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This volume proposes to investigate serial narration as an exemplary means of cultural, social, and national self-discovery and self-assurance. Focussing on questions of genre, narrative form, and serialisation, the individual essays examine the variety of ways in which British and Irish television series broadcast after 2010 negotiate the concept of community as a key component of the state of the nation.

The first part of the volume, “Family, Morality, and Communal Cohesion”, centres on the concept of the family, which functions in many series as a micro-unit of society giving revealing insights into contemporary conceptions of community. In her essay on the Birmingham-based Peaky Blinders (2013-), Sina Schuhmaier examines the position of community within the tension between tradition and modernity that defines the 1920s setting of the series, arguing that Peaky Blinders pictures its protagonists, the Shelby family, as an open, non-normative community. The series thus answers the sense of upheaval of the interwar period with a caution against potentially totalitarian forms of community – a lesson of renewed relevance today. Moving to a more contemporary setting, Kerstin Frank then shows how the crime drama Broadchurch (2013-2017) creates a traditional small-town community in the sense of Ferdinand Tönnies’ definition of the term, and how this community is threatened: by the crimes and the revelations during the police investigations, but also by more profound social changes that challenge the very core of the community’s values. In the final essay of this part, Ralf Haekel shifts the focus to Ireland by investigating the gritty crime drama Love/Hate (2010-2014), which is set in gangland, i.e. Dublin’s criminal underworld. The massively successful programme’s five series depict Ireland as a society in which traditional forms of community, most prominently the family, are severely under threat. Focusing on the lives of petty criminals dragged down into the world of corruption and drugs, Love/Hate, which is very much influenced by US American films and crime series like The Wire (2002-2008), sheds a bleak light on society in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

The second part, “Nostalgia and the Search for Community”, explores how a number of series – affirmatively or subversively – negotiate a nostalgic sense of Britain’s historical past as a repository of a more coherent sense of community. The comedy programme Detectorists (2014-2017) presents the prosaic life and conversations of a group of men as well as their mundane hobby, metal detecting, which functions in this series as a very literal means of searching the past. Focusing on the social underdog’s small-scale perspective on history, Wieland Schwanebeck illustrates how the series presents a nostalgic and quite conservative portrayal of community in England at the time of Brexit. The following essays then examine two period dramas from a revisionary point of view centred on the notion of plurality. Lisa Schwander explores the tensions that govern the narrative of community in Indian Summers (2015-2016), which is set in India in the last decades of the British Raj: while the series’ approach to colonial society demonstrates its desire to distance itself from community concepts based on essentialised notions of belonging, Schwander shows how by exoticising Indians as England’s inferior ‘other’, the series reinscribes the very notions of belonging and community it attempts to criticise. The essay contextualises this tension with fundamental shortcomings of a contemporary society that imagines itself as borderless and pluralistic. Set even further back in the past at the time of World War I, The Village (2013-2014) offers a revisionary look at heritage television and period drama. Focusing on the form and function of cultural memory in a rural setting, Lucia Krämer investigates how the series presents community from the point of view of peasants and the working class, which differs decisively from the upper-class perspective dominating many programmes that portray the same period, such as Downton Abbey. In her argument, Krämer concentrates on the role of World War I as a catalyst in the transition of a modern form of civic community centring on individual autonomy and plurality.

The third part of the volume draws attention to how a variety of series portray “Crime and Social Decline in Urban Communities” to pinpoint crucial features of contemporary society. Set against the backdrop of Britain’s industrialised North, the crime drama Happy Valley (2014-) completely subverts nostalgic notions of pastoral ‘Englishness’ by showcasing a small-town community riddled by dysfunctional families, exploitation, and patriarchal violence. In her reading of the series, Caroline Lusin elaborates on how Happy Valley uses crime to display the break-up of traditional social structures and units, such as the family and the community, but ultimately celebrates the value of individual moral agency. The next two essays then shift the attention from the provinces to the metropolis. Starting from the premise that the council estate holds a stigmatised and marginalised position in the popular British imagination, Luis Özer discusses the filmic depiction of a London tower block community in Top Boy (2011-2013). As Özer argues, this Channel 4 drama oscillates between clichéd images of council housing reminiscent of the black urban crime genre and a more nuanced, social realist portrayal of community attachment and lived realities on the estate. The concluding essay of this section opens up the question of genre by analysing the connection between dysfunctional community structures in contemporary Britain and the figure of the ‘deviant’ teenager in Misfits (2009-2013). In this essay, Annika Gonnermann maintains that by caricaturing and subverting the conventions of the well-established superhero-genre, the series casts unsocial teenagers as unlikely superheroes: in its first two series, the protagonists fight villainous representatives of the system, such as neglecting parents, abusive social workers, or fraudulent priests, allowing the audience to explore the implications of community formation.

The fourth part, finally, combines three series that address different forms of “Vice and Virtue in Capitalist Communities”. In his essay on Broken (2017), Stefan Glomb analyses this series with a view to establishing links between its criticism of contemporary British society and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The targets of this critique are institutions and money, both of which are held responsible for the ever-widening gulf between system and life-world, as well as the increasing erosion of communal ties. In this reading, Broken performs an immanent critique of neoliberal capitalism, and, avoiding the extremes of methodological individualism and methodological holism, points the way towards a (partial) re-establishment of community. Focusing on the medieval concept of ‘psychomachia’, Monika Pietrzak-Franger then investigates the crisis of community as characteristic of contemporary society in the detective series Luther (2010-). Crime in this series serves a mirror to a largely dysfunctional society in which community in the sense of a healthy ‘warm place’ is largely missing. In this setting, the detective is a highly ambiguous figure, brilliant but flawed, struggling for some sense of community within a society characterised by neoliberal capitalism. Finally, the perspective shifts to the digital age with Laura Winter’s essay on the episodes “The National Anthem”, “White Bear”, and “Nosedive” of the media-critical anthology Black Mirror (2011-), in which omnipresent technology plays a similar role in terms of power relations as the state or the tyrannical corporation in the genre of dystopia. In revealing how a sense of community is only created through digital spectacle, and how individuals are addicted to online approval in an increasingly anonymous society, all three episodes propose that community in the digital age exists increasingly only as a media phenomenon.

All these recent productions are not just an excellent case in point for the popularity of the serial format; they also suggest that British and Irish television series are well established by now as a privileged medium for reflecting critically on issues related to community and the state of the nation. No doubt they will carry on with this task in the future. What with Brexit looming on the horizon, and nationalisms on the rise all over Europe, there will surely be no shortage of topics.