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The Rise of Bright Noir. Redemption and moral optimism in American contemporary TV Noir

Libro: European Television Crime Drama and Beyond
Editorial: Palgrave MacMillan
Fecha de publicación: 2018
Página Inicial - Final: 41 - 60
ISBN: 978-3-319-96886-5
Resumen: In Film Noir, the ending is crucial for reaching an understanding of the moral stance of the narrative. TV Series, however, offer a fragmented structure¿episodes, hiatuses, and seasons¿, which prevent the audience from grasping their full meaning until the initial conflict-the one that launches the series and structures the narrative-is definitively resolved. In a television landscape where the story is becoming ever more sophisticated, one of the great advances of ¿complex TV¿ (Mittell, 2015) revolves around the notion of the ¿ars moriendi¿ (Harrington, 2012) of audiovisual fictions: the ending of a TV show increasingly aims for circularity, emotional climax, reasonable surprise, and internal narrative coherence. But, also, a good ending usually provides some kind of moral closure. Following the classic authors who have studied Film Noir (Frank, Borde and Chaumeton, Schrader, Naremore), one can highlight two prominent features of the genre: ethical ambiguity and a final sense of despair. This notion of moral uncertainty, existentialism, and even nihilism that typifies the Noir genre has become a sort of cliché because, as Skoble (2006) has studied, we can find moral clarity and redemption already in several classic Noir examples from the 40s and 50s. Consequently, this article attempts to explore how some recent American and British TV-Noir shows are addressing this issue by undermining one of the main thematic and ideological features that both spectators and critics usuall