Identity, place and belonging in Shetland

First broadcast on BBC One in 2013, Shetland has become the most high-profile and successful networked Scottish TV drama of recent years. In this article I examine the ways in which the show uses the conventions of crime drama to explore the specificity of Shetland as a place and a location, how it informs the plot lines and its relation to the main protagonist, DCI Jimmy Perez’s, sense of identity and belonging. This in turn indicates the importance of Shetland to both the vitality of this perennially popular genre and to questions of national representation and identity in post-devolutionary Scotland.