Second Lives

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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"--