Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television
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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.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0226820483
ISBN13:9780226820484
Release Date:March 2023
Publisher:University of Chicago Press
Length:336 Pages
Weight:1.45 lbs.
Dimensions:0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"
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