In New Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre, Martin Shuster dives deep into the smartest shows of the past twenty-five years, from Twin Peaks to Orange Is the New Black, explaining how they are aesthetically and politically significant. Shuster focuses on three popular and critically acclaimed series, HBOs The Wire, FX's Justified, and Showtimes Weeds, to show how ?new television presents the contemporary world as entirely devoid of normative authority, with one exception: family. Though often portrayed in radically non-traditional ways, it is the family, with its many permutations and imperfections, that becomes the center of an otherwise destabilized world. Shuster takes it that these shows are implicitly, and at times explicitly, concerned with the current political moment, where public trust in US institutions is at an all-time low and where the promise of America is shown to be in danger of disappearing. The family is explored as a site for potential political renewal, but the parameters of the family stay amorphous or empty, suggesting that the best hope to be found in such an environment, politically, if not ethically and aesthetically, is the cultivation and maintenance of a conceptual space for newness. Readers interested in new ?quality television will find much of use in Shusters work to help them think through what gives these shows their power and ability to lead the viewer to a new self-knowledge.
Even though it’s frequently asserted that we are living in a golden age of scripted television, television as a medium is still not taken seriously as an artistic art form, nor has the stigma of television as “chewing gum for the mind” really disappeared.
Philosopher Martin Shuster argues that television is the modern art form, full of promise and urgency, and in New Television, he offers a strong philosophical justification for its importance. Through careful analysis of shows including The Wire, Justified, and Weeds, among others; and European and Anglophone philosophers, such as Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls; Shuster reveals how various contemporary television series engage deeply with aesthetic and philosophical issues in modernism and modernity. What unifies the aesthetic and philosophical ambitions of new television is a commitment to portraying and exploring the family as the last site of political possibility in a world otherwise bereft of any other sources of traditional authority; consequently, at the heart of new television are profound political stakes.
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