reviews: a metascore of 60 points over 100 on the Metacritic website. Ozark (Netflix, 2017) is a recent take on the antihero structure, but the television critics were not enthusiastic about it either (66/100 metascore). Lastly, Ray Donovan (Showtime, 2013–) is one of the few current successful antiheroes: the series’ fifth season was broadcast in 2017. However, Ray Donovan never received critical acclaim from the critics, like other antihero TV shows did, and its cultural resonance has been much more limited than other TV crime dramas such as The Shield, The Sopranos or Breaking Bad.

  5. 5.

    Schuchardt synthesizes this pessimistic genre stereotype: ‘As the subsequent history of film noir shows, there really is no such thing as a happy ending, because a happy ending cannot result from an insoluble dilemma’ (2006, 58).

  6. 6.

    Justified’s relevance can be measured by its universal critical acclaim. According to the aggregation website Metacritic, all of Justified’s seasons, with the exception of the first, obtained a critical rating superior to 84 over 100 points. Certain seasons were especially praised: season 2 was the third most critically acclaimed season of 2011 (only surpassed by Breaking Bad S4 and Homeland S1), season 3 reached the seventh position of 2012, season 4 scored fifth, and the final season, 6, also made the top ten of the year (Metacritic n.d.).

  7. 7.

    This idea of postmodernism is at the centre of the current battle of ideas and can, in fact, be considered mainstream in cultural elites and American universities. However, famous and diverse academics such as Jonathan Haidt, Steven Pinker and Jordan B. Peterson have recently denounced it. ‘The humanities—writes Pinker—have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness’ (2013, n.p.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain

    Alberto N. García

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  1. Alberto N. García
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Aalborg University, Aalborg East, Denmark

    Kim Toft Hansen

  2. Grantham College, Grantham, UK

    Steven Peacock

  3. Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Sue Turnbull

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García, A.N. (2018). The Rise of ‘Bright Noir’. 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_3

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