Country Noir and Rural Peripheries in Western Europe

Western Europe proposes a certain liminality not only between urban/rural areas, but its status also stresses geographical tension on a broader level. Housing a range of politically dominant offices and the historical roots of the EU, Western Europe maintains a historic, hegemonic apprehension of Europe, which may generate—in other European regions—a sense of being geopolitical and metaphorical peripheries of the continent. Whenever TV crime series move into Western European peripheries, the result may appear more powerful in the sometimes extreme accentuation of rural settings. For that reason, we focus on what has been referred to as Country Noir, including the natural wilderness forgotten or marginalised in an urbanised and geopolitically centralised European region. Through representative readings of the French-Belgian Black Spot (2017–19), the Austrian-German Pagan Peak (2019–2023), and the Luxembourgian Capitani (2019–2022), we show how Western European crime series are not only influenced by other continental spatio-generic subgenres, but Country Noir is also a spatial negotiation of the centre-periphery status of Western Europe with specific US influences such as Twin Peaks (1990–91) and True Detective (2014-). Altogether, the chapter highlights both a significant counternarrative to urbanised Europe and a dynamic generic influence going both ways across the Atlantic.