Second Lives
Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television
9780226824802
9780226820484
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Second Lives
Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television
A history of prestige television through the rise of the “black-market melodrama.”
In Second Lives, Michael Szalay defines a new television genre that has driven the breathtaking ascent of TV as a cultural force over the last two decades: the black-market melodrama. Exemplified by the likes of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, the genre moves between a family’s everyday life and its secret second life, which may involve illegal business, espionage, or even an alternate reality. Second lives allow characters (and audiences) to escape what feels like endless work into a revanchist vision of the white middle class family. But there is for this grimly resigned genre no meaningful way back to the Fordist family wage for which it longs. In fact, Szalay argues, black-market melodramas lament the very economic transformations that untethered TV viewing from the daily rhythms of the nine-to-five job and led, ultimately, to prestige TV.
In Second Lives, Michael Szalay defines a new television genre that has driven the breathtaking ascent of TV as a cultural force over the last two decades: the black-market melodrama. Exemplified by the likes of The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, the genre moves between a family’s everyday life and its secret second life, which may involve illegal business, espionage, or even an alternate reality. Second lives allow characters (and audiences) to escape what feels like endless work into a revanchist vision of the white middle class family. But there is for this grimly resigned genre no meaningful way back to the Fordist family wage for which it longs. In fact, Szalay argues, black-market melodramas lament the very economic transformations that untethered TV viewing from the daily rhythms of the nine-to-five job and led, ultimately, to prestige TV.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction: Television’s Second Life
1. The Gangster Mourning Play
2. The Informal Abject
Housework and Reproduction in Weeds and Orange Is the New Black
3. AMC’s White-Collar Supremacy
Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Halt and Catch Fire
4. Managed Hearts
The Americans and News Corporation
5. Waiting for the End in Twin Peaks, The Wire, Queen Sugar, and Atlanta
Conclusion: Streaming and You
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index