Viewing America

In an age of blockbusters, television drama reigns supreme. Just ask the millions who watched the Breaking Bad finale, readers who devoured Brett Martin’s Difficult Men this summer, and Hugh Laurie, the veteran of House who claims that television is “America’s way of conversing with itself about what it believes to be important.”

Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (on sale Jan. 1st) examines ten recent ground-breaking television series that represent a contemporary United States. From the halls of The West Wing to the streets of The Wire, Mad Men’s Midtown office buildings to the football fields of Friday Night Lights, television in the 21st century has captured the contemporary hopes and anxieties that define modern America. Television goes where it has not gone before: familiar genres from crime fiction to science fiction have been reinvented by shows like The Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica. These shows address post-9/11 problems at home and abroad, including:

• the dereliction of American cities

• the corrosive influence of drugs

• the collapse of the educational system

• the price of the drive for success

• the impact of wars abroad and attacks at home on national values

Viewing America is as much about a changing America as about the television series that have addressed those changes. In the last fifteen years, television has become a medium for addressing contemporary questions: the political uncertainty underlying presidential decisions on The West Wing, or the modern warping of the American dream that created Tony Soprano (along with his psychological instabilities). Modern television drama is more than shallow evening entertainment, but a place where America engages in a dialogue with itself.

Essential reading for fans of TV drama and those wondering where the creative representation of contemporary America has gone, Viewing America celebrates the emergence of a new golden age of American television, one that empowers writers and viewers to address the social and political realities of a nation in a new century.