‘Rosie’s Room’ and ‘Bullet’s Phone’: The Commodification of the Lost Girl in The Killing and its Paratexts

This chapter looks at what happens in the shift from the Danish to the American version of the popular TV series Forbrydelsen/The Killing in order to consider the cross-cultural significance of the ‘lost girl’ crime story. While TV crime drama has been accused of trading in degrading images of violated women for shock value, this chapter focuses attention on how the lost girl trope is presented on such shows via forms of new media technologies. Its central assertion is that, in order to fully account for the often-damning gender politics of contemporary TV crime dramas, one must look not simply to the content of their storylines but to their modes of framing and address across platforms, and the affective responses that they in turn enable and/or disenable. How do technological processes of mediation and remediation shape cultural/ideological understandings of violence against girls and women on contemporary TV dramas? And how does the remediation of violence through the digital interface extend beyond the TV crime dramas themselves to the paratextual materials that increasingly surround post-network TV?