Bron|Broen, the Pilot as Space between Cultures, and (re)negotiations of Nordic Noir
Authors: Steiner Tobias 
Published: July 2018

PREPRINT, to be published as: Steiner, Tobias (2022). “Bron|Broen, the Pilot as Space between Cultures, and (re)negotiations of Nordic Noir”. In: The Scandinavian Invasion: The Nordic Noir Phenomenon and Beyond. eds. Richard McCulloch; William Proctor. Peter Lang, (forthcoming). ------------------------------------------------------- Nordic Noir has, since the early-2000s, evolved into a globally-popular genre that now easily transcends media-specific boundaries. Television has always been at the forefront of that development: Scandinavian TV productions either turned literary successes such as the Henning Mankell novel universe of Wallander into distinct and easily-recognizable television scripts, or developed independent shows such as Forbrydelsen (DR, 2007-12), which, with foreign adaptations such as The Killing (US) (AMC/Netflix, 2011-14) – themselves grew into international format successes. The most recent wave of Nordic Noirs – including blockbuster shows like Bron/Broen [The Bridge] (DK/SWE, 2011-), Dicte (DK, 2012-), Blå ögon [Blue Eyes] (SWE, 2014), Arvingerne [The Legacy] (DK, 2014-), Frikjent [Acquitted] (NOR, 2015-), Herrens veje [Rides upon the Storm] (DK, in development) or Kongen af Danmark [The King] (DK, in development, 2017-) – continues to employ a particular Nordic Noir template. But while doing so, many of these shows also simultaneously transform Nordic Noir through processes of remaking and adaptation that become evident in examples such as Gomorrah (ITA, 2014-) and Les Témoins [Witnesses] (FR, 2015-), within correspondingly-changing generic, narrative, and locational contexts such as ‘Italian’ or ‘French Noir’. This most recent wave thus both affirms and dissolves the specificity of Nordic Noir as a genre.This chapter is particularly interested in the status that Nordic Noir as a genre has as a source for formatting within television, and the specific (re)negotiations that take place when Nordic Noir is transferred to different cultural settings. Following a brief introductory framing of Nordic Noir and its role in larger processes of the global format trade, I will use the analytic perspective of Performance Studies which, as I argue, allows for a more nuanced view on the workings behind the circulation of Nordic Noir formats in the global television business. In particular, I will employ Navarro’s understanding of format adaptation as processual ‘space between cultures’ (2012), and try to identify the onsets of this liminal space in the specific setting of the pilot. It is exactly here, I argue, where adaptation processes first become visible – processes that take a known template and rework it via narrative modulation into transcultural TV remakes.Subsequently, I will illustrate this perspective via the example of Bron/Broen, one of the recent Nordic Noir television series that has itself become a format – travelling on a global scale and thus renegotiating the meaning of Nordic Noir in a variety of cultural settings. This will be done via a comparative analysis of Bron/Broen’s pilot and two of its international iterations – The Bridge (US), and The Tunnel (FR/UK).