True Stories That Travel: Sambre and The Long Shadow

The growing reach of global streaming services for the distribution of television drama has exacerbated creative tensions around the telling of stories which have distinctively regional provenance and/or are of specifically local and national interest. Since the advent of TV3 in the previous century, critics have regularly noted tendencies towards ahistoricism, the rise of the generic ‘non-place’, and often arbitrary relations between the somewhere of a story’s provenance and the nominal spaces used as setting. Nevertheless, during the same period, factual or ‘true story’ dramas have become ever more ubiquitous in contemporary television. These have proliferated across both broadcast and streamed services, their factual referents underpinning a claim to (contingent) authenticity. As actual historical events occur only in actual space and time, such drama series appear to militate against the otherwise globalising tendencies pioneered for streamer-funded fiction.

This paper will explore how the dramatic reinterpretation of geographically specific, historical events may allow for both cultural specificity and international resonance through the use of aesthetic strategies that transcend spatial boundaries. Analysis will focus on two recent television series which dramatise protracted police investigations into actual, regional - and nationally notorious – serial crimes: Sambre (France Télévisions, 2023) and The Long Shadow (ITV, 2023). Both of these dramas privilege an affective emphasis on intersectional and marginalised subject experiences, on readily identifiable themes of injustice, victimhood, and scandal, and on the (often reflexive) deployment of internationally recognisable conventions of fictional television genres.