Television, Justice and National Identity in Spain

Television dramas have an enormous discursive power to shape national identity in the form of shared experience and collective belonging. Both law and visual culture are dominant discourses constituting an imagined community, which creates meaning through storytelling and performance. Spanish television is a particularly good case study, since the medium has been a vital tool of identity construction at individual, collective and national levels in a country that lived through almost 40 years of dictatorship (1939–1975). Television was thus used as a means of propaganda (1956–1975), as primary educator of democratic values (1975–1989) and as creator of a social debate (1990 onwards). This article examines law drama, law comedy and documentary/docu-drama over two periods of production/reception – the Transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and the first two decades of the new millennium – in order to compare changes in national culture and collective identity construction. What is most striking in all shows is the hybridisation of genres: to a greater or lesser extent all shows contain elements of workplace dramas and/or domestic sitcoms, making the private political.