Strange TV: Innovative Television Series from The Twilight Zone to The X-Files
by M. Keith Booker
Category: Social Science

In the years since World War II, commercial television has become the most powerful force in American culture. It is also the quintessential example of postmodernist culture. This book studies how The Twilight Zone, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files display many of the central characteristics that critics and theorists have associated with postmodernism, including fragmentation of narratives and characters, multiplicity in style and genre, and the collapse of traditional categorical boundaries of all kinds. While these inventive series also challenge many of the conventions of television programming itself, they do not, however, pose a subversive threat to the capitalist order. The book argues that instead, the very characteristics that identify these series as postmodern are also central characteristics of capitalism, especially in the late consumerist phase.