Small Screen IR: A Tentative Typology of Geopolitical Television. Issue 3 (27th May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Saunders, Robert A.
• Is Part Of: Geopolitics. Volume 24:Issue 3(2019)
• Page Start: 691
• Page End: 727
• Publication Date: 2019-05-27
• Subjects: Geopolitics -- Periodicals; Boundary disputes -- Periodicals; Sovereignty -- Periodicals; 320
• DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2017.1389719
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1465-0045

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Daniel Drezner recently stated: 'We live in a Golden Age of international relations programming on television'; however, while geopolitical television dramas have flourished since the new millennium, IR scholars and political geographers have paid relatively little attention, instead focusing more attention on films. Given the capacity of television series to respond to headlines from around the world, as well as cater to audience tastes, the medium provides a substantively different platform for engaging and interrogating world affairs and negotiating geopolitical realities. In this article, I will discuss the emergence of the so-called geopolitical TV or small screen IR, and examine how technological advances and social transformations have created conditions for increasingly sophisticated offerings that interrogate a wide variety of issues in world politics. Addressing the shift towards more intellectually demanding fare since 2001, I provide a brief overview of the evolution of geopolitical TV since 2001, focusing initially on American dramas such as Lost, The Wire and 24, before moving on to more recent examples of geopolitically inflected programming which include case studies from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the US. In its empirical and structural contributions, this article provides a tentative typology of the genre, classifying geopolitical television series into five distinct groups with a representative empirical case study for each: 1) exotic-irrealist ( Berlin Station ); 2) parliamentary-domestic ( Borgen ); 3) procedural-localised ( The Bridge ); 4) historical-revisionist ( Deutschland 83 ); and 5) speculative-fantastical ( Occupied ). In its normative and theoretical contributions, this article seeks to advance the study of small screen geopolitical interventions, arguing that geopolitical television series function both as a mirror/reflection of IR and an imaginative/predictive force in contemporary world politics.