The Politics and Moral Lessons of Prestige TV

Nearly a half century after Alasdair MacIntyre warned that the modern world had thrown ‘the language and practice of morality into grave disorder,’2 political theorists still debate whether late-modern culture can support coherent ethical commitments. Communitarians such as Sandel lament the erosion of civic virtue;3 conservatives Deneen4 and Scruton5 decry the loss of moral consensus; and leftists from Jameson6 to Bauman7 and Brown8 diagnose a neoliberal hollowing-out of normative horizons.

Many scholars extend MacIntyre's verdict to their analyses of ‘new television.’ Martin Shuster contends that prestige television serials of the late 1990s-2020s reveal a ‘normative desert’ of American life in which, drawing on Arendt's concept of natality, the family is understood to represent the last ‘site for potential political renewal.’9 Other commentators echo Shuster's ‘desert’ metaphor, though not always his focus on the family, reading anti-hero narratives such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad as exercises in moral ambiguity that deny viewers little stable ground for judgment.10 In conventional left-wing fashion, some critics maintain that certain series – The Wire, for example – through their portrayals of pervasive moral brokenness and structural injustice, oblige viewers to confront their complicity in structural oppression and therefore to embrace a radical duty of collective reform.11