There are times when a television series tells you exactly where you are before the camera has even shown you the city.
It happens through sound.
A voice on the radio. A song playing in a bar. Music drifting from an open window. Something traditional, something contemporary, something completely ordinary to the people who live there.
And suddenly the location feels real.
For me, music can do something very similar to language. It belongs to a place.
That does not mean every crime drama needs folk music playing dramatically in the background every time the detective walks down a street. In fact, that would probably have the opposite effect.
What matters is authenticity. If a series takes me to Genoa, Naples, Paris, Szczecin, Reykjavík or Copenhagen, I want the soundtrack to understand where we are. Because a location is not only something we see.
It is something we hear.
Music Can Make a Place Feel Lived In
There is a difference between filming somewhere and actually allowing that place into the story. Beautiful establishing shots can show us the architecture. Aerial photography can show us the coastline. Street scenes can give us a sense of scale. But local music can make the location feel inhabited.
It reminds us that people were living there before the television crew arrived. They have their own radio stations, musicians, cultural references, songs they grew up with and music they associate with particular moments in their lives. When a series uses those sounds naturally, the city stops feeling like a backdrop.
It becomes somebody’s home.
That matters enormously to me when watching European crime drama.
I do not simply want to recognise the country from a landmark.
I want to feel that the story could only have happened there.
A Soundtrack Can Travel — But Should It?
International television has become increasingly easy to watch. That is wonderful. A series made in Italy can be watched in Britain. A Polish drama can find an audience in Greece. A Danish detective series can suddenly have viewers across the world. But international distribution sometimes comes with a temptation to make everything feel a little more familiar.
And music can be part of that. A soundtrack filled with recognisable English-language songs may feel more immediately accessible to an international audience.
But sometimes I find myself asking:
Why?
Why should an Italian series sound as though it could have been made anywhere? Why should we see Genoa while hearing music that gives us absolutely no sense of Genoa, Italy or even the characters who live there?
It is not that English-language music does not belong in European cities. Of course it does. People everywhere listen to music from everywhere. The problem comes when the soundtrack begins to feel imposed rather than discovered.
There is a difference.
Petra Made Me Think About This
Petra is one of the series that made me think much more seriously about the relationship between music and place.
Here we are in Genoa. A city with its own personality, history, rhythm and cultural identity. And yet there were moments when the English-language soundtrack pulled me away from all of that. It did not ruin the series.
But I noticed it.
And once I noticed it, I began thinking about how different the experience might have been if the music had allowed Genoa — and Italy more broadly — to remain present in the sound of the programme as strongly as it was present in the images.
That is the strange power of music. We may not consciously analyse every song we hear while watching television. But we feel when something belongs. And sometimes we feel when it does not.
Music Is Another Form of Geography
Mapped in Drama is obviously interested in geography. Where was something filmed? Why did the production choose that particular town? What does the landscape contribute? Could the story have happened somewhere else?
But geography does not stop at the edge of the frame. Music has geography too. Certain instruments belong to cultural traditions.Certain styles developed in particular cities or regions.
Accents appear in songs just as they do in speech. Musical scenes grow out of neighbourhoods, political movements, migration and generations of cultural exchange.
Even contemporary pop music can tell us something about where we are. So when a production chooses local musicians or songs, it can quietly add another layer to the map.
You may never see the location named on screen.
But you can hear it.
Music Can Tell Us About the Character Too
Local music does not have to function as tourism. In fact, it is much more interesting when it tells us something about the person listening to it.
What does the detective play in the car? What does the suspect listen to at home? What is playing in the café where everyone in the neighbourhood seems to know each other? What song comes on at a family gathering?
These choices can reveal age, class, background, nostalgia and identity without a single line of dialogue. And this is where local music becomes especially valuable. A character’s musical taste can connect them to their surroundings or deliberately separate them from them.
Perhaps they hate the traditional music their parents adore. Perhaps they listen to a local band nobody outside the country has heard of. Perhaps an old song instantly tells us something about the generation they belong to.
That is storytelling.
Not decoration.
The Best Music Does Not Announce Itself
The most effective use of local music is often the least obvious. I do not need someone to walk through Paris while an accordion announces FRANCE. I do not need flamenco every time we enter Spain. And I certainly do not need every Scandinavian crime drama accompanied by some approximation of gloomy Nordic music.
That turns culture into shorthand.
The interesting choices are usually smaller.
A song on somebody’s kitchen radio. Music heard from another room. A local artist playing over the closing credits. A contemporary track that people in that country are actually listening to. Music should deepen the sense of place rather than explain it to us. There is an enormous difference between the two.
Opening Credits Matter Too
Then there are title sequences. A great opening theme can become inseparable from a series. Sometimes you only need to hear the first few seconds and the whole world of the programme returns immediately.
The weather. The landscape. The characters. The feeling you had while watching it.
Crime drama understands this particularly well. The best themes create atmosphere before the story has even started.
But I find it particularly interesting when those themes somehow belong to the cultural world of the series rather than simply being generic “crime music.”
It is another opportunity to establish identity. Another chance to tell us:
This story belongs here.
Music Can Carry History
Local music can also bring something that location photography alone cannot.
Time.
Songs carry memory.
A piece of music can connect a modern crime story to an older version of the same country.
It can remind us of political periods, migration, social change or particular generations.
An old song played in the right moment can tell us more about a character’s history than several minutes of exposition.
And European crime dramas often deal with the past.
Old disappearances. Family secrets. Political wounds. Communities that remember things differently. Music can become a bridge between those timelines. Sometimes the characters may have forgotten.
The song has not.
International Audiences Do Not Need Everything Translated
This connects closely to how I feel about watching television in its original language. I do not believe international audiences need everything made familiar for us. We are perfectly capable of entering somebody else’s cultural world. That is part of the pleasure.
Give me the unfamiliar song.
Let me wonder who the artist is.
Let me search for it afterwards.
Let a Polish series introduce me to Polish music or an Italian series send me looking for an Italian singer I had never heard before.
Television can open doors.
Why close them before we even get there?
The music does not need to sound familiar to me.
It needs to sound right for the story.
Sometimes the Soundtrack Becomes Part of the Journey
One of my favourite things about watching international television is when something follows me after the final episode.
Sometimes that is a location I suddenly want to visit. Sometimes it is an actor whose other work I start searching for. Sometimes it is a food I had never heard of.
And sometimes it is a song.
You hear something during an episode, search for it, add it to a playlist and suddenly a television series has given you another small piece of its country to take away with you.
That is exactly what cultural exchange should feel like. Not forced. Not educational. Just curiosity leading somewhere else.
Let the Country Be Heard
Crime drama does not need music constantly. Silence can be incredibly powerful. But when music is used, I want it to feel intentional. I want to believe someone asked not only:
Does this song work with the scene?
but also:
Does this song belong in this world?
Because television locations should not only look authentic.
They should sound authentic too.
Language matters.
Accents matter.
Street noise matters.
And music matters.
If you are going to take me somewhere, let me hear where I am.