The Serial Will Be Televised: Serial Television’s Revolutionary Potential for Multidisciplinary Analysis of Social Identity - Reviews of Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure by Dennis Broe, Wayne State University Press, 2019, and Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television by Maria Sulimma, Edinburgh University Press, 2021

Abstract

This review examines how two recent books use a multidisciplinary approach to examine seriality as both technology and narrative mode in contemporary American television. Both Dennis Broe’s Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure (Wayne State University Press, 2019) and Maria Sulimma’s Gender and Seriality: Practices and Politics of Contemporary US Television (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) examine the impacts of the interactivity between socio-political climates and the unique formal aspects of serial television has on social identity, relationality, and the potential for resistance within the medium.

Keywords

• seriality
• television studies
• media studies
• neoliberalism
• gender studies