Prestige Television

Cultural and Artistic Value in Twenty-First-Century America

EDITED BY SETH FRIEDMAN AND AMANDA KEELER

“Seth Friedman and Amanda Keeler prompt us to rethink conventional wisdom about ‘Quality TV’ and explore a rich terrain that combines TV industry strategies and textual expressions. The book makes a wonderful contribution to the study of recent and contemporary television and its shifting cultural status.”

—Michael Z. Newman, Professor of English and Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Prestige Television explores how a growing array of 21st century US programming is produced and received in ways that elevate select series above the competition in a saturated market. Contributing authors demonstrate that these shows are positioned and understood as comprising an increasingly recognizable genre characterized by familiar markers of distinction. In contrast to most accounts of elite categorizations of contemporary US television programming that center on HBO and its primary streaming rivals, these essays examine how efforts to imbue series with prestigious or elevated status now permeate the rest of the medium, including network as well as basic and undervalued premium cable channels.

SETH FRIEDMAN is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre at DePauw University. He is the author of Are You Watching Closely? Cultural Paranoia, New Technologies, and the Contemporary Hollywood Misdirection Film

AMANDA KEELER is an associate professor of Digital Media in the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University.

Perfect Copies

Perfect Copies

Reproduction and the Contemporary Comic

BY SHIAMIN KWA

Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the “problem” of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa’s Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, and explores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics creators push the limits of different ideas of “reproduction” in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about comics like these can push us to engage with complicated questions and teach us to be better readers..

176 pp 41 color and 4 b/w images

6.125 x 9.25

978-1-9788-2657-1 paper $29.95S

978-1-9788-2653-3 cloth $69.95SU

January 2023

Comics Studies • Cultural Studies

SHIAMIN KWA is an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures and comparative literature at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Regarding Frames: Thinking with Comics in the Twenty-first Century for the Comics Studies (RIT Press, 2020).