This article combines quantitative tools of social research, text-based analysis, and production studies to analyse gender equality and female labour in contemporary Italian TV crime drama. More precisely, we analyse the portrayal of female characters and women’s employment in key behind-the-scenes roles in Italian TV crime dramas distributed from Fall 2015 to Summer 2022. The research has two main goals: first, to understand how crime narratives address gender equality and diversity from a twofold perspective – behind-the-scenes and on-screen; second, to understand if and how a sample analysis, targeting a specific case study, can provide general trends such as those coming from the analysis of broader datasets...

The purpose of this article is to analyse the role played by the category of ‘nationality’ in global SVOD (Subscription video on demand) services by looking at Netflix and its presence in the European context, with a focus on two key audio-visual markets such as the British and Italian ones. We argue that the persistence of the concept of ‘nationality’ on streaming services, albeit arguably marginal, suggests a new understanding of its function within contemporary media conglomerates...