“When Danish television drama spread across the world it surprised both industry professionals and academics”, write Pia Majbritt Jensen and Ushma Chauhan Jacobsen in the anthology’s first chapter, “It appeared that a public broadcaster from a relatively small nation with a language spoken by only 5.6 million people had succeeded in creating what could indeed be termed ‘a peripheral counter-flow’ of television content.”
This new anthology is the first publication to consider the transnational audiences of Nordic Noir. Intended for students, researchers, and media professionals, it explores the reception of three Danish series – The Bridge, The Killing and Borgen, among global audiences by investigating how they were received in seven different countries: Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Turkey, and the UK.
“The scale of the study is truly global”, comments Pia Majbritt Jensen and Ushma Chauhan Jacobsen, and they continue:
We have used a highly innovative approach to transnational audiences insofar as we also consider distributors, buyers, and cultural intermediaries as important audiences. The anthology maps out transnational audiences and non-Anglophone content in all their complexities.
As a whole, the anthology provides insight on global-audience research in an age of multi-platform and multi-directional media flows, as well as on the complex nature of contemporary audiences located in different parts of the world.
The Global Audiences of Danish Television Drama offers a major contribution to research on Danish television drama, the international circulation of audiovisual content produced in non-Anglophone contexts, and the phenomenon of Nordic Noir.
Pia Majbritt Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism, Aarhus University.
Ushma Chauhan Jacobsen is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Aarhus University.
Karin Andén