Fictional Television and American Politics

Jack Holland is Associate Professor in International Security at the University of Leeds

‘Like one of the brilliant television shows analysed in the text, this book grips the reader from the very first page and draws them into a fascinating, incisive, thoughtful and utterly compelling analysis of television, culture and politics. I simply could not put it down. If you want to better understand the bewildering nature of American political life today, you couldn’t do much better than this amazing book. It demonstrates how television and politics mutually constitute each other, no more so than in the Reality TV politics of the current Trump administration. This book makes clear that to understand American politics, you have to understand television. Hugely recommended.’Richard Jackson, University of Otago, New Zealand‘Jack Holland's account of how fictional television shapes the world politics of the US in the twenty first century marks a major advance in the analysis of international relations and cultural politics. On the one hand, his analysis demonstrates how fictional television enables us to make sense of who we are, our places in the world, and how we should interact with others. On the other, he reveals the discursive war of position that resonates through the formal politics of the American presidency and those of our fictional televisual worlds. In doing so, Holland ensures that readers will never look at world politics, or their favourite television shows, in quite the same way again.’Kyle Grayson, Newcastle University

• AcknowledgementsList of abbreviationsIntroductionPart I: Watching television1 America and the screen2 Screening America under Bush, Obama, and Trump3 Drawing lines: world politics and popular culture4 Analysing fictional television Part II: Politics and television5 World politics as realpolitik (in House of Cards and Game of Thrones)6 Constructing counter-terrorism (in Homeland, 24, and The West Wing)7 Imagining the president (in The West Wing, 24, and Veep)Part III: Television and our political world8 Ethics and inequality (in The Wire)9 Being human in a world of zombies (in The Walking Dead)10 The personal is political (in Breaking Bad)ConclusionBibliographyIndex