Trope Alert: Please Give Us a Break From Dead Teen Girls on TV

Perhaps the only truly notable thing about the Icelandic crime drama Case that premiered on Netflix last week is how much it underlined just how tired the trope of the dead teenage girl has become in our crime serials. When the Icelandic police investigator happened upon the body of a teenage ballerina — hanging from a noose, above the stage in a darkened theater — it felt like the show was backsliding into a parody of the kinds of crime serials that the U.S. has been churning out for much of the past decade. At the very least, that kind of dull pastiche doesn’t serve Case well, and it keeps it from asserting any kind of unique identity for itself. And it should hopefully serve as a lesson to other crime shows going forward: ditch this trope now; we’re sick of it.

We had this conversation about TV back in the summer, when The Night Of premiered with an episode that did a lot of things right — an emphasis on the granular nature of police procedure, for one example — but which also placed directly at its center the brutal murder of a young woman whose entire purpose in the episode ended up being to get stabbed to bloody death so as to launch the rest of the story, from which she’d be totally absent. It was by far the weakest part of The Night Of, and it couldn’t help but leave a queasy feeling in the stomachs of even that show’s most fervent supporters.

This trope of a young (often teenage) girl serving as stone-dead inspiration for an intricate crime mystery didn’t get invented this decade. It goes back at the very least to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which turned the visual of the dead body of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), wrapped in plastic, into one of the most iconic TV images of the 1990s. Twin Peaks was a brilliant show, and it delved into Laura’s life as Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle McLachlan) combed for details and clues to her murder. In that respect, a show like Veronica Mars, over a decade later, took the idea of a season-long investigation of the murder of a high-school girl into even more well-rounded territory. With Veronica (Kristen Bell) so dogged in pursuit of the person who killed her best friend Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried), the show made liberal use of flashbacks in order to bring Lilly to life and to make the search for her killer all the more urgent. This was a ray of hope into a moribund trope … unfortunately one that wouldn’t last.

The next major milestone for dead-girl TV was 2011’s The Killing, which was set up to be the heir apparent to Mad Men and Breaking Bad among AMC’s top dramas. The Killing, like Twin Peaks before it, took to the Pacific Northwest to solve the season-long investigation into the murder of Rosie Larsen (Katie Findlay), whose face adorned every poster for The Killing in the lead-up to its premiere. That angelic face of a girl who was dead before the show even began. But rather than illuminate the Rosie Larsen character, The Killing slogged its way through a series of gloomy, horrific revelations, about Rosie Larsen and about the myriad ways in which teenagers are exploited in the shadows of society. It’s a worthy avenue to explore, but The Killing eroded all its good will with slack storytelling and a first-season finale that declined to solve the mystery, meaning that everything the audience had endured during that whole season felt like gratuitous punishment … and then they had to go through it again in season 2.

After The Killing, all the tropes that show used became tainted, while at the same time becoming overused. From drugs to abusive boyfriends to sex tapes to forced prostitution to the exploitation of the young by the powerful to ritualistic torture and murder, these would all end up cropping up on everything from The Following to Criminal Minds to Top of the Lake to The Fall. HBO managed to elevate the dead-girl trope to artistic heights in the opening episode of True Detective, which kicks off its mystery with the visual of a dead girl, bound into a worshipful position, in front of a tree, with antlers affixed to her head.

The image was at once disturbing and painterly, in a way that was intended to unsettle both the audience and the main characters. But even at its most artful, dead-girl TV can’t truly justify itself now that its been copied and re-copied so many times. In the most crass terms possible: it’s time to let the fields of dead girls on TV lie fallow for a while, if only so the image can once again regain its ability to shock an audience. Because right now, we’ve gotten to the point where the sight of a young girl who’s been brutally murdered is boring. And that’s the worst thing of all.