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The crime drama Broadchurch (2013-2017), written by Chris Chibnall,1 is one of the most popular and celebrated TV series of this decade in the United Kingdom, a “national obsession” (Billen/Jackson), with viewing figures reaching up to ten million (see Lawson). Set in the fictional, small, coastal town of Broadchurch in Dorset,2 the series begins with the murder of eleven-year-old Danny Latimer and the subsequent investigation led by the two detectives Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller (David Tennant and Olivia Colman), which ends in the revelation that Ellie’s own husband killed the boy. After a very successful and critically acclaimed first season, Broadchurch was perceived to go downhill and degenerate into “Boredchurch” (Hardy) in the second, which combined the general whodunit-structure of the series (the investigation of a new or rather old case, set in the town of Sandbrook) with elements of courtroom drama, revisiting the details of Danny’s death while his murderer is being tried in court. The third and final series re-established its position as a “landmark” (Lawson) TV production and transferred the whodunit-structure to a rape case as Alec and Ellie investigate the sexual assault on Trish Winterman (Julie Hasmondhalgh) during the birthday party of her friend.3 Critics generally agreed that Broadchurch owes its success to a combination of stunning scenery (the Dorset cliffs and beaches) and a high-quality cast, with particular emphasis on the lead roles of the two detectives Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller, played by David Tennant and Olivia Colman. In addition, Billen and Jackson in a review in the Times call the town Broadchurch itself the “third co-star”. The series derives its intriguing atmosphere and gripping plot from the contrast between a small, picturesque English seaside town with a close-knit community and the crimes that disrupt the town’s peaceful life. The town has a traditional, pretty centre, a harbour, an old church, and beautiful cliffs and beaches at its doorstep. Its citizens are down-to-earth, hardworking middle-class people, who know and trust each other. However, in the tradition of classic murder mysteries, the investigations that follow the crimes bring to light a surprising number of secrets and hidden vices, among them adultery, drug abuse, and a variety of psychological cruelties – and, of course, the crimes themselves, murder and rape.

In contrast to traditional crime fiction, in which hidden vices are a part of human nature and therefore a part of every community,4 Broadchurch employs these generic structures to portray a town – and, by implication, a country – whose social structures and moral strongholds are in decline. Some of the emerging vices are part of a dynamic process of social disintegration that threatens to destroy the old sense of community and of moral consensus. While the sunny side of Broadchurch represents the epitome of a nostalgic ‘Englishness’, its dark sides show the fragmentation of this coherent sense of national or local identity. When Detective Inspector Alec Hardy observes the spectacular cliffs close to the town, he ominously comments: “Things fall apart.” (Broadchurch, S2/E1, 00:02)5 On the surface, this remark refers to the crumbling of the cliffs, but the sentence extends its meaning to symbolically include the development of the town. Of course, it is also an intertextual reference to W. B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” and, perhaps more poignantly, to Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart from 1958, in which a traditional Nigerian community loses its stability and social cohesion with the arrival of foreign missionaries and colonisers.

This sense of change shows many parallels to the sociological model of Ferdinand Tönnies, who analysed the transition from a traditional ‘communal society’ (Gemeinschaft) to a modern ‘associational society’ (Gesellschaft).6 The Broadchurch community is – potentially – still a traditional community as it was defined by Ferdinand Tönnies, whose concepts determine the sociological understanding of the term until today (see Bruce/Yearley 57): the rural town is shaped by bonds between its members as well as by traditional social rules and moral codes, and personal relations are still based on direct interaction and personal communication. Its cohesive force is what Tönnies calls ‘essential will’ (Wesenswille), a natural, spontaneous emotion that draws people together for the sake of the community itself (see Tönnies 224). In contrast, an associational society is dominated by the ‘arbitrary will’ (Kürwille), which causes people to interact for some other, external reason, rendering their connections far more volatile and guided by specific purposes or self-interests. Thus, relations between people are more indirect and impersonal, traditional moralities are replaced by modern forms of bureaucracy, and the arbitrary will establishes rationality and efficiency as new driving forces. Of course, Broadchurch is not the pre-industrial rural village Tönnies had in mind at the end of the 19^th century. However, Tönnies’ terms are not a historical description but “ideal types” (Encyclopaedia Britannica), and as such they have lost nothing of their analytical value.

This chapter explores how Broadchurch stages the struggle between the community and the forces of disintegration – or, in Tönnies’ terms, the transition towards an associational community – with the use of genre conventions of crime drama and crime fiction. The upheavals in the community caused by the crimes and the conventional plot developments and character constellations of the genre effectively highlight the traditional structures of the community and the forces of change that are at work, but without establishing a simple, hierarchical binary opposition. The series presents both the traditional community and the modernising forces with their positive and negative sides, but with a hint of nostalgia. In order to show these complex structures from different angles, I will first analyse the representation of the community and its moral foundations, then the role of the professional, official institutions within this situation of change, and, finally, the use of genre conventions to emphasise tradition and change within the community. In this I will focus on the key role of the two detectives, who represent both the challenges that the communal transition imposes on the individual and, if not a solution, at least an attempt to combine the effectiveness of modern professionalism with traditional moral standards of the community.