E-raamat: American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality Television: Captivating Aspirations

1. This is one of only a few works which bring TV studies into contact with mass incarceration studies in ways which go beyond merely adjudicating fact from fiction. It thus strives to be rigorously interdisciplinary while at the same time relevant for those working in diverse yet overlapping fields such as cultural studies, media studies, and critical prison studies. 2. The chapter titles are organized around key research questions - therefore, observations can often be abstracted beyond the corpus of primary objects to larger industry trends, and readers quickly get a sense about how to navigate the chapters. 3. The work offers a novel account which centers televisual practices and the contemporary history of how media ecosystems developed in discussions of political and social importance, rather than merely arguing that TV or media texts simply reflect, respond to, or distort such issues. As such it addresses a notable gap in the literature, especially in relation to media studies of mass incarceration. Far more than a building of brick and mortar, the prison relies upon gruesome stories circulated as commercial media to legitimize its institutional reproduction. Perhaps no medium has done more in recent years to both produce and intervene in such stories than television. This unapologetically interdisciplinary work presents a series of investigations into some of the most influential and innovative treatments of American mass incarceration to hit our screens in recent decades. Looking beyond celebratory accolades, Lee A. Flamand argues that we cannot understand the eagerness of influential programs such as OZ, The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, 13th, and Queen Sugar to integrate the sensibilities of prison ethnography, urban sociology, identity politics activism, and even Black feminist theory into their narrative structures without understanding how such critical postures relate to the cultural aspirations and commercial goals of a quickly evolving TV industry and the most deeply ingrained continuities of American storytelling practices.