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Second Lives

Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television

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.

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Reviews

"Szalay compellingly argues for the black-market melodrama’s influence on the wider TV landscape, as well as for the ways it mediates and represents not only the conditions of its own production but also the entire contemporary economic order . . . [He] weaves together incisive, revelatory textual analysis with a consideration of both the operations of media industries and socioeconomic reality. Szalay’s account of the relationship between television and deindustrialization serves to illuminate the workings of both as well as the relations between them."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"The shrewd analysis excels at distilling implicit themes in the entertainment landscape. Media scholars will want to check this out."

Publishers Weekly

"Szalay explores the allegorical functions of black-market melodramas, considering the ways they reflect late-stage capitalism, illustrate the disintegration of the separation between work and family time, and interrogate white, middle-class, family mythologies, which 'they can neither quite recall nor yet cease to allegorize.' Recommended."

Choice

"The first book to seriously criticize the 'quality' TV boom of the last 25 years, investigating what made audiences binge and celebrate the crime-ridden lives of the Sopranos and the Roys in a time of economic precarity, rising authoritarianism, and daily lives with time to burn."

N+1

“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