With its twisty serialized plots, compelling antiheroes, and stylish production,
Breaking Bad has become a signature series for a new golden age of television, in which some premium cable shows have acquired the cultural prestige usually reserved for the cinema. In Breaking Bad
and Cinematic Television Angelo Restivo uses the series as a point of departure for theorizing a new aesthetics of television: one based on an understanding of the cinematic that is tethered to affect rather than to medium or prestige. Restivo outlines how
Breaking Bad and other contemporary "cinematic" television series take advantage of the new possibilities of postnetwork TV to create an aesthetic that inspires new ways to think about how television engages with the everyday. By exploring how the show presents domestic spaces and modes of experience under neoliberal capitalism in ways that allegorize the perceived twenty-first-century failures of masculinity, family, and the American Dream, Restivo shows how the televisual cinematic has the potential to change the ways viewers relate to and interact with the world.
About the AuthorAngelo Restivo is Associate Professor in the School of Film, Media, and Theatre at Georgia State University and author of
The Cinema of Economic Miracles: Visuality and Modernization in the Italian Art Film, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews"Graduate students, scholars, and professionals interested in how television has changed over- time, the filming and creation of
Breaking Bad, and the shift in television should find this book to be in their lane." -- Natalie Brown * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Book InformationISBN 9781478003083
Author Angelo RestivoFormat Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Duke University PressPublisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 318g