The ‘Sailor’ and the ‘Peasant’: The Italian Police Series between Foreign and Domestic

Abstract

Applying the categorisation made by Walter Benjamin as regards popular storytelling — stories told by sailors, and stories told by peasants, the former being internationally oriented and the latter locally based — this paper reconsiders the history of Italian police drama as in transition from ‘foreign’ or international to ‘domestic’ or national/local storytelling. This transition follows three phases: the adaptation of foreign classics in the first two decades of the Italian television; the emergence of the domestic voice in the 1970s and 1980s, when locally based police series were produced, although in the context of a television supply widely internationalised by massive slates of foreign imports; and the establishment and popularity of the now hegemonic formula, all'italiana, from the 1990s onwards. The contemporary police drama is now a fully localised genre, yet this doesn't disguise the footprints of a transnationalisation which is still underway, whereby the sailor's and the peasant's voices converge and merge.