Turn on, tune in, trust no one: the paranoid style captures TV
Conspiracy thrillers are the favourite genre of a distrustful age
Cold-callers might be fraudsters and emails could be phishing scams. Dotted lines of dirty money connect venal Westerners with hostile powers. When a gunman tries to storm a presidential dinner, half the internet thinks it’s a hoax. Nothing and no one can be trusted, it may seem—not in real life and, these days, definitely not on TV.
For just as this is a heyday of conspiracism, it is becoming a golden age of conspiracies on television. The villains of crime shows and thrillers have traditionally been terrorists, mobsters and serial killers. Now they are likely to be dodgy cops, double agents and corrupt politicians. The danger is coming from inside the house—often the White House. The fear such stories dramatise is not of a lone maniac but a rogue system.
“Secret Service” supplies the latest inside job on British tellies. The head of the Russia desk at Mi6 (played by Gemma Arterton, pictured) suspects the Kremlin has a mole at the heart of Britain’s government. The set-up has distinct echoes of “The Night Manager”, a hit about spies and skulduggery, in both the sumptuous Mediterranean locations and the slipping of an agent into a target’s family. The dialogue has distinct echoes of every espionage show you’ve ever seen. “We can all lie to someone we love,” drawls a spymaster on autopilot.
The renegade spooks of “The Night Manager” are not unusual. Even its name is not unusual: see also “The Night Agent”, another multi-series yarn, this one involving a staged bombing, CIA turncoats and (you guessed it) moles at the heart of government. These days, in fact, anyone on tv in a position of public trust is liable to betray it. In “Zero Day” a cabal orchestrates a cyber-catastrophe. “The Madness” combines white supremacists with disinformation and corporate chicanery. More television conspiracies are in the pipeline. The fix goes on.
On screen, as in reality, conspiracism comes in bursts. After the assassinations of the 1960s and Watergate, the mid-1970s was a febrile period, yielding (at the cinema) “Chinatown” and “The Parallax View”. Among today’s real-world prompts—and narrative motifs—are foreign meddling in Western politics, panopticonic surveillance and the power of occult algorithms and artificial intelligence. “The Capture”, a superior conspiracy saga, focuses on official misuse of deepfakes.
Social media, another newish technology, are the chief vector of conspiracism, making doomscrollers everywhere amenable to stories of Manchurian candidates and false flags. Meanwhile attitudes to authority are poisonous. In Britain and America, pollsters report, trust in government is at a cynical low. Americans have also lost faith in science, big business, police and the media; 27% of Britons think there is a conspiracy against them personally. Polarisation is part of the problem: if hated opponents win an election, they must surely have cheated. They are bound to be up to no good.
In this context, conspiracist dramas, like conspiracy theories themselves, offer a consoling pay-off. Yes, they depict a sinister world controlled by shadowy forces. But, like QAnoners and vaccine truthers, viewers derive a gratifying sense that they are in the know. In any case, as an explanation for global woes, conspiracies are more comprehensible than cock-ups and chaos, especially those uncovered in the season finale.
The genre has drawbacks, too. It is hard to make a conspiracy seem convincing, a tv director confides, and the permutations of baddies and whistleblowers are limited (as “Secret Service” suggests). Government traitors, men with guns and end-of-episode twists are de rigueur. More gravely, as well as reflecting an ambient hunch that the mighty are crooked, conspiracy shows may corrosively reinforce it. (Who exactly is behind them all, a conspiracy-minded critic might wonder?)
Then again, other kinds of tv crime aren’t entirely victimless. The creep of conspiracy in glitzy thrillers coincides with the retreat of a different genre: lurid tales of murdered women, whose deaths let male gumshoes earn their spurs. Of late some writers and producers have grown wary of that default scenario, say insiders, preferring spiky female roles, including spies and assassins, to decorative female corpses.
The dead-girl trope implies a failure of imagination as well as a shallow view of women. But the paranoid style of crime shows and thrillers is, in its way, at least as disturbing. No longer is it just a woman’s body on the TV mortuary slab. Now it is the entire body politic.■