Public and Private, Global and Local in Italian Crime Drama: the case of "La Piovra"

This chapter analyzes the TV series 'La Piovra'. It is argued that, as the series progressed, it increasingly departed from ‘social melodrama’ - as the original concept was labeled – and drew closer to the U.S. serials. At first sight, the main outcomes were a more superficial and apoliticalthe portray of Italian society; storylines being stuffed with spectacular actions and a great component of romance; civic values being replaced by private concerns as the ultimate reasons for the protagonist's heroism and involvement in the struggle against Mafia. The main element of originality of this work consists in the attempt to analyze the evolution of 'La Piovra' using the analytical categories provided by studies on globalization and cultural adaptations of media contents. In particular, I used the notion of ‘transculturalization’ (Chan and Ma, 2002) to claim that 'La Piovra'’s borrowings from US police series, far from being simply transplanted, were actively recontextualized in a way that they could appeal to the national audience. Recontextualizing meant turning the tough and unscrupulous ‘lonely avenger’ found in US action and police series in a 'tragic hero', like Cattani, conscious of being a looser but still determined. The reason for such an adaptation was to provide a portray of the struggle between the forces of the law and Mafia likely to exorcise the audience’s fears without giving up the program’s claim for social realism.