Everybody Needs Some Bodies: Familial Teams and Individual-Communal Tensions in Early-00s British Television Crime Series at the Intersection of Post-Feminism and Post-Television

Khorikian, Anousch Loucine

Abstract

Familial teams were a pronounced and novel trend in 00s British crime series, with nearly 18% employing a structure wherein multi-protagonist teams display nuclear family-like bonding and dynamics, informing patterns within an individual episode, and narration across episodes. This thesis demonstrates that these previously-unexamined familial investigative team structures are a particularly noteworthy and adaptive phenomenon in a 00s context of post-televisual competition and post-feminist contradictoriness as they are especially suited to generating, maintaining, and manipulating an ideological ambiguity central to sustaining a series‘ broad appeal.
To examine this 'broad-appeal ambiguity', this thesis creates an analytical framework for longitudinal close textual analysis, synthesising the formulaic crime genre conventions, 00s televisual aesthetics, and gender discourses, that interact in the familial investigative team structure. It proposes two tripartite crime formulae to capture an episode‘s tensions between individuals and team communality, and concomitant formal and ideological implications, combining televisual concepts with a new concept for relational gender analysis, 'familiality'. This is applied across the runs of three case study series of different subgeneric inflections and lengths in which the familial investigative team structure was especially pronounced – Silent Witness (1996- ), Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010), and Spooks (2002-2011).
Thus, this thesis reveals the complex developments of investigative teams used to maintain a broad appeal over time. It, moreover, finds a commonality in how the series move towards the traditional and misogynist in endings, highlighting the interrelation between the untraditional investigative workplace familiality and the development and maintenance of broad-appeal ambiguity. Findings such as these demonstrate the value of longitudinal form-and-ideology-synthesising close textual analysis. They, furthermore, shift attention away from a predominant focus on the individual/individualism in existing British crime drama research, towards a recognition that examinations of televisual engagements with popular neo-liberalism require an emphasis on the interrelation of the individual and the communal.

Citation

Khorikian, A. L. (2020). Everybody Needs Some Bodies: Familial Teams and Individual-Communal Tensions in Early-00s British Television Crime Series at the Intersection of Post-Feminism and Post-Television. (Thesis). University of Hull. https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4922443

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: Nov 22, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 30, 2025
• Keywords: Screen ; Film studies
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4922443
• Additional Information: Film studies; School of the Arts (Screen); University of Hull
• Award Date: Oct 29, 2020