Italian TV Dramas
Italian TV dramas have developed into the “central storytelling system” of Italian society in the decade at the turn of the 21st century. Within the Italian dramatic landscape the genre that most epitomizes the process of indigenous building through the multifarious interaction between domestic and foreign, local and transnational, is unquestionably the police drama. In the early 1990s the standards began to be set for which for was soon to establish a distinctive Italian style formula for police dramas. Embodied almost paradigmatically in Marshal Rocca, the new formula of the Italian style police series based its peculiarity and familiarity on a set of four essential components. The first of these was the blending of drama and comedy. Pre-announced and guaranteed by actors coming from film and stage comedy, humor permeated the police drama genre, in accordance with the deliberately hybrid style of the “dramedy”. The second ingredient of the new formula was an “estrangement” from the metropolitan milieu, which happened by either setting police stories in an ostensibly provincial location (either real or imaginary) or by using the alternative approach of a “provincialization” of the city. The third component of the formula was the intrusion of the private and family life, the domestic sphere, into the narrative core of the police series. This incorporated an entire dimension of domesticity to unfold in detailed fashion, ranging from the preparation and consumption of meals to more intimate scenes and appearances of half-clothed characters at the breakfast table. As well as issues of love and friendship, issues with crime and punishment and indeed any kind of situation in everyday family life. A fourth and fundamental component of the formula was the characterization of the protagonists as anti-heroes, meant as representatives of average human beings with ordinary vices and virtues. The Italian police dramas chose their main character as a mimetic hero, a “common man” figure endowed with intellectual and temperamental resources and a capacity for controlling his circumstances, more or less equal to “one of us”.
Over a period of two decades beginning in the late 1980s, exactly 100 TV dramas were dedicated to Mafia and, more generally, to organized crime were broadcast on the national public and private channels: this figure amounts to almost 10% of the total prime time offering in terms of number of productions. There has never been a television season from 1988 to 2008 in which at least one, but normally more than one, homegrown Mafia story has not made an appearance on the Italian screens. In Italian TV dramas the Sicilian Mafia, regardless of the international or national setting of the story, are involved in more than half of the plot lines.
Generally speaking, the stories of Italian TV dramas may be awash with saints, popes, civic heroes and ordinary everyday heroes, but they are traditionally sparing with female protagonists. One could conclude that male domination was set in stone when faced with the predominance of male protagonists in contemporary television storytelling, but Italian TV dramas are not suspected of misogynistic inclinations. The women of Italian TV dramas are generally positive and admirable characters: expert and effective in shouldering the burden of “double presence” in the family and the workplace.
As for the mafia dramas, the women in these dramas belong to a lawful society and share its principles and values, refuse to surrender to blackmail and abuses on the part of organized crime. In both cases the anti-Mafia heroines of TV drama, whether they choose to escape the grip of the Mafia environment or rebel against being the victims of criminal power, are characterized by the firm intent to revoke, withdraw and deny their consent to the universe of Mafia values and behavior. TV drama’s entrust to female characters the task of reminding viewers that not only the repressive actions of the forces of law and order (carried out by male protagonists) but also the loss and denial of consensus can help to undermine, both internally and externally, the cultural foundations of organized crime’s power. Mafia women are above all the custodians and agents of the crucial task of inculcating the Mafia codes and values of honor, omertà and vengeance into the younger generation, and the guarantors for the handing down of Mafia culture from one generation to the next.
Over a period of two decades beginning in the late 1980s, exactly 100 TV dramas were dedicated to Mafia and, more generally, to organized crime were broadcast on the national public and private channels: this figure amounts to almost 10% of the total prime time offering in terms of number of productions. There has never been a television season from 1988 to 2008 in which at least one, but normally more than one, homegrown Mafia story has not made an appearance on the Italian screens. In Italian TV dramas the Sicilian Mafia, regardless of the international or national setting of the story, are involved in more than half of the plot lines.
Generally speaking, the stories of Italian TV dramas may be awash with saints, popes, civic heroes and ordinary everyday heroes, but they are traditionally sparing with female protagonists. One could conclude that male domination was set in stone when faced with the predominance of male protagonists in contemporary television storytelling, but Italian TV dramas are not suspected of misogynistic inclinations. The women of Italian TV dramas are generally positive and admirable characters: expert and effective in shouldering the burden of “double presence” in the family and the workplace.
As for the mafia dramas, the women in these dramas belong to a lawful society and share its principles and values, refuse to surrender to blackmail and abuses on the part of organized crime. In both cases the anti-Mafia heroines of TV drama, whether they choose to escape the grip of the Mafia environment or rebel against being the victims of criminal power, are characterized by the firm intent to revoke, withdraw and deny their consent to the universe of Mafia values and behavior. TV drama’s entrust to female characters the task of reminding viewers that not only the repressive actions of the forces of law and order (carried out by male protagonists) but also the loss and denial of consensus can help to undermine, both internally and externally, the cultural foundations of organized crime’s power. Mafia women are above all the custodians and agents of the crucial task of inculcating the Mafia codes and values of honor, omertà and vengeance into the younger generation, and the guarantors for the handing down of Mafia culture from one generation to the next.