Abstract
This book provides a short overview of a topic that is growing in popularity in academia and the contemporary press more widely. The growth of ‘prestige’ television has led to the commission of a wide variety of long-running serial fictions foregrounding male leads in roles as varied as career criminals (The Wire, The Sopranos), to sexually-active single parents (Californication, Hung). Given the expansion of this genre in the new millennium, Albrecht limits the possible scope of the work to series produced within the last ten years, and then further narrows his focus by selecting six series as case studies. The scholarship on display is thorough, and specific.
Albrecht’s introduction is excellent, providing the reader with an overview of the scholarly and industry uses of the term ‘quality television’, making a clear case for the author’s particular stance and interpretation. The author also positions himself clearly in terms of his approach to gender, with a stated feminist perspective and references to key theorists working on the discourse of gender in contemporary Western society. It is slightly disappointing to see shows like Californication, in which sexuality and gender are so prominently addressed, referenced heavily in this section, when they will not be considered in further detail. However, it is to be considered a compliment that the reader will come away wishing that the author had been able to extend their study.
The case studies at the core of the book build an argument that traces the development of particular masculine archetypes in 20th-century American society, through their representations on screen in the 21st century. This enables the author to establish an historicised perspective, using the modern iterations of masculinity on display in these fictions as a lens to examine the development of a range of masculinities available for identification, and examination, in American contemporary culture. Though so much has been written on Mad Men by contemporary critics that Albrecht’s chapter sometimes develops the feeling of a literature review, he has a clear line of argument to draw together the threads he extracts from the analyses of others. These threads are then picked up and carried through the analysis of Breaking Bad and Hung in the next chapter. The development of a clear, linked argument across the case studies is one of the strengths of this volume. The last case study, on Girls and Louie, is the most strikingly original commentary in the book. The clarity of purpose with which Albrecht approaches the topic is evident here, as the threads that linked the previous chapters on historicised perspectives to traditional masculine identities can be tied into the analysis of very non-traditional characters and series.
Where the book loses its focus and clarity is, disappointingly, the opening chapter: ‘Masculinity in the Obama Era’. It should not be possible to write an entire chapter on this topic without using the words ‘race’, ‘racism’ or ‘black’, yet somehow Albrecht has contrived to do so. This chapter offers an excellent critique of the cultural position of the ‘MRA’ or Men’s Rights Activist, and an interesting analysis of the intersections of masculinity and socio-economic class in American political discourse. However, without addressing race, this analysis can only offer so much. When, in the conclusion, the author declares it ‘unsurprising’ (p. 109) that prison-set dramas feature more people of colour, the lack of intersectional critique is most jarring. The end of the first chapter, in which the author addresses recent commentary and scholarship in television studies surrounding the modes of dissemination of media product, felt like it was sadly curtailed. An expansion on how ‘quality’ television became so, and the process of legitimation, would have served to position the cultural analysis of the next chapters within a clear economic and social framework for media production.
This book will be of great interest to scholars of identity and masculinity, and of American contemporary media, as it offers new perspectives on the construction of the ‘masculinity in crisis’ narrative, and an excellent analysis of representations of white masculinity in cultural products of the post-recession era. The well-chosen range of case studies, and the incorporation of ideas and critiques from outside of the academic perspective, strengthens the analysis and situates it firmly in contemporary critical discourse.