This chapter engages with noir scholarship to investigate how three Greek television crime shows, produced during different chronological periods and broadcast by different channels, have contributed to varied and complex constructions of noir masculinities. The empirical focus is placed on Tmima ithon/Vice Squad (ANT1, 1992–95), which centres around the adventures of a gender-mixed group of police officers dealing with cases of marginalised delinquents and organised criminal networks; Oi istories tou astynomou Beka/The Stories of Officer Bekas (ALPHA, 2006–08), a television adaptation of Yannis Maris's popular eponymous book series; and Eteros ego: Hamenes psyches/ The Other Me: Lost Souls (COSMOTE, 2019–20), a recent show aired by a pay TV network featuring a male-dominated cast and a thematic structure borrowing from both local and foreign detective models. Drawing from discussions around the cinematic legacies of noir and its international expressions on the small screen, the primary aim of this chapter is to shed light on yet another neglected area of the Greek noir universe, that of the noirness of television fiction.

While the above television shows are largely labelled as crime shows, they employ aesthetics, narrative structures and conventions that accommodate the expression of noir influences and/or ambitions. More specifically, the selected texts do more than simply allowing the viewer to follow the detectives’ journey through the investigation of the crime to its final resolution. Ever since the 1940s, noir's ‘baggage’ has been linked with ‘specific cultural preoccupations and ways of speaking about men’ (Studlar 2013: 372). Thus, noir is as much about diagnosing masculinities as it is about detecting crime. In nominating noir masculinity as the key analytical lens of this chapter, we examine representations of male detectives woven into the main narrative of the texts they ‘inhabit’, as well as the actors who embody these roles, their star personas and career trajectories (Gates 2006: 6). To do so, we conduct a character and performance study, registering the ways that character and performance signs (Butler 2012; Cantrell and Hogg 2018; Dyer 1998a), including appearance, style, tone, rhythm, objective correlatives – that is, individual objects linked to characters (Butler 2012: 62) – as well as the actors’ image and performances in other roles, inform and allow for a more thorough understanding of noir masculinities in the context of Greek television fiction.