‘How Could You Not Know?’: The Epistemological Precarity of The Female Detective as Mother

by: Barbara Selznick , June 14, 2021

On two occasions during the British crime serial Broadchurch (2013-2017) one mother accusingly asks another, ‘how could you not know?’ referring to terrible acts committed by their husbands. The problematic implications of this accusation masquerading as a question are that women should somehow intuitively know all of their family members’ secrets, and that women are ultimately responsible for overseeing and controlling their families’ actions. Both times this question is asked in Broadchurch the show’s female detective, Ellie Miller is involved; first, she is the person asking the question and later, she is the one being asked. The accompanying censure weighs heavily on Ellie and other female detectives in contemporary television crime dramas. The idea that women, particularly women with families, should always know, determines how television’s female investigators are expected, and allowed, to operate as both detectives and mothers.

The female police detective straddles the professional and the domestic; she must be a master of both of these worlds, drawing on sometimes-competing proficiencies and epistemological aptitudes in an attempt to uncover truths within multiple domains. The construction of these representations is, of course, shaped within an industrial ecosystem that, in an effort to meet particular goals and attract target audiences, impacts the social constructs surrounding the tensions between career and motherhood for women. To explore these connections between the industry and questions of representation of the female detective within the crime serial, this essay focuses on the first season of Broadchurch, and the single season of its U.S. remake, Gracepoint (2014). Within the post-network period of television, crime dramas, like all television genres, have been influenced by industrial, sociocultural, and stylistic shifts. Television programming in the 2000s faces myriad changes shaped by, for example, increased competition (on top of the impact already felt after the rise of cable and home video), access to more international content, and the fight for upscale viewers with money to spend on advertised products and subscription fees. As a result, a number of stylistic influences guided crime dramas of the 2010s as they aimed for distinction amidst an increasingly competitive field of entertainment options. Broadchurch and Gracepoint demonstrate how television series, in varying ways, mobilised stylistic conventions stemming especially from the contemporary interplay of melodrama, narrative complexity, and Nordic Noir. By starting with two series that share the same source material—the same story, the same characters, some of the same creative personnel—we can see how the intersection of specific industrial, stylistic, and social considerations can lead to subtle yet significant differences in the depiction of the female detective as mother.

While the incorporation of melodrama into television crime drama can be traced back to the 1980s, Jason Mittell sees narrative complexity developing on U.S. television in the 1990s, and Nordic Noir made its way into British and U.S. television series in the 2000s. All of these influences offered ways for crime dramas to stand apart from more traditional programming, and each also shaped series’ depictions of female detectives. In the 1980s, elements of melodrama were utilised in a range of genres to expand their appeal and open up procedural shows to sophisticated characterization. As more programs began to blend genres, crime series expanded to include serialised information about police officers’ personal lives and their roles within their communities, linking these programs to family melodrama. (Klinger 2018: 518) Melodrama imbued crime dramas such as the Hill Street Blues (1981-1987) and Cagney and Lacy (1982-1988) with an emotional centre that highlighted the communal nature of police work. This move toward melodrama intentionally appealed to audiences interested in layered characters, and to female viewers expected to be drawn to the emotional, family-based storylines. Lynn Joyrich notes that melodramatic crime dramas also acted to reassure audiences, because the ‘melodramatic mode, above all, expresses the desire to find true stakes of meaning, morality, and truth’. (1988: 137) The moralistic backbone of the domestic melodrama can potentially add a sense of certitude to the ethically ambiguous and confusing worlds created within crime series, a potential that operates differently within individual programs. Elements of melodrama are found within series connected to narrative complexity and Nordic Noir, both of which use the form to allow space for the depiction of both the professional and personal lives of female (and male) detectives.

Narrative complexity, introduced into television dramas in the 1990s and particularly popularised on U.S. cable television in the 2000s, embraced melodrama as a way to work against the conventions of episodic and traditional network television. As Jason Mittell explains, the ‘complexity’ of these shows touched on their stories, characters, events, and temporality. (2015: 22) In the effort to stand out from the competition in the late 1990s and 2000s, these dramas played with traditional narrative expectations within television, enhancing the serialised nature of some series, and mixing genres so that the crime drama increasingly included a focus on the personal lives of not only the police officers, but also the criminals. The eliding of hero and villain, in the form of the antihero, was perhaps one of most notable changes within the early 2000s. Programs featured characters like The Sopranos’ (1999-2007) crime boss Tony Soprano or Breaking Bad’s (2008-2013) Walter White, who behaved in ways deemed traditionally non-heroic, who were ‘unsympathetic, morally questionable, or villainous figures, nearly always male.’ (Mittell 2015: 142) In complex crime dramas, melodrama’s sense of morality is challenged as the characters (antiheroes) often push up against the series’ established ideas of right and wrong. (Mittell 2015: 134) Even shows that include the police officers as protagonists, such as The Shield (2002-2008) and The Wire (2002-2008), generate tensions and ambiguities around the characters’ morality, through the frequent incorporation of antiheroes as well as an often grim view of society.

Female detectives fit uncomfortably into this world, despite the melodramatic leanings toward a focus on family. In general, female characters did not develop as antiheroes in quite the same way as male characters, often losing their moral high ground not by being outwardly villainous, but by focusing on career over family. Nancy Botwin in Weeds (2005-2012), Sarah Linden in The Killing (2011-2014) and Elizabeth Jennings in The Americans (2013-2018) all put work before their children, becoming what Suzanna Walters and Laura Harrison identify as ‘aberrant mothers,’ perhaps even bad mothers. (Walters & Harrison 2012: 51) Unlike the doting and indulgent mothers often seen on U.S. television, these mothers ‘are certainly neglectful and often disengaged from their children. Motherhood is, rather, narratively secondary. In other words, her identity as a woman—and as a character—is not wholly determined by her behaviour as a mother’. (Walters & Harrison 2012: 48) Female characters in the morally murky world of the narratively complex drama face a complicated future, both at home and within the police force.

Narratively complex crime series problematise the representation of female detectives as mother in ways different to those seen in shows heavily influenced by Nordic Noir. Much has been written about the emergence and international success of the Nordic Noir, or the Scandinavian Drama, which includes a range of texts from diverse media including literary crime fiction, films, and television shows.^[1] Programs such as Wallander (2005-2013) from Sweden, Forbrydelsen (2007-2012) from Denmark and the Swedish-Danish co-production Bron/Broen (2011-2018) all aired internationally, to great acclaim. The style of these shows has been described as melancholic and slow, featuring, as Glen Creeber writes, ‘bleak naturalism, disconsolate locations and morose detectives’. (2015: 22) These qualities, along with the use of sorrowful music, highlight narratives that layer on top of a single mystery which unravels over the course of several episodes, an exploration of moral, social, and ethical issues. (Creeber 2015: 28) The shows often feature mismatched detectives representing different sensibilities, who must learn to work together. Importantly, Nordic Noir explores human nature and, in the end, embraces humanist values of community, empathy, and understanding. As Creeber notes, Nordic Noir ‘reveals an intensely complex and divided world that can only be healed through a combination of tolerance and cooperation’. (2015: 24) In this way, Nordic Noir series frequently reaffirm melodrama’s moralistic and humanist qualities. This celebration of community potentially opens up space for a rounder depiction of the female detective as mother. Janet McCabe writes that within these shows, female detectives, while retaining some similarities to earlier representations, are more ‘psychologically complex and inherently more flawed and contradictory’ than previous female police officers on television. (2015: 30) While the casting and costuming of these roles—they are generally stylishly dressed, thin, and blond—creates a particular visual ideal for women (McCabe 2015: 42), the female detectives in Forbrydelsen and Bron/Broen also question traditional gender stereotypes, as their socially awkward personalities are set against those of their male partners who are better able to connect emotionally with witnesses and victims. (Turnbull 2014: 183) The post-feminist assumption of gender equity found in these shows (Turnbull 2014: 181), which also includes the freedom to cast off stereotypes of women as nurturing and emotional, raises questions about how female detectives function as career women within larger social frameworks.

Kathleen McHugh identifies the ‘gender inversion’ found in transnational crime shows of the 2000s as uniquely influenced by the intersection of melodrama, Nordic Noir, and narrative complexity. (2018: 538) The representations of the female detective/mother that reflect shifting representations of gender offer insight into ‘how the figure of the professional woman has become such a pervasive focus of conflictual and often highly emotional discourses of power and femininity’. (McElroy 2019: 89) Neo-liberal post-feminism of the 21^st century idealises the ‘balanced woman’ who successfully navigates both family and career. (Orgad 2016: 167) In the process of finding this balance, the domestic and the public merge, both at home and at work, as evidenced by the ways that structures of knowledge and the demonstration of skill function for professional women, both in society and on television. Angela McRobbie observes that domestic work has been imbued with an expected level of qualified expertise. Women have been tasked with ‘managing’ the family, the role of ‘housewife’ being reinvented as a professional position that is valuable and rewarding. (2013: 130) Families, McRobbie observes, are run with the efficiency of small businesses, with the ‘professional mother to stage-manage and oversee the success of this kind of family enterprise’. (2013: 131) Mothers have additionally been given the responsibility for family members’ moral development. (McRobbie 2013: 135) In this collapse of professional woman and mother ‘the ‘new momism’ idealises mothers, holding them to impossible standards, while simultaneously blaming them for every misstep and wrong turn of their progeny’. (Walters and Harrison 2012: 39) Mothers, therefore, are expected to ‘know,’ and to some extent control, what is going on in their families. The inevitable outcome of this is, as we see in Broadchurch, mothers being held accountable not just for the crimes of their family members, but also for their own ignorance of these crimes.

Just as the skills of the professional world were incorporated into the domestic, ‘many of the supposedly private, emotional competencies thought of as familial and domestic come to be required of modern workers’. (McElroy 2019: 90) Skills such as compassion, empathy, and collaboration, traditionally associated with women and the domestic sphere, are increasingly valued within the professional environment, further blending the expectations of women in their professional and private worlds. This integration of the private and the public is complicated within crime dramas, where the skill sets associated with the domestic sphere have stereotypically fit more problematically alongside the competencies idealised for investigators. The intellectual abilities associated with police work—objectivity, rationality, and autonomy—were traditionally connected to men, while women’s knowledge was often seen as instinctual, subjective, and emotional. These representations diminished feminist ways of knowing, while also positioning women as less trustworthy in circumstances that required objectivity. (Code 1991: 29) Feminist critiques of assumptions about ‘maternal thinking’ (Code 1991: 89) demonstrated that popular notions of the skills and knowledge required to be a ‘good’ mother were assumed to be incongruent with mainstream standards of objectivity expected in law enforcement.

Crime dramas of the 1980s, with their increased representation of female police officers, generally reflected (at least in some ways) second wave feminist critiques that supported the perception of women’s abilities as rational. These women could be objective and autonomous—in other words, good detectives—because they severed their connections to feminine preoccupations such as their families and their appearance, as well as feminine modes of knowledge reliant on subjectivity, emotionality, instinct, and kinship. (Hagelin & Silverman 2017: 859) These depictions, however, continue to draw lines between different schemas of thinking/knowing and who has access to them. Contemporary postfeminist crime dramas, as many scholars have demonstrated, attempt to erase these categorisations of knowing in their representations of both men and women who exhibit equal access to the epistemological forms that had traditionally been characterised as either masculine or feminine. The push toward more complex and well-rounded characters essential to both Nordic Noir and narrative complexity, along with the incorporation of melodrama, encouraged the production of television series in which all characters—men and women—are shaped by their emotional experiences and their communal ties.

Importantly, within this new paradigm, female detectives in more recent series are increasingly depicted as both professional and feminine; they can be objective and empathetic, rely on evidence and intuition, and they can be autonomous while still maintaining connections to family and community. As seen in shows such as The Killing, The Fall (2013-2016), and Top of the Lake (2013-2017), the female police officer’s life experiences as a family member, detective, and, most problematically, victim of trauma, create what Lindsay Steenberg calls an ‘alternative epistemology,’ which ties her ability to solve crimes to both her expertise as an investigator and her emotional connection to the crime. (2013: 63-64) Female detectives, McHugh explains, do not just use evidence, they feel it, mobilising what she calls ‘felt knowledge,’ ‘the psychological and emotional sensations generated by empathetic identification with victims and killers’. (2018: 537-539) And Lisa Coulthard observes how music is frequently used in recent transnational crime dramas to demonstrate the emotion behind the thinking work done by female detectives. Mobilising ‘feeling-thinking’ music, these shows ‘transform knowledge into affective epistemology’ (Coulthard 2018: 558) that depicts ‘female knowledge-making as a tortured, irrational, and psychologically inflected process’. (Coulthard 2018: 564)

Coulthard, in common with other scholars, explores how the competent female detective’s access to all forms of knowledge is reliant on her victimisation. Some researchers find feminist power in the fact that these detectives are able to use their trauma to connect with victims and solve crimes. (Horeck 2018: 572) More problematically, ‘in representing professional investigators as always already victimised, crime stories … suggest that women must somehow be psychologically damaged in order to be investigators, or, by extension, professionals of any kind’. (Steenberg 2013: 63) In effect, these representations potentially mark the female detective as ‘epistemically untrustworthy’ (Scheman 1995: 184), limiting the reliability of her knowledge. Even the postfeminist female detective, who is granted access to all forms of expertise and experience—whose representation is no longer limited by either the notion that women’s knowledge is all subjectively instinctual or the preconception that, to be successful, women have to surrender empathy—is still the subject of doubt and suspicion. The female detective ‘represents the focal point for postfeminist anxieties around the career woman’ (Steenberg 2013: 59) and, because of her instability, must herself be observed and investigated by both her co-workers and her family. (Steenberg 2013: 57; McHugh 2018: 545)

Female detectives remain in an almost untenable position. While their postfeminist representations appear more expansive and inclusive, they still potentially question the ability of women to successfully navigate the postfeminist world. Their access to objective, rational knowledge, and their perceptions of the world and of evidence, is intertwined with emotion, subjectivity, empathy, and instinct, all of which is then tied to their positions as victims of trauma. Impacted by their industrial goals and stylistic influences, Broadchurch and its U.S. remake, Gracepoint, demonstrate how this precarity is embodied within the female detective as mother in ways that still reflect the interests and concerns of the industrial ecosystems in which the series are created.

A critically acclaimed and highly popular crime drama, Broadchurch centres on the murder of a young boy in a small, coastal town in the UK. Chris Chibnall was the creator and showrunner of the series, which starred David Tennant and Olivia Colman. The program ran for three seasons on ITV. As many viewers noted, Broadchurch, though ostensibly about the process of catching a murderer, was really an exploration of social structures such as family, community, the church, and the media. And, at the heart of all of these issues are the series’ mothers: Ellie, played by Colman, the detective who works with Tennant’s Alec Hardy to solve the murder, and Beth, played by Jodie Whittaker, the mother of the murdered boy. Both popular and academic critics noted that Broadchurch’s ‘core is undeniably mothers’ (Garner 2013) and ‘in the end, Broadchurch is Ellie’s story’. (Turnbull 2015: 713) In fact, Ross Garner explains that the decision to reveal the killer early in the last episode allows time for the narrative to focus on the more important emotional fallout of Ellie discovering that her own husband, Joe, killed Danny. (2013) Ellie’s centrality within the story is highlighted at the beginning of this essay. She questions a witness, who claims she never knew that her husband was sexually abusing their daughter, placing the burden of moral authority on the mother by asking with disbelief, ‘how could you not know?’ Later, Ellie becomes the investigated, as she is asked how she could not have known that her husband was a murderer. Ellie’s shifting position within the narrative—she is a career woman and a mother, the voice of authority and a trusted member of the community, and she is both the investigator and the investigated—must be understood in the context of Broadchurch’s industrial and stylistic context.

In 2013, ITV went through a process of rebranding. Garner explains that the network attempted to increase its cultural cache to reach beyond its standard audience of older viewers and women. (2013) As part of this process, ITV rethought its slate of crime dramas, both in terms of the actual programs and how it marketed them. A commercial network with a public service remit, ITV aimed to draw a broad audience, but, Garner notes, the networks’ viewers were actually disproportionally female and in their mid-thirties. (2013) These viewers were supposedly drawn to ITV’s melodramatic crime dramas, often described as ‘nice’ and ‘safe’. (Garner 2013) The rebrand of ITV in 2013 looked to grow this audience by attracting a more upscale demographic, with an emphasis on strong acting, aesthetic stylisation, and emotional realism. (Garner 2013) ITV, however, was not prepared to abandon its core audience by severing its long association with melodrama or crime drama. So, while Broadchurch’s marketing campaign worked to ‘draw more discriminating viewers’ and build a ‘younger, more upscale audience,’ ITV also wanted to maintain the ‘mass audience’. (Clarke 2013) The result of these efforts is what Jonathan Nichols-Pethick explained as the use of melodramatic affect to service the emotional and psychological realism of the crime series (2012: 109-110)—what Garner labelled ‘quality melodrama’. (2013) ITV’s melodramatic crime dramas, then, were infused with a sense of distinction, which was achieved in the case of Broadchurch through an association with Nordic Noir.^[2]

Broadchurch mobilises stylistic components of Nordic Noir, including the focus on landscape, a soundtrack by an Icelandic musician, the use of mismatched detectives, and a slow-paced emphasis on emotion and psychology, while raising larger social, moral, and ethical questions. The series’ employment of qualities associated with Nordic Noir, however, was tempered by its concessions to ITV’s loyal viewers accustomed to the network’s crime melodramas.^[3] The integration of Nordic Noir and melodrama designed to appeal to a broad audience without alienating the network’s core viewers of older women, results in female characters less reflective of the postfeminist, emotionally stunted, work-focused women of earlier Nordic Noir series like Forbrydelsen and Bron/Broen. The women—particularly the mothers—of Broadchurch are primarily, and more stereotypically, emotionally aware, and deeply embedded in family and community. The series’ melodramatic emphasis on family and emotions combines with the Nordic Noir-esque explorations of human nature to focus on people’s access to knowledge—their ability to understand other people, perceive the truth, and comprehend what is right. Characters long for knowledge (who killed Danny?), question what they think they know (did Hardy really bungle a previous investigation?), and wonder at their ability to know (as Hardy says in the last episode, ‘you can never really know what goes on inside someone else’s heart’). Ellie, in particular, navigates the different structures of knowledge in her roles as detective and mother, one of which relies on community experience and social relations, and another which values objectivity and autonomy. In her difficulty forming and living with this new ‘alternative epistemology,’ Ellie demonstrates the complexities that exist for the postfeminist career woman.

As a professional woman, Ellie is searching for balance at work and at home. As the series opens, all appears to be under control as Ellie returns from vacation expecting to receive a promotion, and her husband Joe, a former paramedic, stays home to care for their two sons. But this balance is tested when her son’s best friend Danny is murdered. The investigation is led by Hardy, the man who got Ellie’s anticipated promotion, a seemingly burnt-out detective with a secret heart condition. Hardy’s cold cynicism stands in stark contrast to Ellie’s emotional connection with the town and her ‘softer’ more maternal manner. The clash between these mismatched partners is set up when they first meet at the crime scene. Ellie, recognising Danny’s body, becomes distraught. Hardy replies, ‘Shut it down. We’re working a case now.’ Throughout the first few episodes, Hardy repeatedly instructs Ellie to reign in her emotions, glaring at her, for example, when she reassures the dead boy’s family. Ellie makes assumptions about the investigation based on her knowledge of the town and its residents, repeatedly refusing to entertain people as suspects because she knows them. She tells Hardy that none of the family could have committed the crime because ‘they’re not that kind of family’ (to which he replies, ‘no one is’). Hardy frequently chastises Ellie for stating theories about the crime based on friendship and sentimentality, telling her that she ‘needs to look at the evidence in front of her.’ Yet, he is also disposed to use Ellie’s understanding of the community to help the investigation. Early on, he asks her, ‘You know this town; who’s the most likely?’ In group situations—public meetings, church services, a funeral—Hardy encourages Ellie to look for people behaving differently. Initially, Ellie bristles against Hardy’s attempts to, as she says ‘mold her,’ as we see in the second episode:

Hardy: You have to learn not to trust and look at the community from the outside.

Ellie: I can’t be outside of it and I don’t want to be.

Hardy: If you can’t be objective, you’re not the right fit.

Ellie: No, I am the right fit; it’s you who’s not the right fit.

In this example, set in Hardy’s office using a shot/countershot pattern that keeps the characters in separate frames, the detectives’ need for objectivity is connected to autonomy from the community. In order to see the truth, Ellie must disconnect from her friends and fellow Broadchurch residents, and eye them with suspicion. She makes this shift throughout the series as she slowly adopts Hardy’s techniques. Standing outside of the town church in episode four, in a low-angled, medium-long shot that now frames the two characters together, Ellie tells Hardy ‘I hate what I’m becoming.’ He questions her, ‘A good detective?’ and she responds, ‘Hardened.’ Here, again, a good detective is implied to be one separate from their emotions, who can turn off their feelings.

Ellie’s pursuit of objective knowledge is driven home in the penultimate episode of the season when, as Hardy’s illness is revealed, she takes control of the investigation. In an interrogation, Ellie, no longer crying during suspect interviews, threatens to have an uncooperative witness’ dog ‘put down’ if she does not answer questions. Ellie is indeed ‘hardened’ by her decision to pursue the truth. Her mobilisation of this alternative epistemology—of her access to truth that is shaped by evidence, as well as her subjective position within the community—results in a subtle questioning of her proficiency as a mother. Ellie’s certainty in her family begins to unravel when she learns in the sixth episode that Joe had taken their son Tom paintballing without her knowledge. And viewers—along with Hardy—are informed by the local minister (who also runs the school’s computer club) that Tom and Danny had a physical altercation. The minister explains that he contacted the parents, but it is made clear that Ellie never knew about it. Ellie even goes so far as to apply her newly acquired suspicious nature to her son, when she reluctantly admits to Hardy that she does not believe Tom when he claims his laptop was stolen.

Ellie’s crisis of knowledge comes to a head when Joe, the one person she never suspected, is revealed as the murderer. Here Ellie becomes more like other postfeminist detectives on television, in that she is now seen as a traumatised victim and, in this position, becomes the subject of suspicion. More than once, Hardy defends Ellie to others, clarifying that she did not know about her husband’s crime and did not compromise the investigation. She is separated from her community and forced to move into a nearby motel as her home becomes a crime scene. And she is shamed and rejected by the dead boy’s mother. That Ellie’s husband turns out to be the murderer, and that she could not see this truth—either as a wife/mother or as an investigator—raises questions about the neoliberal post-feminist ideal of balance. In her focus on work, she missed discovering essential facts about her family, including that her husband was unfulfilled. Joe rationalises his secret meetings with Danny (that he claims, and the series asks us to believe, were not, physically sexual), saying ‘I wanted something that was mine. Ellie had her job; Tom does his own thing. But Danny … I felt like he needed me.’^[4] The balance that Ellie found between her work and home life was at the expense of her husband, and the show only narrowly avoids blaming Danny’s death on Joe’s role as a househusband. Ellie, meanwhile, in her formation of a schema of knowledge that could serve her as both an investigator and a mother, finds herself cast out by a community which no longer has a place for her.

True to its melodramatic bent, Broadchurch’s first season ends with an emotional focus on its mothers, while remaining connected to its Nordic Noir influence with its emphasis on style, psychology, community, and location. Ellie ends her story, at least in this first season, on a bench with Hardy, in front of the Broadchurch landscape while her former friends, including even her son, are seen in the distant background celebrating Danny’s life with a torch lighting. Within the moral landscape of Broadchurch, Ellie remains a ‘good’ character: the ‘bad’ murderer is in prison, and the season ends on a note of hope and salvation as Danny’s nuclear family is bathed in the warm glow of support. Nevertheless, Ellie is separated from her beloved community and her family due to her attempts—and failure—to achieve balance. This ending highlights the difficulties Broadchurch faced in its integration of Nordic Noir and melodrama as it tried to appeal to its target audience, offering an ending that could be read from multiple perspectives. Ellie may now be seen as a fully formed postfeminist detective, a victim of trauma whose betrayal by her husband gave her access to the felt knowledge that allows her to be a stronger detective, more independent and confident in her position as both a woman and a professional. Or, in the series’ suggestion that Ellie’s focus on work drove her husband to murder a young boy, she may truly be the victim of a crime series that offers ‘postfeminist lip-service to feminist issues as a disguise for pre-feminist scorn’. (Jermyn 2017: 271)

Even though Broadchurch aired in the U.S. on BBC America, Fox quickly adapted the series. Gracepoint lasted for one season on Fox, airing in the Fall of 2014, with Dan Futterman and Anya Epstein serving as showrunners. David Tennant recreated his original role, and he was paired with Anna Gunn as the female lead. The series followed the same story as Broadchurch—the murder of a young boy in a small town—but was set in a coastal town in Northern California.^[5] Gracepoint’s producers acknowledged the difficulties of staying true to the critically and commercially successful original while still creating a new show. (Littleton 2014) To try to hold on to the elements that made Broadchurch successful, the U.S. producers brought on some of the same creative team, including Tennant, for the remake. ^[6] Producers also promised viewers a different narrative experience by expanding the series to ten episodes (from Broadchurch’s eight) to include additional story elements. And, to ensure a sense of suspense for those who had already seen Broadchurch, audiences were also guaranteed a different ending. The process of reshaping Broadchurch for a U.S. audience, informed by the industrial goals at Fox and the increased stylistic influences of U.S. cable’s complex crime dramas, resulted in variations within Gracepoint’s depiction of the detective/mother.

As a foreign show that aired on BBC America, the audience for Broadchurch in the U.S. was, according to The Hollywood Reporter, ‘negligible’. (O’Connell 2014) By adapting the show with a U.S. setting and (mostly) American actors, Fox hoped to attract a new and larger audience to the series. (Turnbull 2015: 710) Most importantly, however, a remake of Broadchurch fit into the vision for the network advanced by Kevin Reilly, the newly promoted Chairman of Entertainment at Fox. Reilly, who had been with the network since 2007, assumed the chairmanship in 2012, just as the network’s ratings began to decline. Before then, with Reilly’s assistance, Fox had been number one amongst the broadcast networks with the coveted 18-49-year-old demographic. (Kissel 2013) However, as American Idol’s (2002-2016) popularity waned, the network’s ratings fell. Reilly decided to take Fox in a new direction in order to increase male viewership . (Kissell 2013) To make this move, Reilly drew on the network’s past as an upstart, edgy network in the 1980s. He noted that ‘Fox was the challenger to cable before there was cable’. (Belloni & Rose 2013) Now he wanted to take on cable again, by moving away from the traditional development process that focused on a pilot season and fall premieres. Instead, Reilly touted complete series pick-ups, particularly of limited series with 10-13 episodes. (Levine 2013) He said in 2013, ‘[w]e’re going to emulate the HBO model, which will be high-end, big in scope and epic productions. They will have movie stars and top notch talent’. (Levine 2013) Reilly, then, looked to ‘upscale’ the network’s offerings with content that appealed to selective viewers, preferably men. But, as the head of a broadcast network, Reilly still displayed a sense of caution. For source material, Reilly looked to pre-sold ideas with creators who had proven records.^[7] A successful British series like Broadchurch offered a strong template for a limited series. Furthermore, Broadchurch was co-produced by Kudos, a company then owned by the Shine Group, which was itself owned by News Corp, Fox’s parent company. Gracepoint, in turn, was co-produced by the News Corp-owned Shine America. With only a few adjustments, then, Gracepoint—modeled on critically acclaimed, company-owned intellectual property—could fit into Fox’s new strategy of straight to series pick-ups that would allow the network to compete with the quality content on cable while growing the male audience.

Complex narratives on cable television, such as The Sopranos, Mad Men (2007-2015), and The Shield, blend genres while playing with viewer expectations. The critical and popular success of these shows influenced many of the dramas created for broadcast television, but even more so the programs that aired on Fox during Reilly’s tenure. Gracepoint’s adaptation of Broadchurch drew on the qualities associated with complex dramas, made immediately evident by the show’s casting of Anna Gunn, best known—and often intensely criticised—for her role on the ultimate complex narrative, Breaking Bad. At times, the show’s new style works against the original’s connection with Nordic Noir. For example, tone is sacrificed for pace as Gracepoint tightens up scenes, lingering for shorter spans of time on character reactions or landscapes, in order to pack in additional story elements and characters.^[8] Gracepoint also strengthens the role of the male leads, portraying them as somewhat more threatening than they are in Broadchurch. Danny’s father, Mark, and Paul, the town priest, are both conceived as darker characters, with Mark displaying tendencies toward violence, and Paul demonstrating an uncomfortable romantic interest in Beth. And Tennant’s character, here renamed Emmet Carver, although still depicted as ‘good,’ is more closely aligned with the antihero as he is more volatile, yelling at reporters and pushing suspects. One Canadian reviewer describes Carver as ‘more seedy, cynical and inscrutable. That’s the American touch—add another layer of pointless enigma to the cop’. (Doyle 2014) Additionally, while Broadchurch demonstrates Hardy’s complicated relationship with his daughter through phone calls, she actually visits Gracepoint for seemingly no other reason than to paint Carver as an inattentive parent who cares more about work than his family. Demonstrating the importance of melodrama, this increased focus on Carver’s personal life makes him a more morally ambiguous character within the series.

Just as Tennant’s character is revised to be more similar to the antiheroes found on cable television, Gracepoint’s Ellie is also a different kind of mother and detective. Gunn’s performance as Ellie was one of the main points of comparison raised by reviewers of the series. While some praised it, others were more critical—not necessarily of Gunn’s acting, but of her embodiment of the role.^[9] One critic, in negatively comparing the shows, explained that

[w]hat’s particularly odd is the core relationship between Tennant’s character and his resentful sidekick. In Broadchurch the sidekick was DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman), an unglamorous woman, who isn’t a bad police officer, but one who knows the locals too well to be skeptical. Here the sidekick is still called Ellie but is played by Anna Gunn, who was stunningly good as Skyler on Breaking Bad. This Ellie is distinctly more glamorous and shrewder as a cop. The tense dynamic of the original is undermined. (Doyle 2014)

Gracepoint adds a rougher edge to Ellie that questions her principles, a change in character predicated on what she knows and how she knows, as both a detective and a mother. Gunn’s Ellie, as Doyle notes, is tougher than Colman’s incarnation, fighting back against Carver and arguing for her competence, telling him, as he barks out orders early on in the series, ‘Yeah, I think we all know how to do it’ or, in a later episode, sarcastically saying, ‘Yeah, I knew nothing before you came into my life.’ This Ellie is more likely to ‘lean in’ and demand respect, a self-confidence that is mirrored in her appearance. In comparison to Colman’s shorter, dark-haired, and sometimes rumpled Ellie, Gunn’s character is tall, thin, and blond, with styled hair and well-fitted clothes. This Ellie is more composed and less outraged at the idea of suspecting people she knows. If Colman’s Ellie is reminiscent of the pre-feminist period in her lack of confidence and her maternal representation, Gunn’s character appears more in line with an older feminist model of career woman who is confident in her abilities, but still unable to get ahead—or perhaps even the postfeminist detective who has already embraced her range of fluencies and skills. As a result, Ellie’s journey from compassionate insider to suspecting outsider, from subjective community member to objective investigator, is less pronounced. Toward the end of the series, in the scene in which Colman’s Ellie angrily threatens to put down a witness’ dog, Gunn’s Ellie calmly offers a more roundabout warning that the dog ‘could be put down and that would make us all feel terrible’. Here we do not see a strong transition in character from weak to strong; if anything, Ellie seems softer as she mobilises feminine expectations that she is caring and nurturing to manipulate the witness.

Ellie’s depiction in Gracepoint as more competent and secure at work—she knows, or at least claims to know, how to investigate and remain objective—is not necessarily mirrored at home. Although on Gracepoint, Ellie is not blindsided by the news that Tom went paintballing, or that Tom and Danny fought, she does not know her son’s ultimate secret: that he, in fact, accidentally killed Danny while trying to protect him from Joe. Ellie is being deceived by not just one member of her family but two, making her even more of a failure at overseeing their moral development. But Ellie’s ineptitude on Gracepoint is centralised more around her son than her husband. While on Broadchurch, Joe claims his relationship with Danny was fueled by his desire to have something of his own, a failure that could have perhaps been solved within the family, on Gracepoint, Joe’s intensions are explicitly sexual, marking him as innately damaged beyond Ellie’s ability to repair. Tom, on the other hand, yearns for his mother’s attention, and would perhaps have confessed to her if she had spent more time with him. Tom repeatedly talks about missing his mother while she works on Danny’s murder case, and even tries to track down a potential suspect because, he says, ‘I wanted my mom back’.^[10] Ellie’s lack of presence eventually leads to a lack of knowledge, as Tom yells at Ellie, ‘You don’t even know anything about me anymore!’

In the end, it is Ellie who actually solves the case. While Carver believes that Joe—who has confessed—is the killer, Ellie deduces that it was not her husband who killed Danny, but her son. While informing Tom that his father was arrested for Danny’s murder, she intuitively realises that something is wrong with his reaction. The camera lingers on her concerned face intercut with flashbacks to pieces of evidence being discussed (by the men). The combination of motherly instinct and evidence leads Ellie to the truth. One critic celebrated this ending:

[t]he new ending also means that Ellie is the one who really solves the crime, not Carver, making her into the hero that we always knew she was. In America, she’s not a victim of the man in her life who committed this crime, nor is she dimmer than her arrogant new boss. It also shows a much stronger and deeper resolution about what happens when the truth comes out. (Moylan 2014)

That Ellie ultimately solves the case makes her both respectable at work and questionable at home. How did she not know that both her husband and her son were hiding crimes? The added tension of involving Tom in the murder enables her moral lapse when she decides to cover up her son’s crime. Now that Ellie has access to this knowledge, she chooses to hide it—but she is doing so to protect her son. This conflict pushes at the clear morality of melodrama, but does so by questioning the epistemological limits of the detective/mother. She may be questioned for her role as a career woman whose son feels abandoned with a horrifying secret, but once she puts all of the pieces together by integrating the evidence with her ‘natural’ understanding of emotion, she uses all of her skills to protect her child. Here, Ellie is not depicted as a traumatised victim, because she puts aside her pain and takes action for Tom.

Gracepoint, however, does not give us much time to reflect on Ellie and her future, as the show quickly repositions us back to Carver’s character. Having spoken, and seemingly reconciled, with his daughter, we watch as Carver also figures out that Tom is the killer. He does this through a seemingly random decision to replay an interview with Tom and Joe that he recorded on his phone. Carver replays one section of the interview repeatedly, recognizing that Tom’s wording, and a look exchanged between the two, indicate that Tom knew more than he was saying. Carver’s realization is based on visual and aural evidence that he gathered and possesses. Surrounded in darkness in a close up, he calls Ellie. These shots are intercut with images of Ellie, also in darkness, watching Tom sleep. Ellie declines Carver’s call, and the last shot of the series is a close up of Carver’s face stalking toward the camera. The male detective is on the move ready to seek out justice. In Broadchurch, Ellie’s family is shattered, but she is morally vindicated, as she ends the season sitting on a bench with Hardy. The series as a whole concludes with the image of Danny’s family united on the beach, and a feeling of redemption and love that reflect the hopefulness often espoused in Nordic Noir. Gracepoint changes the show’s ‘final word,’ adding Carver’s realization to the end of the episode. After we see Danny’s family on the beach, we conclude with Carver’s talk with his daughter, and his ultimate solution of the crime. The series ends not with the strength of the unified family, but with Ellie’s family under threat. The stylistic elements of the complex drama that resist hope and clarity win out as the series ends with a new enigma (‘what will Carver do to Tom?’) and Ellie emerges as a morally ambiguous character who may use the power of her knowledge to protect her family outside of the law. In the end, Gracepoint becomes Carver’s story, and while Ellie may not be as much of a victim as she appears to be at the end of Broadchurch, she is also no longer the central character. The need to investigate her is not metaphorical but literal, as she becomes, potentially, Carver’s new adversary.

While we get the opportunity to continue Ellie’s story on Broadchurch, as the series continues for another two seasons, the same is not true of Gracepoint, which, arguably, left us with more of a cliffhanger regarding Ellie’s fate. Reilly’s experiment at Fox was deemed a failure, and he resigned in May 2015. There are arguments to be made about how successful Broadchurch and Gracepoint each were at helping their networks redefine their brands in their adaptation of particular televisual styles for their own industrial purposes. This analysis demonstrates that in these efforts, the depictions of the detectives/mothers differed in ways that offer insight into ‘how the figure of the professional woman has become such a pervasive focus of conflictual and often highly emotional discourses of power and femininity’. (McElroy 2019: 89) Created within the industrial and social climates of their time, these series drew on particular stylistic modes, generic conventions, and social expectations to reveal potentially progressive and problematic images of postfeminist women, and the precarity of their positions in the professional and domestic spheres.

Notes

[1] As Glen Creeber notes, Nordic Noir tv series were themselves influenced by early complex dramas such as Twin Peaks (1990-1991), Murder One (1995-1997), and The X-Files (1993-2002). (2015: 23)

[2] Eva Redvall notes that Nordic Noir series such as Forbrydelsen and Bron were seen as niche content in the UK. (2016: 346)

[3]Les Roberts, for example, argues that Broadchurch’s use of the stylistic elements of Nordic Noir, particularly its focus on landscape, is superficial.

[4] Joe, and the show, disregard that he was also caring for the family’s baby who probably also ‘needed’ Joe.

[5] The series was actually shot in Canada, and, according to Sue Turnbull, images of the beachfront cliffs were computer-generated. (2015: 711)

[6] Broadchurch’s writer/showrunner Chris Chibnall served as a consultant for Gracepoint, and also wrote the first episode. James Strong directed several episodes of both series.

[7] For example, Reilly picked up the limited series Wayward Pines (2015-2016) based on the successful book series, with a pilot directed by M. Night Shyamalan and began (but never completed) development of a Civil War limited series by Bruce McKenna who wrote Band of Brothers (2001). He also brought Gotham (2014-2019) to Fox.

[8] Deborah Jermyn observes that this same type of change was made in the U.S. version of Prime Suspect (Prime Suspect USA, 2011-2012), which moved away from the original’s ‘leisurely’ pace. (2019: 192)

[9] As noted above, this may have been related to the very conflicted reactions that many viewers and reviewers had to Gunn’s character in Breaking Bad.

[10] Although he claims he was trying to solve the case, it is more likely that Tom, as Danny’s actual killer, was planning to plant evidence on the innocent suspect.