New Television ─ The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre

In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, Martin Shuster dives deep into the smartest shows of the past twenty-five years, from Twin Peaks to Orange Is the New Black, explaining how they are aesthetically and politically significant. Shuster focuses on three popular and critically acclaimed series, HBO’s The Wire, FX's Justified, and Showtime’s Weeds, to show how ?new television” presents the contemporary world as entirely devoid of normative authority, with one exception: family. Though often portrayed in radically non-traditional ways, it is the family, with its many permutations and imperfections, that becomes the center of an otherwise destabilized world. Shuster takes it that these shows are implicitly, and at times explicitly, concerned with the current political moment, where public trust in US institutions is at an all-time low and where the promise of America is shown to be in danger of disappearing. The family is explored as a site for potential political renewal, but the parameters of the family stay amorphous or empty, suggesting that the best hope to be found in such an environment, politically, if not ethically and aesthetically, is the cultivation and maintenance of a conceptual space for newness. Readers interested in new ?quality” television will find much of use in Shuster’s work to help them think through what gives these shows their power and ability to lead the viewer to a new self-knowledge.

Martin Shuster is assistant professor and chair of Judaic Studies in the Center for Geographies of Justice at Goucher College. In addition to many articles, he is the author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity, also published by the University of Chicago Press.