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Pimps and Pied Pipers: Quality Television in the Age of Its Direct Delivery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2015

MICHAEL SZALAY
MICHAEL SZALAY*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of California, Irvine. Email: mszalay@uci.edu.
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Abstract

This essay examines the fascination with bodily conversion that characterizes recent HBO programming. Dramas and comedies like True Blood, Veep, Silicon Valley, and True Detective describe human forms in various states of transformation: into a menagerie of supernatural creatures, polling data, digital information and, even, the landscape of the American South. These transformations anticipate and seek to rationalize the exchange of the programs in which they appear into and out of diverse forms of Time Warner brand equity – even as they rehearse anxieties that the network's famed “quality” diminishes in the face of such exchanges. Female characters bear the brunt of this reflexivity; their forcibly contorted and monetized bodies figure the temporary material form assumed by otherwise liquid equity as it moves within Time Warner and, ultimately, over Internet lines and into the viewer's home. The network's famed misogyny is, in this respect, self-conscious and idiosyncratic, and reveals something essential about the incoherence of HBO's parent company at the moment that the network discovers new pathways for the direct distribution of its product.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Fictions of Speculation , November 2015 , pp. 813 - 844
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

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9 See Jane Feuer, “HBO and the Concept of Quality TV,” in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds., Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 145–57, 151. Also see McCabe and Akass, “It's Not TV, it's HBO's Original Programming,” in Mark Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, eds., It's Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-television Era (Routledge, 2008), 83–94; and Avi Santo, “Para-television and Discourses of Distinction: The Culture of Production at HBO,” in ibid., 19–45.

10 See Dean J. DeFino, The HBO Effect (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 177–91.

11 See Mary McNamara, “HBO, You're Busted,” LA Times, 3 July 2011.

12 Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ), 175–76. For a rebuttal of Irigary that reads the prostitute as self-empowered see Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing, and Rewriting the Prostitute Body (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 90–95.

13 Slavov Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 18, original emphasis.

14 London: Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction (London: Autonomedia, 1996), 9–11, original emphasis.

15 See Jerry Christensen, American's Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 287–93.

16 For Mark Fisher see “Suffering with a Smile,” Occupied Times of London, 22 June 2013. See also Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming, “If Only I Was Fucked and Left Alone,” Strike! Magazine, 4 June 2013.

17 MDP-Labs.com, July 2013, at http://mdp-labs.co/netflix-leads-with-superior-compression-algorithms.

18 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 163.

19 Michelle Chihara, “Kingmakers and the HBO Brand,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 June 2015.

20 Simon quoted in Shirin Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft, eds., The Politics of HBO's The Wire: Everything Is Connected (New York: Routledge, 2014), 88.

21 Hector Becerra, “A Times Writer's Take on True Detective's Vinci: That Was Vernon in a Nutshell,” Los Angeles Times, 21 Sept. 2015.

22 Robert Chambers, The King in Yellow (New York: Wildside Press, 2014), 45.

23 See http://m.history.timewarnercable.com/the-twc-story/era-1995-2000/Story.aspx?story=64.

24 Bewkes quotes in New York Times, 7 March 2013, at www.google.com/search?q=pizz+true+detectie&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8; on tax implications of spin off see www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1468516/000119312509235507/dex991.htm.