Can detective fiction save liberal democracy? On the performative functions of crime control in the Czech TV series The Nineties

This study seeks to expand the criminological interest in narrative fiction by examining the functions that complex fictional stories on crime control can perform. As a case study, the article takes the Czech Television series The Nineties , which tells the story of a police investigation into murders linked to the rise of organised crime in 1990s Czechia. Broadcast in early 2022, the show became widely popular, as it was seen as not only covering real-world events but also providing an interpretation of the complicated period of postsocialism. Inspired mainly by narrative criminology and Rafe McGregor’s work on fictional narrative knowledge, we analyse the series’ representational and performative work at the level of phenomenology, counterfactuality and mimesis. We reveal how in The Nineties , these values contributed to the impact on its audiences, including its function in (de)legitimising the entire postsocialist order. We contextualise this response with the rise of right-wing populism that has shattered the postsocialist order via exploiting the established narrative of criminalising postrevolutionary developments. This makes The Nineties correspond to Travis Linnemann’s conception of the police story, where the police act as the guardian of the civilised order threatened by criminal monsters. Contrary to the series’ critics, we claim that The Nineties can be read as reinforcing the legitimacy of postsocialist liberal democracy by representing postrevolutionary developments as a battle of police with organised criminals, where not only their apprehension but an entire belonging to Western civilisation is at stake.