Overview

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.

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9780226820484

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Reviews

I really love this book. Szalay digs deep under the skin of recent television. Second Lives is compellingly argued, impeccably reasoned, and a pleasure to read. And it unearths the hidden allegories that are at the core of contemporary television. This is an important book, recommended to all who would grapple with TV's complexities. -- Will Scheffer, cocreator of HBO's 'Big Love' and 'Getting On' Second Lives proves that a deep account of the broadest of socioeconomic realities, the total economic order, is necessary to adequately grasp our cultural present. A future classic of TV studies, and easily among the best books on culture and deindustrialization. -- Sarah Brouillette, Carleton College If television about white family life has often been nostalgic, Szalay chronicles what happens when that triumphalism encounters today's uncertainties around gender and sexuality, ethnicity and race, and labor and economic precarity. A rich, resonant book that informs equally about US politics and television today. -- Dana Polan, New York University

Author Information

Michael Szalay is professor of English and film and media at the University of California—Irvine. He is the author of New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State and Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party.

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