Adapting Landscape and Place in Transcultural Remakes: The Case of Bron|Broen, The Bridge and The Tunnel

Abstract

Although place tends to be overlooked as a narrative component in audiovisual fiction, it is undeniable that landscapes, settings and locations play a defining role in television series. Not only are these forms of place central to reinforcing the genre, themes and plots of the story; they also serve to reflect the characters’ emotions and cultural identities. Therefore, when a scripted format is remade in a foreign country, the narrative dimension of place is one of the elements that need to be relocalised to a new sociocultural environment. This paper aims to examine how the significance of place is adapted in the specific case of transcultural televisual remakes. In order to do so, the study will present a comparative analysis of the Swedish-Danish co-production Bron|Broen (2011-) and its two remakes: the American The Bridge (2013-2014) and the Anglo-French The Tunnel (2013-). More specifically, the representations of place in these three series will be studied in relation to other narrative components, such as genre conventions and aesthetics, characters, and dramatic conflict. Ultimately, this paper will prove that, when you take a story built for a specific setting and relocate it elsewhere, that new context informs the architecture of the story itself.