New formulas in Spanish television fiction: The young adult crime thriller

Abstract

With the arrival in Spain of Netflix and other digital content platforms, the audience of Spanish television fiction fragmented into a new multiform reality. The primacy of young ages among its most loyal users led to the development of formats and labels dedicated to them, fostering hybridizations as interesting as the young adult crime thriller, a combination of the teen series with the inquisitive and retrospective structures of the crime thriller.

Given the remarkable growth of this fictions in the last five years, this article intends to define them as a specific cycle within other current crime dramas. Despite the existence of some literary and cinematographic precedents, this subgenre bears little relation to them, presenting itself as a contemporary formula arising from the industrial needs of the platforms.

Through a qualitative analysis of the main works, we describe a series of features that reaffirm its group identification, as well as its differences with the traditional formula of the genre, such as the scarce presence of teenagers investigators, the lack of interest in exploring criminal universes or the reiteration of subjects associated with young people such as bullying, sexual abuse or emotional manipulation.