Intertextuality and police television dramas in Spain (1990-2010). The literary shift to metatelevision and recurrence of the female victim as motif

Abstract

Analysis of intertextuality in Spanish police dramas between 1990-2010 shows that one of the repeated leitmotifs, both on television and on new audio-visual platforms, is the female victim, which recurs both thematically and mythically. This study also confirms the rise of complex narrative (Mittell, 2015) through the development of references to metatextuality and self-referentiality, with a substantial difference between the first and second decades analysed. There are references not only to police dramas but also to the values of the production process, whether ideological or generic, in line with the pleasure of recognition and the construction of the model viewer (Eco, 1986).