Second Lives - by Michael Szalay (Paperback)

About the Book

"We hear everywhere that we are in a golden era of television. Prestige dramas are the stars of streaming services and cable networks alike, luring viewers into binge watching hours of programming with writing, production values, and acting talent typically associated with feature-length films. In Second Lives, Michael Szalay focuses our attention on a highly influential subset of prestige television that he calls the black-market drama, and he tethers the new renaissance of television to this genre. The black-market drama is a genre that was inaugurated by the HBO series The Sopranos. At its most basic level, it consists of shows in which part or all of a (usually) white, middle-class family leads two lives, one routine and the other typically illegal and dangerous. Those lives might involve black markets or money laundering, a secret past or closeted identity, addiction, prostitution, espionage, or an alternate reality. And those secret lives might be kept from a variety of people, from other family members to neighbors to the state. What matters is that second lives allow characters to awaken from the slumber of their first lives. We, the audience, awaken too. For Szalay, these black-market dramas are the key to understanding how TV, once the lowest of the low, came to be esteemed as never before"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A touchstone for future studies."-- "American Literary History"

"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"

"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"

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

"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

"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'

"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

About the Author

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.