This article presents findings of a mixed-methods audience study on consumption patterns and attitudes towards European television crime narratives among European viewers. Based on semi-structured interviews in Denmark, Germany and Italy, and a nine-country online survey (n1321), we asked how, when, where and why European audiences watch crime series, and whether watching non-domestic European crime narratives influences perceptions of the European ‘Other’. Our findings reveal preferences for Anglo-American content, combined with a criticality towards domestic content often perceived as stereotyped. While stereotypes and personal and previous non-mediated encounters draw viewers to European content, they do not necessarily challenge viewers’ perceptions of the European ‘Other’. It does, however, enable critical reflection on viewers’ domestic societies and TV cultures, leading to a process of banal cosmopolitanism.

Scandinavian success as European policy dilemma Creative Europe's funding for TV drama co-productions, 2014-20This article surveys the fiction productions that received funding from Creative Europe's TV Programming scheme 2014-2020. The evaluation shows that most funding went to North-Western Europe with Scandinavia surpassing Europe's big TV producing nations. The geographical and genre imbalances in the TV scheme must be seen in the light of the long-established close collaboration between Germany and primarily the Scandinavian countries and the profiled position of "Nordic Noir" crime fiction as the engine that drives forward international collaboration. This trend exemplifies European policy dilemmas emerging from television's role in the intersections of economy and culture. North-European countries appear well-equipped in advance to meet the criteria of Creative Europe through established collaboration, while differences in the media systems and production cultures have kept producers in the South and East of Europe from even applying. The EU funding scheme may, thus, have strengthened already strong relationships rather than creating new ones.

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This editorial and interview introduce Critical Studies in Television’s new section ‘In Translation’, which provides translations of non-English-language research in television studies. It addresses how contributions from languages other than English enable adequate understanding of transnational TV phenomena through methods and theory developed on a diversity of objects and contexts. The first translation of Kirsten Frandsen and Hanne Bruun’s article ‘Time and Timing – a methodological perspective on production analysis’ is introduced in an interview with Hanne Bruun. She talks about how media studies translate between academia and the media industries in impactful ways and how new approaches developed based on Nordic cases challenge a narrative of difficulty and decline in production research.