Appreciating Wallander at the BBC: producing culture and performing the glocal in the UK and Swedish Wallanders for British public service television

This article explores how the different versions of Wallander, all in some ways are remakes of the original detective books written by best-selling Swedish author Henning Mankell, are collected together by the BBC into a corpus of television. The central purpose is to understand how the Nordic-based procedurals featuring the protagonist Kurt Wallander are positioned as a privileged form of culture at the BBC. Looking, in particular, at how the various performances of this titular character are made sense of in the UK public service broadcasting televisual flow and beyond, the article takes up the task of considering how the BBC uses the remakes to imagine its role as a cultural institution with public service responsibilities at a time when television is increasingly produced and consumed globally.