Malmö in the Public Imaginary: Thin Blue Line, Dialect Television Drama, and Local Patriotism

Malmö is Sweden's third largest city with a population of 350.000.In the 2010s, the city made headlines nationally and internationally for shootings and crime and became emblematic for a segregated welfare state in decline.Located in the far south of Sweden, close to the Danish capital Copenhagen, Malmö used to be an industrial city, dominated by the huge shipyard Kockums and construction companies such as Skanska.In the 1970s, the oil crisis led to unemployment and even depopulation in the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.An effort was made to rebrand the postindustrial city as a "knowledge city", with a newly started university in 1998, the construction of the bridge across Öresund to Copenhagen which opened in 2000, and the landmark high rise Turning Torso, by famous architect Santiago Calatrava, finished in 2003.In the 2000s, Malmö on the one hand moved forward as a "creative city" (Florida 2002), home to the successful gaming company Massive Entertainment as well as several other film, music, and gaming studios, and on the other hand continued to have a reputation of ethnic segregation, crime, shootings, and an informal economy.In this article, I address the local press and media reception of recent television series Tunna blå linjen (Thin Blue Line, 2021-) and how it relates to a local sense of Malmö as the peripheral underdog vis-à-vis Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.Although originally intended to take place in Stockholm, the screenplay was rewritten to fit Malmö when southern-Sweden based production company Anagram took on the show.In several ways, this seems to have been a lucky choice -the setting of Thin Blue Line provides much of its color, its soundscape, and its ambience as well as gaining it a large and enthusiastic following in southern Sweden.In order to chart the reception of Thin Blue Line, I have used "Svenska dagstidningar", a database administered by the Royal Library, consisting of digitized Swedish newspapers from 1645 to now (Kungliga biblioteket).By entering the search term "tunna blå linjen", and then filtering by year (2021 and 2022), and then by newspapers, it is possible to get a overview of how a (searchable) phenomenon or event appears over time and space in Swedish press.For instance, for 2021, the search term yielded 8.127 hits, the absolute majority of these in the first three months of the year, while the series was airing.Due to the number of editions for some newspapers, however, several of these hits were duplicates.Moreover, the search engine finds any mention of the word or phrase in any of the digitized newspaper pages, which means that all television schedules are included in the search.Consequently, such a search can only give an indication of press attention.For instance, the Stockholm-based, nationwide evening newspaper Expressen had most hits (286), the local daily Sydsvenskan the second most (242), and Stockholmbased, nationwide daily Dagens Nyheter the third most (227).However, about a fifth of the Stockholm-based papers' mentions were duplicates, whereas only about a tenth of the smaller, local newspaper's came from the same article in a different edition.In spite of some commentary that the series was apologetic in relation to the police, that it reproduced racist stereotypes, and that it aligned itself, through its title, with the American anti-Black Lives Matter movement which constructs the police as the "thin blue line" between chaos and civilization (Pahnke 2021; Krutmeijer 2021; Tapper 2021), it mostly received positive attention.However, as I argue below, even the negative commentary in the local newspaper is grounded in a sense of lived experience in this particular city.For the purpose of this article, I adapt the concept of "dialect cinema" (Martin 2020).Dialect cinema is an apt term in this context, because one of the most highlighted aspects in the reception of Thin Blue Line was that most characters spoke the southern dialect, skånska, which is prevalent in Malmö.However, dialect cinema does not exclusively or even necessarily refer to the sound of the dialogue.Instead, it can be seen as extending or paralleling Hamid Naficy's concept of "accented cinema".In contrast to accented cinema which signifies filmmakers in exile or diaspora, whose film styles reflect dislocation, displacement and movement and thus are marked as different from majority, mainstream or classical cinema (Naficy 2001; Martin 2020:63), dialect cinema "retains the visual and audio character of its place of origin" (Martin 2020:62, in reference to Goldberg 2008).However, both accented and dialect cinema share several similarities, not least that both, at their best, concern identity "as a process of becoming" (Martin 2020: 63; Naficy 2001).In the case of Thin Blue Line, I would argue that the connections rather than the differences between accented and dialect cinema provide the distinctive audio-visual ambience of Malmö that the local reception responded to.Not least because Malmö is a melting pot, with a third of its population born outside of Sweden, most commonly in Iraq, Syria, or Denmark (Malmö stad, befolkning), and that this is both a point of pride and something highlighted in the external negative image of Malmö.Thin Blue Line, quite obviously, is not cinema, and several of the parameters Naficy draws for accented cinema and of those Martin demonstrates in dialect cinema rely on the notion of the filmmaker as auteur, as the creative artist behind the film.Nevertheless, bringing the theoretical perspective of a dialect into the analysis of the reception of Thin Blue Line can more specifically explain some of the response it stirred.As a dialect television drama, it "renders its scenic and cultural origins visible and audible" (Martin 2020:64).The reception in the local press can be understood