In the last 15 or so years, the status of television within the broader cultural landscape has undergone a radical shift. In the wake of so-called "quality television" programs like The Wire and Breaking Bad, television — once derided as a form of mere entertainment — is now arguably the paradigmatic art form of contemporary US culture. In this sense, contemporary television (at least in its "quality" incarnation) is not only now grasped as "art," but as the very form of art to which we turn in order to understand best the present in which we live.

In this seminar, we will examine the rise of "quality television," beginning with its signature programs — The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad — all of which use the multiseason serial form to bring about an arguably unprecedented degree of conceptual complexity and dramatic intensity. To help us develop an analytical language to discuss these programs, we will sample the fast-growing and highly diverse body of scholarship dedicated to these shows, reading essays from a variety of critical perspectives (formalist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, etc.); as background, we'll also read some canonical texts in critical theory and media studies from Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey, and Judith Butler. We will be particularly concerned with the analysis each of these shows sketches out of contemporary capitalism, and capitalism's characteristic institutions and forms of life (the advertising agency in Mad Men, the drug trade in The Wire and Breaking Bad, etc.) with a particular emphasis on questions posed by television's own imbrication within the capitalist culture that it depicts. Gender will also be an ongoing concern, given the persistent suspicion that the label "quality television" may have something masculinist about it, insofar as the term first emerges in relation to a series of so-called "male anti-hero shows." In the final third of the seminar, questions of gender and sexuality will loom particularly large. We will turn to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a program that arguably performs a feminist deconstruction of the very concept of "quality television." We'll conclude the semester by taking up a slew of contemporary programs, all of which in some way engage with feminism, queer gender politics, and/or a critique of traditional masculinity — Girls, Transparent, Louie, and Broad City. (Wednesday 1:30 - 4:20 p.m.)