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.
Industry Reviews
"I take Martin Shuster's New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre to be the most important contribution, since Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed, to the construction of a philosophy of this genre of popular culture - the strange novel object intertwining television series, cinema, and our everyday lives. Both deep, erudite and wonderfully entertaining, New Television explores 21st century works that are now becoming classics: The Wire, Weeds, Justified, ...and many others. Overcoming generalist, theoretical, or elitist analyses of TV that simply miss the texture and the reality of our experience of moving images, Martin Shuster, following the lead of Stanley Cavell and Hannah Arendt, focuses on our shared and democratic experience of television. This fascinating book helps us understand how, and why, some TV series matter to us, how they are constitutive of our memories, how they shape our present and future lives."
--Sandra Laugier, Universite Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
"Martin Shuster has written an astonishing book on television's recent artistic and philosophical achievements. In a series of staggeringly bold and nuanced chapters he unfolds the thought of Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Michael Fried, and others in order to paint a compelling picture of how we can make intelligible the art of television and its inheritance of other artforms, modes of being, thinking, and judging. His claim that 'the medium has come of age' is cashed out in vivid accounts of The Wire, Weeds, and Justified which establish his critical authority as the leading philosopher of this medium and its evolving art."--Jason Jacobs, The University of Queensland
