Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas and the Reinvention of Television

In this sharp study, Szalay (Hip Figures), an English and film professor at the University of California, Irvine, examines the theme of black markets in prestige television. He contends that such “black-market melodramas” as The Sopranos, Orange Is the New Black, and Breaking Bad are “allegories of deindustrialization and the erosion of separate spheres” of work and home life, the collapse of which the shows’ characters attempt to reverse by creating secret second lives engaged in informal economies. In Tony Soprano’s nostalgia for an idealized notion of the nuclear family, Szalay sees an exemplification of critical theorist Walter Benjamin’s “mourning play,” which describes “a forced, stagey effort to endow a fallen world with some transcendent meaning.” “Worries that housework and paid managerial work have become the same” loom large in black-market melodramas, the author posits, pointing to the suburban housewife protagonist of Weeds who involves her family in her illegal marijuana business. Though readers who haven’t seen the shows discussed might feel underserved by the brief plot summaries, the shrewd analysis excels at distilling implicit themes in the entertainment landscape. Media scholars will want to check this out. (Mar.)