ALL CAPS, all the time: why are so many shows bombarding us with giant fonts?

David Fincher’s work is full of fine details. You could conceivably watch his entire back catalogue without realising, for instance, that the camera tends to mimic the actors’ smallest movements. But during the editing process for his 2017 TV drama Mindhunter, he had an idea that nobody can have failed to notice. “I’m not sure which episode we were watching,” editor Tyler Nelson told the Art of the Cut website, “but he said, ‘Let’s fill the frame with a big location card.’”

Mindhunter fans are split between loving its colossal captions and hating their overbearing presence

Whenever Jonathan Groff’s behavioural psychologist Holden Ford visits a new town, we’re told which one it is in massive letters that take up the whole screen: welcome to (eg) BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, and to a trend in TV and film for enormous location titles.

Mindhunter fans are split between loving its colossal captions and hating their overbearing presence, but they’ve caught on. Netflix’s drug-running drama Narcos is about to return with a season entirely set in Mexico, but when the regular show visits there, you know about it because a big caption shouts MEXICO.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Narcos season four trailer

The BBC’s on-point thriller Killing Eve regularly smothers the screen with a typeface created for the show by title designer Matt Willey, drawn narrow for an air of retro cool, and to facilitate the elegantly threatening blood-dripping effect on the show’s title card – which, in its use of a very large font on a background that changes colour each week, recalls the way Girls used to confidently imprint its name on the whole screen at the start of every episode.

Killing Eve also trumpets its globe-cantering élan whenever a new location looms by announcing, via the same very large capitals, that we’ve arrived in VIENNA, PARIS, MOSCOW or another chic destination - although perhaps this is all just leading up to the gag in episode four where the tranquil, fictional Home Counties village of BLETCHAM gets the same treatment.

There’s a trend for films and TV dramas that have global scope and want to shout about it. The current vogue for enormous place names started on the big screen in 2016, when Captain America: Civil War made sure you knew the action was taking place everywhere from LAGOS to LONDON and from BUCHAREST to BERLIN. A year later, The Fate of the Furious took advantage of how easily digital video editors can now make text appear to integrate with a scene by placing the oversized lettering for HAVANA. CUBA on the surface of the harbour water and VLADOVIN, RUSSIA across frozen tundra.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matt Willey’s Killing Eve title card Photograph: BBC

Fincher hasn’t just upped the stakes by making his location titles fill the entire screen, rather than merely a large proportion of it: the size of the text, combined with the chosen typeface (it’s Heroic Condensed, font fans) recalls tabloid newspaper headlines of the 1970s, when the show is set. It also evokes pulp/noir detective films from a few decades earlier.

In storytelling terms the captions perform a function similar to the datelines reminding you which year you were up to in Zodiac, one of Fincher’s previous serial-killer studies: he likes his information meticulously collected and boldly labelled. More simply, Mindhunter’s location titles are startling and oppressive: they’re a jolt to make sure you’re still alert in between the show’s trademark epic dialogue scenes and, since they tend not to introduce glamorous locations, they underline that unthinkably horrible things are happening in mundane places like PARK CITY, KANSAS and ALTOONA, PENNSLYVANIA.

Trendy and/or thematically sound as outsized captions may be, however, there’s another more prosaic explanation for them. Mindhunter was made for Netflix; Killing Eve is an iPlayer box set. A chunk of the audience will be squinting at a smartphone. Discreet captions won’t cut it on a handheld device: in an age of small screens, it’s best to go big.