Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV

Michael Szalay

Theory & Event, Volume 22, Number 2, April 2019, pp. 465-488 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/722835

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Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV
Michael Szalay

Abstract This essay moves from Twin Peaks and The Wire to Queen
Sugar and attributes their many moments of narrative stagnation
to a shared interest in deindustrialization, on the one hand, and
soap opera and melodrama, on the other. These dramas confront
the historical erosion of separate sphere gender relations and the
industrial family wage upon which those relations were based. At
the same time, they confront the generic consequences of their
own inability to distinguish home from work. As all work comes
to seem a variant of housework, the ostensibly serial narratives
that define these dramas become static, and expressions of the very
melodrama from which they set out to distinguish themselves.

Critics often characterize the “quality TV” that emerged at the end of
the last millennium on non-broadcast channels—first on premium and
basic cable and later on web platforms—by its serial storytelling.1 A TV
“serial” is “cumulative,” Horace Newcomb explains, and produces an
overarching story distinct from the episodic stories of a TV “series.”
Jason Mittell adds, a TV serial “creates a sustained narrative world, pop-
ulated by a consistent set of characters who experience a chain of events over
time.”2 Serials first appeared in the U.S. on primetime broadcast TV in
the 1980s and 1990s, on shows like Hill Street Blues and thirtysomething,
and increasing numbers of both broadcast and non-broadcast dramas
(like X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) began thereafter to admix
episodic and serial narratives. But though The Sopranos would itself do
so, that drama is typically seen as inaugurating the “twelve- or thir-
teen-episode serialized drama” that would become what Brett Martin
calls “the signature American art form of the first decade of the 21st
century.”3 Trisha Dunleavy distinguishes “complex serial drama” from
Mittell’s “complex TV” by focusing on the same “high-end” dramas
that interest Martin: The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. These
programs, she argues, “tell a complete story from beginning to end.
Pursuant to this, their episodes are interrelated and interdependent,
must be viewed in strict order, and the interpretation of new events
in the narrative present is always informed by events of the past...The
high-end serial’s ‘overarching’ story entails unavoidable change and
an inevitable end.”4

Theory & Event Vol. 22, No. 2, 465–488 © 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press
466 Theory & Event

Why primetime serials emerged when they did and remain now a
dominant form has become a matter of some interest. Dunleavy attri-
butes the complex serial’s narrative “experimentation and innovation”
to the increased market penetration of cable and satellite TV, as well
as to the deregulation of the media industry.5 Angela Ndalianis stress-
es the capital mobility produced by deregulation: “since the 1980s,
national markets have been integrated into an expansive [global] sys-
tem ...whose concern for capital extends across multiple countries and
multiple media.” As TV competes for capital in this dynamic system,
it too becomes dynamic, or given to “change” and “undulating con-
tinuity.”6 Focusing on the similarity of serial TV and Victorian seri-
al fiction, Martin finds both “singularly equipped not only to fulfill
commercial demands, but also to address the big issues of a decadent
empire: violence, sexuality, addiction, family, class.”7 Lauren Goodlad
tells a similar story; “big” serial TV dramas with “long temporal spans”
emerge in response to processes of financialization akin to those facing
Victorian novelists, and “like the nineteenth-century novels they often
resemble,” TV serials “capture the real-life experience of inhabiting the
structures of a long-evolving, fast-changing global economy.”8 David
Buxton also studies “serialization in the age of finance capital”: “The
forward movement” of serial TV, he writes, exhibits “a form of infla-
tion” in which “plotlines are created continuously, from episode one, to
maintain a relentless rhythm of accumulation.”9
These critics tend to assume that “high-end” or “quality TV” is
“forward moving” (Buxton) and given to “undulating continuity”
(Ndalianis) because of the “fast changing global economy” (Goodlad)
whose motions it mirrors. I have written elsewhere on TV’s relation
to global finance—for example, by delineating functional homologies
between financial derivatives and HBO serials—and below I do trace
narrative features of quality TV to macroeconomic causes.10 But my
aim is to account for the social and generic forms that mediate those
causes, and the features that I describe are not those just outlined.
Linda Williams thinks “the fundamental paradox of contemporary
serial television” is that “the less time we have, the more time we spend
watching in the parceled-out mode of seriality.”11 This essay owes a
great deal to Williams, and I also read seriality in light of the working
day’s expansion. But “the parceled-out mode of seriality” can produce
contradictory effects, by generating simultaneously cumulative and
static narratives. Nothing that follows gainsays the fact that quality
TV does tell ongoing stories. But quality TV does not always tell “com-
plete stories” that move inexorably toward predetermined ends, and
even when it does, it often produces versions of what Walter Benjamin
calls “petrified unrest,” in which personal and historical events appear
simultaneously dynamic and stalled.12
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 467

That petrifaction frequently takes shape in relation to soap opera.

When serial stories slip into stasis and repetition, they mediate the
broadly economic determinants that this volume links to “secular
stagnation.” The dramas to which I turn register what Ted Martin
calls “the problem of the contemporary” as the everyday experience of
secular stagnation, insofar as they struggle to break free from and yet
also fully inhabit a capitalist present that feels both endless and stalled
on the precipice of decisive change.13 I trace these effects to quality
TV’s complex mediation of deindustrialization and the convergence of
waged and unwaged labor within and beyond the middle-class home.
I understand quality TV not as a direct expression of the “real home of
capital” that was for Fernand Braudel the space of global finance, but
in relation to its generically determined treatment of domestic labor
and the (typically white and middle-class) nuclear family. At bottom,
quality TV is determined by a lost boom, and so cannot elude a nos-
talgic mode; but it is also “overdetermined,” as Louis Althusser would
put it, in ways that constrain its nostalgia’s expression. Here I offer but
one of those constraints: quality TV cannot think the relation between
middle-class family life and deindustrialization except in terms of its
own relation to soap opera.
Quality serial TV comes from soap operas and melodrama, not-
withstanding the efforts of English professors to liken it to the novel.14
When the serial narratives that were for decades a staple of daytime
soaps migrated to evening soaps, and then to more seemingly serious
fare, those narratives changed less than some would have it. Though
now typically about middle-class rather than rich families, these
dramas are still dominated by “an infinitely expandable middle,” as
Dennis Porter says all soaps are, and inheritors of the “clotural con-
ventions” that Jane Feuer discerns in Dallas and Dynasty, for example.15
To be sure, most serial TV depends at its molecular level on suspense,
understood as the strategically intensifying interruption and arrest of
forward movement.16 But the quality programs that interest me use
suspense to dramatize less what changes than what doesn’t. Thus
could Dana Polan characterize The Sopranos by its “structure of stasis,
repetition, and cyclicality,” in which “characters seem to replay certain
types of behavior again and again rather than move forward.”17 To be
sure, quality TV disavows the soaps—as the lowbrow, too-feminine
form from which it came—by committing to upscale versions of what
Amanda Lotz calls “the male-centered serial,” the most important fea-
ture of which is its depiction of “the entirety of men’s lives” at home
and at work.18 But as it moves between home and work, it confronts
the erosion of the industrial family wage and what Maya Gonzalez
calls “the growing integration of the sphere of social reproduction into
that of production.”19 As a result, it discovers an unsettling congru-
468 Theory & Event

ence between its male leads and the unwaged, gendered workforce to
which soaps were historically addressed.
Quality TV fails to escape from soaps and melodrama, in short,
because of what it takes to be the convergence of once distinct separate
spheres. Williams argues that The Wire is an “institutional melodra-
ma,” and I agree that quality TV generally is a form of melodrama.
But if, as Laura Mulvey notes, melodrama draws its “source material
from unease and contradiction within the very icon of American life,
the home,” then The Wire displays a still-more contradictory melodra-
ma, because of its inability to conjure the family home as “the space of
innocence” (Peter Brooks) or “the good place from which one comes”
(Williams).20 Melodrama becomes “institutional” precisely because
home is now everywhere and nowhere; and as melodrama itself
becomes both ubiquitous and impossible, its narratives become both
serial and stagnant.
I begin with Twin Peaks and The Wire, before turning at length to
Queen Sugar. These dramas associate narrative stasis with deindustri-
alization and the home’s transformation in surprisingly similar ways.
Twin Peaks links the closing of a sawmill to the dilation of domestic
space and the horrors that take place within it as if out of time. The
Wire links deindustrialization to workplace boredom, homelessness
and civic futility. Where Twin Peaks closes a mill while signaling soap
opera’s resurgence, Queen Sugar opens a mill while signaling its escape
from soaps. The story of an African American family reclaiming land
once worked by its ancestors as slaves, Queen Sugar wants to break
free from recursive domestic rhythms that it associates with coerced
unwaged labor and soap opera. The drama aspires to the linear time
that it associates with historical transformation (and prestigious TV).
But it fails to transcend its soap origins for two related reasons: 1) its
black protagonists experience labor as compelled and unfree whether
that labor is waged or unwaged, and whether it takes place within or
beyond the home and 2) historical time seems itself to have ground to
a halt, stalled on the precipice of what feels like epochal change.

Two Ways of Looking at Deindustrialization

Quality TV often turns nostalgically to industrial production. In the
first minute of The Sopranos, Tony declares, “the best is over.” He refers
in part to the passing of his father’s industrial New Jersey. Ray Drecker
begins Hung in almost identical fashion by announcing, “Everything
is falling apart, and it all starts right here in Detroit, the headwaters
of a river of failure. Thank god my parents aren’t around to watch
the country they loved go to shit. They were proud Americans. They
had normal jobs and made a normal living” (1.1). Both offer a version
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 469

of Frank Sabotka’s lament in The Wire: “We used to make shit in this
country” (2.11). Raylan Givens voices this nostalgia in Justified when,
explaining why he did not shoot Boyd Crowder, he says in the dra-
ma’s last line, “we dug coal together” (6.13). The Americans concludes
with Philip and Elizabeth contemplating Moscow at night. What if we
had never left? wonders Elizabeth. “I probably would have worked
in a factory. Managed a factory” (6.10). Industrial labor represents the
road not taken, less a life lost than one never lived. On True Detective,
protagonist “Rustin Cohle” conjoins rusting steel and coal as atavistic
remnants within the postindustrial. When the industrial seems a prob-
lem—as on Deadwood—it is still a punctuating phenomenon whose
arrival or departure explains the content in question. In addition to
their palpable nostalgia, these dramas point us to a surprising TV con-
sequence of the erosion of the separate spheres that evolved alongside
industrial production. On each of these dramas, it is as if the world of
work and even the historical itself, once juxtaposed to the domestic,
disappears into the domestic, such that linear, progressive narratives
seem no longer possible.
An important precursor to the above dramas, Twin Peaks is cen-
trally concerned with deindustrialization. The first shot of its title
sequence is of a wren perched atop a branch, which image dissolves
into the Packard Saw Mill and then the automated cutting of mill
blades (Fig. 1). There are no workers. The camera leaves the factory,
enters the town, and moves to the Great Northern Hotel, perched atop
a waterfall as the wren was atop its branch. The camera zooms in on
the falls and, with an imperceptible shudder, the frame rate slows. We
follow the cascades to a reflective pool beyond the base of the falls and,
transitioning now to the series pilot, into the house that sits beside
these waters. Our first shot of this or any domestic interior is of Josie
Packard seen through a mirror, which echoes the still waters beyond
the house. She is a racial other out of place and yet dominant within
this home, which once belonged to Catherine and Pete Martell. So too
she owns the mill, but is conspiring with Ben Horne to destroy it. The
mill is no longer profitable, and Josie wagers she can make more than
she can running it by burning it down, pocketing the insurance money,
and selling the land to Horne. Laura Palmer’s body washes up from
the still waters beyond the Martell house, a figure for the jobs that will
be lost. In fact, the body’s appearance provides Josie with a pretext
to close the mill. “You can’t do that to my workers!” yells Catherine.
But Josie can and does. “The mill will shut down,” she announces.
“Perhaps, you can spend the day with your families.” We cut to Horne
chasing investments for the country club he plans to build upon the
mill’s land. He has no money of his own to invest. “Fluidity is every-
thing,” he will tell Josie, but “I can’t summon up cash reserves that I
don’t have” (2.6). Laura’s body emerges from a still body of water (as
470 Theory & Event

Figure 1.

Packard’s does from a mirror) as if both a symptom of and solution to

Josie’s liquidity crisis: the water is still, we might say, because the mill
no longer generates capital, and the body is dead, we might add, to
register the mill’s expulsion of living labor (the only source of value).
But if a necessary condition of the town’s deindustrialization,
Laura’s death is also a figure for a timeless condition that exists less
prior to than somehow beyond the narrative’s historical time. David
Lynch reports that he and co-creator Mark Frost dreamt up the mill
before any of the characters that would come to inhabit it or the town
of Twin Peaks. That explains why the titles invoke the mill less as an
automated factory than as one never enlivened by living labor. The
machinery exists out of time, and it is as if the whole of Twin Peaks
plays out within—even as it seeks to escape from—an interminable
present in which the men have already lost their jobs, and have already
been consigned to a life at home from which they then dream an ugly
release. Twin Peaks integrates daytime soap with detective genre con-
ventions that move us from a mystery to its solution. But it is more
accurate to say that it mires the detective fiction’s linear form in a
recursive and stalled narrative that it traces to soap opera on the one
hand and deindustrialization on the other.
According to Charlotte Brunsdon, soap operas capture “the sphere
of the individual outside of waged labor,” which is also “the sphere
of women’s ‘intimate oppression.’”21 Tania Modleski adds that soaps
prepare women for the “interruption, distraction, and spasmodic
toil” that characterize their unwaged domestic labor, which labor sus-
tains and reproduces male labor power.22 Soap seriality is for Michèle
Mattelart a thwarted effort to flee the sphere of unwaged labor and
gain access to what seems, from within that sphere, like the linear time
of waged labor. Mattelart describes soaps as “a symbolic revenge on
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 471

the triviality of everyday life, whose monotonous repetition is coun-

tered by the day-to-day episodes of the heroine’s unusual adventures.”
Unwaged housework underwrites that triviality, and calls forth a need
to remember the past as the precondition of the present. But the result-
ing narratives typically confine themselves to and provide continuity
in personal rather than social or historical relationships. They are in
that sense stagnant; for Mattelart, soaps remain stuck in non-histori-
cal time. As she puts it, referencing Nietzsche, sequential episodes try
to break free from the “eternal recurrence” of housework, but fail to
attain “the dominant idea of time as geared to linear industrial pro-
ductivity.”23 For her, then, soaps heighten contradictions between the
home’s “eternal recurrence” (which they represent) and “the domi-
nant idea of time as geared to linear industrial productivity” (which
they limn negatively, as an unfulfilled aspiration). This rings a change
on Thomas Elsaesser’s classic account of Hollywood family melodra-
mas of the 1950s. According to Elsaesser, these films substitute static
tableaux for narrative progression; lavish mise-en-scènes function as
objective correlatives for characters unable to break free of psychoan-
alytically inflected impasses.24 But Jane Feuer reminds us that these
films also figure “the disintegration of a capitalist ruling class fami-
ly,” such that psychological stasis counterpoints and even explains
economic decline.25 And for Mattelart, soaps offer psychological dyna-
mism as a paltry “symbolic revenge” on economic stasis; their escapist,
“unusual adventures” seek to placate a gendered workforce denied
access to an industrial wage.
In Twin Peaks, the triumph of soap opera points to the loss of that
wage. “Spend the day with your families” indeed: that is the organiz-
ing problem. After the mill closes, the family home becomes a lethally
endogamous hall of mirrors. The father of the girl abducted and abused
with Laura, Ronette Pulaski, works at the mill before it closes. And
though Leland Palmer is never himself employed there, after the mill
closes we find him at home during the day watching Invitation to Love
when his niece Maddy arrives for Laura’s funeral. Anticipating The
Wire, the ubiquitous soap is about an apartment complex called “The
Towers,” whose name evokes the twin peaks from which the town
and drama take their names. Throughout, domestic space dilates, and
time grinds to a halt in the face of twinned and otherwise recurrent
events that give the lie to cause and effect. Just as the mill has always
already expelled its workers, so too Leland has always already raped
his daughter; there is no before and after within the Palmer home. So
too, Leland will murder Maddy just as he did his daughter—telling-
ly, as the needle of the living room phonograph cycles back and forth
within the lead-out groove of a Louis Armstrong LP. Family time is
traumatic time, which is to say soapy, stuck-in-place time, and it opens
a space for the supernatural, figured here in the trans-generational
entity “Bob” that drives Leland to violence.
472 Theory & Event

The Wire’s Season Two cold open represents a version of this stasis,
and does so, as it happens, in relation to a body of water that figures
stalled capital in flight from industry. Lynch’s colorful main street aes-
thetic gives way to a bleak urban realism, but the dramas offer surpris-
ingly similar accounts of their difficulty realizing forward movement.
The camera surveys ruined factories along the periphery of Baltimore’s
Inner Harbor district. The point of view is Jimmy McNulty’s, as he and
a fellow police officer navigate the waters and recall when their fathers
were let go from those factories (Figs. 2 and 3). They spy a stalled
pleasure boat, “Capitol Gains,” and set about towing it in. “Capitol”
houses “Capital”: the factories lining the harbor were gutted and shut-
tered because, enticed by the prospect of better returns elsewhere, their
owners decided against reinvesting in production on site, and instead
sold off their land and assets; the owners thus realized capital gains.
That process led to a decrease in cargo traffic heading into the port
and eventually transforms Season Two’s underemployed dockwork-
ers into an unemployed surplus population. “It is capitalistic accumu-
lation itself,” Marx writes, “that constantly produces, and produces
in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant
population of laborers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices
for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a
surplus population.”26 The Wire is of course preoccupied with redun-
dant laborers, especially as they have been driven into the informal
economy of the drug trade. Barksdale corner boys aspire to promo-
tions that will grant them percentages of their packages, rather than
fixed salaries. “Coming off the clock,” as they put it, represents a sig-
nificant improvement in their standard of living. But they are selling
drugs at all because their community was forced off the factory clock
years before, when capital once located in Baltimore either invested in
production elsewhere, transitioned into finance, or disappeared into
profit taking and luxury-good consumption. The informal drug econo-
my both shadows the formal economy (by absorbing castoff labor) and
allegorizes it (by mirroring state-recognized businesses). In Season
Five, Gus Haynes asks his boss at The Baltimore Sun, then announcing
layoffs, “How come there are cuts in the newsroom when the company
is still profitable?” (5.3). But the question is not “if profitable” but “how
profitable,” and what to do with profits. “I’ve got too much money,”
Marlow Stanfield tells a lieutenant as we cut from The Sun. Stanfield
sends that excess offshore. In neither the drama’s formal nor informal
economies do profits return in bulk to production, and, in the former,
fiscal crises serve as pretexts to fire workers and enfeeble organized
labor.
The cold open intimates the limits of this process. The vessel can-
not make an adequate “return” (literally, to shore, and metaphorically,
as “offshore” capital). The fact that its engine is dead suggests that
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 473

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

eventually, and in aggregate, capital gains stall upon a sea of liquidity.27

The cold open thus condenses allegorically the contradictory process-
es that animate the drama’s social world, just as The Wire as a whole
diagrams the local effects of what has been a decades-long decline
in U.S. industrial profitability (McNulty’s dad was fired in 1973, the
hinge year between boom and bust, when U.S. industrial production,
already having fallen off in the late sixties, decelerated precipitously).28
As this decline becomes more acute, and as the money runs out gen-
474 Theory & Event

erally, managers of all kinds “find ways to do more with less” (5.3), as
The Sun editor puts it. The Wire registers the manifold consequences of
that imperative, as it reshapes Baltimore law enforcement, schools, city
politics, and the lives of already precarious populations.
Did we need five seasons to learn about the effects of this over-ac-
cumulation crisis? Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle find it easy to
“imagine [The Wire] going on endlessly, each season focusing on a dif-
ferent facet of the contemporary American city (the growing Hispanic
population and informal workforce, the sex trade, sanitation, the emer-
gency services, cleaners, pizza delivery guys, etc.).”29 Yet they reject
the notion that subsequent seasons would have told us anything more
about the larger forces driving Baltimore’s crisis. Lester Freamon and
Cedric Daniels each speak a version of the drama’s most famous line:
as Daniels puts it, “you follow the drugs, you get drug dealers. You
follow the money, you don’t know where it’s going to lead” (1.8). But
we know exactly where the money will lead, not because we know
to whom or into what licit venture this or that bundle of cash will go,
but because we are provided a version of what David Harvey calls a
“descent from the surface appearance of particular events to the rul-
ing abstractions underneath.” Toscano and Kinkle are interested in the
partial nature of that descent: for them, The Wire is about the “institu-
tional and cognitive limits faced by anyone seeking to orient oneself in
the realities of contemporary capitalism.”30 I’m interested in the narra-
tive limits imposed by a too-static account of contemporary capitalism.
Adorno claimed in the 1950s, “Every spectator of a television mys-
tery knows with absolute certainty how it is going to end. Tension is
but superficially maintained.”31 The Wire is a masterpiece of tension,
but by the close of the first season, at the very latest, we have a rea-
sonable sense of how subsequent seasons will end: McNulty is in the
back of a courtroom, watching in despair, as he did at the start of the
first episode; as new seasons unfold, different characters will be sent
to jail, even as new ones spring up to replace them, and be placed in
motion in turn by ruling abstractions that disallow the kind of change
for which the detectives long. Neither groups nor individuals will alter
the dynamics in which they are caught. Given to a Naturalist pessi-
mism, The Wire insists that all of its stories are ultimately the same,
insofar as they reveal that neither individuals nor groups can change
their larger environment. Linda Williams stresses the drama’s exhor-
tation to redeem a fallen world; The Wire is melodramatic, she argues,
because it is animated by a clear vision of right and wrong and by a
corresponding impulse to seek justice. I would stress its commitment
to fostering as well as frustrating that impulse: characters cannot but
seek justice, and they cannot but fail to produce change. This amounts
not simply to melodrama, but to an exploration of its limits. The his-
torical dynamics delineated in Season Two’s cold open render agency
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 475

all but irrelevant, after all, and as often as The Wire celebrates mor-
al action (and character bildung, in the cases of Bubbles and Roland
Pryzbylewski, for instance), it proffers explanations that suggest the
impossibility of change. This is why Williams is only partly right to
dismiss the drama’s pretense to tragedy: however demotic and earnest
in its reformism, The Wire also insists on what feels akin to fate and
inevitability.
As on Twin Peaks, the male detective’s inability to change ossified
dynamics takes shape in relation to a tendentious vision of domestic
life. FBI Agent Dale Cooper would save the Palmer family from its
recursive rhythms by dragging what haunts it into the light of his-
torical time; in The Wire, home is what detectives idealize and long
for after fleeing from it headlong, and what they return to after hav-
ing failed to produce meaningful change. Members of the Special Unit
feel called to a mission; they work feverishly in pursuit of historical
stakes. McNulty and Kima Greggs especially think those stakes inim-
ical to domestic life. But as they are rebuffed in their mission, family
ties beckon. “You got to ask yourself how you want to live your day-to-
day” (2.7), Freamon tells Daniels. Home and domestic ties extend the
promise of something more authentic. “This is life, Jimmy,” McNulty’s
ex-wife tells him when speaking about their kids. “This is the stuff that
matters” (5.5).
When McNulty briefly gives up “career cases” and takes a beat as
a patrolman, he experiences happiness, we’re meant to understand, as
a function of days and weeks now clearly divided between his job and
life at home with Beadie Russell, who also works a nine-to-five. This is
the moment at which the drama is most pointedly nostalgic. Williams
avers that “we are never asked to believe that any past home repre-
sented a golden age. No one is trying to ‘get back to the garden.’”32 But
The Wire is awash in nostalgia for industrial production’s clearly sep-
arate spheres. And even if McNulty and Russell both work, they both
“come off the clock” at the end of the day and retreat to a “haven in a
heartless world.” Home is a haven because neither thinks about work
when home—unlike detectives, who never stop working. For a while,
McNulty enjoys his retrograde retreat from the technical-managerial
class into the proletariat. The problem, of course, is that he cannot sus-
tain his domestic bliss, because, ultimately, he cannot stop working.
And the very impulse that produces melodrama—McNulty wants jus-
tice—is the very impulse that destroys the sanctity of his newfound
home.
“Tell me Jimmy,” Freamon says, “how do you think it all ends? The
job will not save you. Cases end. You need something outside this.”
Like what? McNulty asks. “A life. It’s the shit that happens while you’re
waiting for moments that never come” (3.9). The terms are manifestly
contradictory: a life “outside” work, presumably lived at home, might
476 Theory & Event

save you, but you’ll live that life waiting for something else (and for an
end that never comes). And of course waiting turns out to be the name
of the game, at home and at work. When McNulty returns to career
cases, he experiences a version of the endless tedium that detectives
frequently associate with domestic life. Kima tells him at the start of
the fifth season, “Every day, same shit.” His reply, which repeats in
different form throughout: “shit never fucking changes” (5.1). Fredric
Jameson thinks moments like these reveal The Wire’s anatomy of bore-
dom; Hua Hsu thinks the drama given to “extended periods of seem-
ing stasis.” Williams thinks the drama produces “the rhythm of certain
situations felt again and again” and characters caught in a “trap of rep-
etition.”33 On Twin Peaks, a signature combination of dread and monot-
ony concatenates prosaic tedium and the ambivalent longing for the
disruption—and even the destruction—of the domestic. We witness
the costs of a life spent within that space in the drama’s many broken
women, confined to wheel chairs, missing eyes, lost to madness, and
strung out with stress. The Wire’s dread and monotony, and its dread
of monotony, feels very different, but is in the end surprisingly similar.
Williams attributes the drama’s “trap of repetition” to its serial
structure. But the drama attributes it to deindustrialization, the gen-
eration of surplus populations, and the concomitant proletarianization
of the technical-managerial class, which experiences, simultaneously,
downward mobility and the loss of clear demarcations between work
and nonwork. When chronicling the immiseration of Baltimore’s black
citizens at the hands of newly mobile capital, and the quixotic hours
and days of detectives struggling against the tide of history (and their
own precarity), The Wire finds it impossible to allow the possibility
of significant change (narrative or historical). Moreover, it generates
a static melodrama made contradictory by its inability to invoke
a domestic “space of innocence” that might serve as the basis for
Baltimore’s redemption. Homes and families remain, but characters
do not leave them each day to engage and thereby change the world.
Rather, they chose home or world, which choice amounts to no choice
at all. The loss of complementary separate spheres, that is, has led to
two seemingly different but functionally similar outcomes: home and
work have become indistinct even as they have become still more rad-
ically separated.
The domestic becomes simultaneously inescapable and unavail-
able. This is why “homelessness” emerges in the final season as such an
equivocal and yet organizing metaphor. All are homeless when history
grinds to a halt, even as all are stuck in what seems newly encompass-
ing domestic space. For Williams, the orange couch in the middle of the
pit beneath the Towers represents a workspace made into a home. We
might also note the many times that detectives, asleep at their desks,
are told to return to their homes. But there can be no true home in such
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 477

a world, the drama frets, just as there can be no true escape from home.
McNulty speaks the drama’s last line, “Let’s go home,” to a homeless
man, and that line certainly suggests the utopian impulses with which
our detectives have fought for a sustaining collective life. But calling
Baltimore home can only be an act of despair. The homeless man will
find no home; the city will remain dysfunctional. Making peace with
that means giving up on reform and returning to homes and families
that function as sites of consolation rather than renewal. Like Bubbles,
who after much humiliation gains access to his sister’s home, McNulty
and Greggs beat a forlorn and conservative retreat, back into the fami-
lies from which they fled.

“Farming is waiting and waiting is farming”

On Queen Sugar, the Bordelons would escape stalled family into pro-
gressive historical time by embracing industrial agriculture. Charley
Bordelon and her siblings have inherited land in Louisiana that their
ancestors once worked as slaves. They stake their survival on har-
vesting the farm’s cane and processing it in their own mill. But the
ostensibly historical narrative stalls, never so palpably as in relation
to a protracted growing season that takes up the first two seasons of
the drama. Narrative time distends and defies the calendar’s cyclical
rhythms. The resulting admixture of anticipation and stagnation both
promises and defers the arrival of significant change. Charley thinks
the processing of cane harvested by black farmers in her mill (the first
in the state owned by a black woman) augurs the end of a white “sys-
tem of oppression” (2.3). The words are grandiose, but Queen Sugar
earnestly anticipates a black ownership class in the rural South (Fig.
4). Prolonging the cane’s growth dramatizes that class’s arrival. But it
also forestalls the reality that the drama will not in the end represent
the end of any oppression. And so at the close of the second season,
the harvest now here, Charley asks for more time, one feels, on the
drama’s behalf. “This is the beginning of the end for your way of doing
business,” she tells a white landowner. “Maybe not next month or next
year, but the end is coming” (2.16). The harvest that promises a new
beginning now intimates a more far-off horizon (Figs. 4 and 5).
Quality TV often discovers that linking the events of one episode
to those in another does not necessarily produce meaningful progres-
sion. A single conflict introduced and quickly resolved might produce
the effect of progress and closure. A single conflict drawn out over
many years, as in Queen Sugar, can produce the effect of no progress at
all, whether resolved or not. This is doubly true of not-yet-concluded
TV, and not simply because its story and its telling might diverge. All
narrative plays with differences between fabula and sjužet (the Russian
Formalists), histoire and récit (Gérard Genette) or “story” and “plot”
478 Theory & Event

Figure 4.

Figure 5.

(Peter Brooks). Equally so, different media generate different “temporal

autonomies,” to borrow from Genette, in relation to a narrative’s con-
sumption. A given novel’s story and plot might diverge both from each
other and the uneven rhythms of reading.34 TV and film might thus
seem more akin to each other than to the novel. The speed with which
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 479

we experience their narratives is fixed, as is our total viewing time. We

know how long watching a given film or episode will take. But when
watching not-yet-concluded serial TV, we don’t know how long the
story will last, and so encounter another kind of temporal autonomy.
The difference between binging and watching week-to-week might
matter less here than the indeterminate time span of the program’s
initial run. Genette thinks of narrative “duration” as a function of how
long the events in a story take relative to the time it takes to narrate
them. But in not-yet-concluded serial TV, duration remains indeter-
minate because neither plot nor story nor our experience of either
possesses a fixed end. This is why Stanley Cavell thinks soap operas
require a “modification of the concept of history, of history as drama,
history as related to the yarns of traditional novels.”35
Though we might know the growing period for sugar cane, we
have no idea during the first two seasons when Queen Sugar will arrive
at the harvest, and not simply because we don’t know when the plot
will get there. We also don’t know how long the plot is, and so our own
experience comes to seem both structured (we watch in increments)
and open-ended (we don’t know for how long there will be increments
to watch). This is complicated on Queen Sugar by the fact that the har-
vest portends more than simply Fall. It portends a new way of doing
business. And so we confront a new kind of season.
Quality TV in the United States typically airs in ten- to thir-
teen-week increments that are more like seasons than the September to
June arcs that once dominated broadcast; but no longer confined to a
fall-winter-spring cycle that tracked with the school year, that TV now
comes and goes in autonomous time horizons that seem both seasonal
and detached from any calendar logic. As the World Turns proceed-
ed in famously deliberate temporal fashion. As creator Irna Phillips
wrote of her show, “As the world turns, we know the bleakness of win-
ter, the promise of spring, the fullness of summer, and the harvest of
autumn—the cycle of life is complete.”36 But in quality TV, time speeds
up even as it slows down—contradictory rhythms sit atop one anoth-
er; we can seem both stuck in and speeding through this TV, as we look
toward an end we know is coming, but that might be coming for longer
than we know. Distending growing seasons often capture these asyn-
chronous rhythms. On Game of Thrones, we experience over eight sea-
sons an epoch-defining transition from feudalism to a political system
whose contours we don’t know. The transition takes shape in relation
to a single season within the story. It is Fall, and Winter has been com-
ing for some time. And so a world-historical transition collapses onto
a distended seasonal transition of uncertain duration, which duration
amounts to the drama’s own. On The Walking Dead we also encounter
an endless season. Plant life proliferates as wildly as the dead; vege-
tation is all but unstoppable, and has overcome civilization’s remains.
480 Theory & Event

On this kudzu Southern Gothic, there are no seasons except growing

season. There is no waiting for harvest; characters reap all year round.
But harvest promises only more of the same: minimal sustenance and
no more than a chance at survival. Here too, then, a distended season
stalls an otherwise healthy cycle, as if to register that even the cyclical
time of the calendar year can be misleadingly progressive. The narra-
tive stalls even as it rushes forward; it promises progression, but keeps
us moving in place.
More than these two dramas, Queen Sugar understands its season-
al stagnation in relation to a raced and gendered division of labor. The
sugar crystals featured in the first season credit sequence reference
Breaking Bad and the illicit informal economies into which families are
often driven on quality family dramas. While agriculture is typically
considered part of the informal economy, it is not illicit, and Queen
Sugar begins by asking how the family farm might rehabilitate and
render legitimate in the state’s eyes the paroled Ralph Angel Bordelon,
the drama’s chief male protagonist, and provide him with a family to
boot. But the gesture to Breaking Bad belies that ambition, and ultimate-
ly Queen Sugar will ask if it makes sense, given the fact that black men
will never be legitimate in the eyes of a racist state, to draw distinc-
tions on their behalf between the informal and the formal economy, or
between unwaged expropriation (in families and prisons) and waged
exploitation (on farms and in factories).
Citing Achille Mbembe on “necropolitics,” Nova Bordelon
describes African Americans as a replaceable and symbolically dead
surplus population. “Who does society say is disposable or trash?”
she asks a panel. “Who are the real-life walking dead? If not through
physical death, then social death, economic death, or political irrele-
vance” (2.3). The Walking Dead panders to whites who would stay one
step ahead of the physical, social, and economic death experienced by
“the real walking dead”: especially in its first seasons, it brutalizes and
replaces its black male characters with frequency, the better to hold at
bay the fear that Rick Grimes is already symbolically dead (and, for
this drama the same thing, symbolically black) because now truly out-
of-work and deprived of the monopoly on violence that he enjoyed
as a cop.37 More relevant are the zombies that schoolchildren imagine
inhabiting abandoned row houses on the fourth season of The Wire.
Those houses symbolize the symbolic death taking shape in domestic
spaces still inhabited by the living, and the children’s zombies are pre-
cursors of the walking dead that the children shortly become as they
discover with only one exception that their high school education will
consign them to Baltimore’s killing corners.
Confronted by a public defender’s indifference to the fate of a
wrongly accused teen, Nova Bordelon asks, “So this kid’s supposed to
just live in limbo?...It’s like purgatory for all of us” (1.12). Like the black
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 481

community generally, the “Bordelons” exist at the borderline or in the

borderland between life and social death. This is true for Ralph Angel
in ways that it is not for his two sisters, each of whom has a job and a
different relation to the police. Charley, a “High Yellow,” to borrow the
name of the drama’s diner, has a white mother and is in the process
of divorcing an NBA superstar. Already wealthy, her struggle will be
to understand the rural and working-class black community to which
her father belonged, while opening her sugar mill. Charley’s half-sib-
lings born to two black parents, Nova and Ralph Angel represent that
community in different ways. Volubly uninterested in raising a family,
Nova is an activist journalist and at the start in love with a white police
officer. She is the mouthpiece for the drama’s politics. Ralph Angel is
the drama’s object of uplift, as he struggles to gain a version of the
nuclear family from which Charley and Nova are differently in flight.
A single parent, he must upon his release from prison be saved
from the too-feminine relation to parenting and domestic labor that
awaits him. In part, that means reuniting with the mother of his son
Blue. But the bigger challenge is giving Ralph Angel a family and a
job (and a narrative that will take him each day from one to the other)
in the context of labor relations that do not supply black men with a
wage adequate to their reproduction, let alone their family’s. One of
the drama’s ingenious strokes is to capture that challenge, and Ralph
Angel’s liminal status, by rendering him subject to two employment
regimes. His father leaves the farm to him and not his sisters because
he thought Ralph Angel needed it most. But even after he becomes
an owner, Ralph Angel remains Charley’s wage-laborer, because the
terms of his parole require a W-2. Two things at once, Ralph Angel has
one foot in a carceral wage system and one in an ownership class, even
as he is at permanent risk of falling out of that class and into prison,
there being little for him in between.
Organized by the same account of the prison-industrial complex
that Ava DuVernay elaborates in her documentary 13th (2016), Queen
Sugar describes the effects of mass incarceration on the black family
and black men in particular.38 Both drama and documentary argue
that the state’s systematic incarceration of African Americans, and the
corporate expropriation of unfree labor in predominantly black prison
populations, represents a new instance of slavery, and a key engine of
capital accumulation. And both suggest that there is no understanding
wage labor for African Americans except in light of the always-implic-
it threat that ostensibly free wage labor might in a moment be trans-
formed into coerced prison labor. But the drama is no documentary,
and it understands unfree labor in relation to problems of narrative
progression that it traces to soap opera.
When the Bordelons visit the lavish estate of the landowner whose
family once owned theirs, Charley asks Nova if she’s been there before.
482 Theory & Event

“To this museum of our enslaved ancestors? No. It’s like going back in
time” (1.3). We hear a repeating refrain: “don’t look back, look ahead.”
The didactic use of music to double down on emotional states rep-
resents one of the drama’s more obvious soap gestures—just as it sig-
nals a self-conscious relation to its subject matter. “Farming is waiting
and waiting is farming” (2.4), intones the Bordelon’s foreman. As we
wait, the narrative stalls in melodramas about the family’s love lives.
And that makes sense, by the logic I have been developing, because
traditional distinctions between work and home do not obtain. Ralph
Angel lives and works on the farm. Nova grows and harvests marijua-
na in her front yard, which she sells to support her activism. Charley
and her son move into and make their home the newly opened mill.
And Aunt Violet, we discover, has been paid all along by Darla’s par-
ents to raise Blue. Later, echoes of Mildred Pierce, she turns her amateur
pie-baking into a business. Confronted with these home-work conver-
gences, and, above all, by the feminizing threat of violence that hangs
over its black men, Queen Sugar suggests that stories about black fam-
ilies must in some sense always recapitulate soap conventions, orga-
nized as those conventions are by failed efforts to reconcile the experi-
ences of time at the core of ostensibly free productive labor and unfree
reproductive labor.
However much it looks ahead, Queen Sugar often retreats into
personal versions of “eternal recurrence.” But that recurrence has a
clear political valence, because the family will seem when working the
farm always one step away from working it as versions of their slave
ancestors. Indeed, the drama’s avowedly historical narrative about the
rise of a black ownership class is forever jeopardized by both the past
and future that seem immanent within their land. Slavery haunts their
farm, and confronts them as an historical dynamic replicated at the
very moment that its legacy seems to be transcended. Hence the dra-
ma’s interest in prison labor: even as Ralph Angel farms on parole,
and is always one mistake away from returning to prison, the family
farm threatens to become a prison. In the third season, the landowner
with whom the Bordelons have been vying moves to acquire and lease
the land surrounding their farm to a for-profit prison, whose arrival
would represent the return of slavery in a new guise, and which would
once again bear the family back into the past.
Recidivism here takes on a new light, as the drama’s title sequence
especially conjoins Ralph Angel’s difficulty moving forward after leav-
ing prison with its own narrative difficulty doing the same. On quality
TV, the title sequence often possesses an unspoken affinity with the
home’s everyday rhythms: it is what repeats and stays the same, day
in and day out, unlike the narrative that follows. But this drama explic-
itly associates its cyclicality with soaps. The lightly psychedelic, kalei-
doscopic visuals are self-consciously retro in their pairing of actor’s
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 483

names and faces; the action, rather, is in the music, which repeats in
varying order four key lines: “dreams never die / take flight / as the
world turns / keep the colors in the lines.” The dreams of characters in
this drama, to take flight from a racial capitalism that would keep its
colored citizens both segregated from whites and between the vertical
lines of prison bars, are inextricable from the dream of this drama, both
to keep black themes and values (colors) within its written lines, and
to take flight on the strength of that writing from fare like As the World
Turns (which flight would presumably represent the opposite of color-
ing between the lines). Of course “as the world turns” signals both a
famous soap and what feel like the invariant rhythms of daily life, and
so taking flight from the former means, I am suggesting, discovering
something historical beyond the latter. But the sequence of the core ele-
ments changes and takes on different meanings in light of their order:
we might hear an imperative to take either flight or sustenance from the
soaps and daily life, depending on where “as the world turns” falls in
the overall sequence, and how implicitly continuous, and productive
of meaning, the elements of the sequence are taken to be: “dreams nev-
er die” means something different, say, if it comes before rather than
after “keep the colors in the lines.” And the continued looping of the
refrain is very much the point: there is no beginning and end of the
ordering as it repeatedly turns back on itself. (Fig. 6)
Ultimately, the titles do not insist upon any one set of meanings
so much as the constellate mutually implicated problems. Queen Sugar
lays claim to its quality, in other words, not because it decisively leaves
the soaps behind, but because it returns again and again under chang-
ing circumstances to the problem of doing so. Even as the Bordelons

Figure 6.
484 Theory & Event

seek escape from a racial “borderland” between life and social death,
and even as Ralph Angel seeks escape from a borderland between
ownership and labor, as well as one, lodged within that second term,
between free and unfree labor, the drama refuses to reject an experi-
ence of “boredom” that characterizes both farming and domestic life.
In the novel upon which the drama is based, one of Charley’s relatives
declares, “life does get daily”: that in response to Charley’s description
of a moment in her past when she found it hard to venture from her
home and into the world.39 Similarly unable to break free from fami-
ly and home, Queen Sugar derives real pleasure from the routines of
everyday life: cooking a meal, setting a table, rejoicing in family when
beset by the larger world.

Boardroom Boredom
And yet, those quotidian delights remain a problem. They come to
feel imposed, and too nakedly compensatory for ambitions thwart-
ed beyond the home. That speaks to TV generally: this is a medium,
after all, that keeps us complacent and stalled even when out in the
world with mobile devices. Fredric Jameson thinks The Wire a form
of “consolation” that assures us, as all TV does, that we are not alone;
but it produces “boredom and sterile or neurotic repetition or paral-
ysis.”40 The Wire and Queen Sugar, I have argued, associate boredom,
repetition, and paralysis with a breakdown of distinctions between
work and home, which breakdown results in a ubiquitous if contra-
dictory melodrama. Melodrama is not possible on The Wire, Jameson
thinks, because the drama manifests “the reign of Cynical Reason,” in
which distinctions between good and evil are vitiated and there are no
“political consequences any longer” to “the corruption of the political
generally, and its complicity with the financial system and its corrup-
tions.”41 Williams disagrees, and I have suggested that each is right in
part, insofar as The Wire manifests both melodramatic and Naturalist
tendencies. I conclude by noting the swerve that Queen Sugar makes
into Cynical Reason just after its harvest.
As the crop comes in, white landowners thwart the Bordelons at
every turn and divide them from them the rest of the black community.
The drama embraces this schism as generically necessary, by ringing
a change on the vision of family that Jameson elsewhere locates in The
Godfather films, in which “mafia” names both the ideological double
of big business and its utopian, archaic antithesis. On the one hand,
he writes, “the ideological function of the myth of the mafia can be
understood, as the substitution of crime for big business, as the stra-
tegic displacement of all the rage generated by the American system
onto this mirror-image of big business.” On the other, that displace-
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 485

ment activates longings for pre-capitalist community. The films’ “fan-

tasy message,” Jameson writes, inheres “in the family itself, seen as
a figure of collectivity and as the object of a Utopian longing, if not a
Utopian envy.”42 The family functions in this way in large part because
it is not white: “a narrative synthesis like The Godfather is possible only
at the conjuncture in which ethnic content—the reference to an alien
collectivity—comes to fill the older gangster schemas and to inflect
them powerfully in the direction of the social.” These terms do not
apply in quite the same way to Queen Sugar, and not simply because
the drama is produced and distributed primarily for black audiences.
Charley tries to activate utopian longings in her fellow black farmers
but is forced instead to play the gangster. See in my mill a kinship alli-
ance that might protect you from the predations of white capitalism,
she tells them. But they forsake her, troubled by rumors. And so she
pretends to ally with the white corporation that is trying to destroy
her; she will fight it from within, later, by selling her mill for a seat
on its board. “You on some Godfather shit” (2.16), Ralph Angel tells
Charley, when he learns her plan.
If this produces an amalgam of the ideological and the utopian,
as Jameson suggests it must, it does so less by way of The Godfather, or
even The Sopranos, than evening soaps like Dallas and Dynasty. There
is no crime network that strategically displaces anti-capitalist rage.
Charley’s extended family might well be an object of longing, because
of the shared domestic pleasures and intimacies that unite it; but it is
an overworked collective persecuted by white power, without any of
its own organized violence. When Charley decides to beat white cap-
italists at their own game, she commits to boardroom machinations.
Her workplace intrigue appears doomed to failure, because it is not
backed up by any kind of force. But they are generically recognizable,
as a mixture of Cynical Reason and melodrama. In fighting her new
fight, Charley gives up the Manichean moral terms of classic melo-
drama and achieves a familiar kind of quality on behalf of the drama
itself, one in which “family” no longer represents any haven from cap-
italist life, and in which a given protagonist’s intermittent penchant for
realpolitik conspires with the drama’s own often half-hearted systemic
analyses. “It’s a game of chess,” she tells her community-oriented lover,
before he leaves her in disgust. On both Twin Peaks and The Wire, chess
allegorizes impersonal forces that rob characters of agency. The latter
anatomizes those forces in ways that the former does not, to be sure.
But generically, I’ve argued, the results are similar. Queen Sugar does
analyze the origins of capitalist racism--up to a point. Throughout, it
insists on the crippling intimacy for African Americans of the wage
contract and the state-coerced unfree labor that underwrites that con-
tract. But it will sometimes feel as if that account exists mainly to justify
the drama’s own embrace of Cynical Reason. In the same moment that
486 Theory & Event

Charley decides to ally with her competitors, Nova finishes her opus,
“Race, Land, and Trump’s America.” Where Charley undermines fam-
ily the better to further its ultimate ends, Nova achieves a macroscopic
synthesis of the political and economic forces rocking her community.
Queen Sugar does not reveal Nova’s analysis. It simply gestures to it, so
as to lend its boardroom machinations a critical pedigree, and thereby
elevate the drama from its soapy origins. This works only for a while:
the drama drags on, seemingly stuck in place, as the corporation that
Charley sets out to destroy becomes just another dysfunctional family.
Melodrama makes its eternal return.

Notes
1. Though I use it below to describe cable and web TV after The Sopranos, the
term “quality TV” has a much longer history; see for example Jane Feuer,
MTM “Quality Television,” Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi (London:
BFI, 1984).
2. Horace Newcomb, cited in Trisha Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama and
Multiplatform Television (New York: Routledge, 2017), 100; Jason Mittell,
Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York:
NYU Press, 2015), 10.
3. Brett Martin, Difficult Men (New York: Penguin, 2014), 11.
4. Dunleavy, Complex Serial Drama, 102.
5. Ibid., 17.
6. Angela Ndalianis, “Television and the Neo-Baroque,” in The Contemporary
TV Series, Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon (Edinburgh: University
of Edinburgh Press, 2005), 86–88.
7. Martin, Difficult Men, 7.
8. Lauren Goodlad, “Bigger Love,” New Literary History, vol. 48, no. 4 (Autumn,
2017), 702, 713.
9. David Buxton, “Serialization in the Age of Finance Capital,” in The Routledge
Companion to Literature and Economics, Matthew Seybold and Michelle
Chihara, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2019), 410.
10. See Michael Szalay, “HBO’s Flexible Gold,” Representations 126 (Spring
2014): 112–134, and also Szalay, “Pimps and Pied Pipers: Quality TV in
the Age of its Direct Delivery,” in Journal of American Studies vol. 49, no. 4
(October, 2015), 813–844.
11. Williams, On The Wire (Duke University Press, 2014), 48.
12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), [J50,5],
319. See also Robert S. Lehman, “Allegories of Reading: Killing Time with
Walter Benjamin,” New Literary History, vol. 39, no. 2 (2008): 240–241.
13. See Ted Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of
the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
 Szalay | Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV 487

14. Mittell notes, “from the late 1950s onward, television seriality was viewed
by many critics, viewers, and producers as synonymous with, and exclu-
sive to, daytime soaps, forging a connotation between serial form and
the derogatory disdain for the genre.” He does not himself believe that
complex TV borrows mainly from the soaps, and locates its melodramatic
origins in “comics, classic film serials, and 19th-centuury serial literature.”
See Mittell, Complex TV, 235–36.
15. Porter quoted in Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995), 121–22.
16. See for example Lev Grossman in “Contemporary Seriality: A Roundtable,”
in Columbia Commons (January 24, 2019): 111.
17. Dana Polan, The Sopranos (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 59.
18. Amanda Lotz, Cable Guys, Television and Masculinities in the 21st Century
(New York: NYU Press, 2014), 55. Linda Williams: “part of the reason
for the masculine dominance of so many contemporary serials from The
Sopranos, through The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men is the desire to
dissociate such work from the taint of the feminine family melodrama and
their earlier soap opera origins.” Williams, On The Wire, 46.
19. See Gonzalez, “Notes on the New Housing Question: Home Ownership,
Credit, and Reproduction in the Post-war U.S. Economy,” in Endnotes 2:
https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-notes-on-the-new-housing-ques-
tion; accessed 4/14/2017.
20. See Laura Mulvey, “Melodrama In and Out of the Home,” Colin MacCabe
ed., High Theory/Low Culture (New York: St. Martin, 1986 ), 81. Peter Brooks
quoted in Williams, On The Wire, 215.
21. Charlotte Brunsdon, “Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera,” in E. Ann Kaplan,
ed., Regarding Television (New York: American Film Institute, 1983), 78.
22. Tania Modleski, “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and
Women’s Work,” Regarding Television, 71.
23. Michèle Mattelart, “Everyday Life (Excerpt),” in Feminist Television
Criticism, Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel, eds. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987), 30, 32, 34.
24. Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family
Melodrama,” Monogram 4 (1972): 2–15.
25. Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties, 116.
26. Marx, Capital, Volume One, Chapter 25, Section 3.
27. Hamilton Carroll notes that the stalled boat anticipates a Season Two
plotline in which state legislators refuse to reopen the grain pier and
dredge local canals. Carroll, “Policing the Borders of White Masculinity:
Labor, Whiteness, and the Neoliberal City in The Wire,” in The Wire: Race,
Class, and Genre, Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro, eds. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2012), 262–63.
28. See Robert Brenner, The Boom and the Bubble: The U.S. in the World Economy
(New York: Verso, 2003), 8.
488 Theory & Event

29. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (New York:
Zero Books, 2015), 154.
30. Ibid., 151, 156.
31. Cited in Hua Hsu, “Walking in Somebody Else’s City: The Wire and the
Limits of Empathy,” in Criticism, vol. 52, nos. 3 and 4 (2010): 511.
32. Williams, On The Wire, 220.
33. Hsu, “Walking,” 510; Williams, On The Wire, 133–34.
34. For an indispensable account of these issues, see Ted Martin,
“Temporality and Literary Theory,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Literature (December 2016); http://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/
acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-122?rskey=WM-
prac&result=1; accessed on 2/15/18.
35. Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” in Daedalus, vol. 11, no. 4 (Fall,
1982), 92.
36. See “A Look Back at As the World Turns: The Beginning,” Soaps.com;
https://soaps.sheknows.com/as-the-world-turns/news/11637/a-look-back-at-as-
the-world-turns-the-beginning/; accessed 5/16/2018.
37. On “social death,” see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A
Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
38. For a trenchant critique of 13th, see Dan Berger, “Mass Incarceration and
its Mystification: A Review of The 13th, in Black Perspectives, October 22,
2016; https://www.aaihs.org/mass-incarceration-and-its-mystification-a-re-
view-of-the-13th/; accessed on 2/05/19; for the definitive account of mass
incarceration, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulags: Prisons, Surplus,
Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley, UC Press: 2007).
39. Natalie Baszile, Queen Sugar: A Novel (New York: Penguin, 2015), 80.
40. Fredric Jameson, “Realism and Utopia in The Wire,” in Criticism, Vol. 52,
Nos. 3–4 (2010): 360.
41. Ibid., 367.
42. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” in Social Text,
No. 1 (Winter, 1979): 146