Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780226824802)

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.

Author: Michael Szalay
ISBN-10: 0226824802
ISBN-13: 9780226824802
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Language: English
Published: 03/22/2023
Pages: 288
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.74d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/30/2023
Choice 09/01/2023