A return to form? Postmasculinist television drama and tragic heroes in the wake of The Sopranos

Abstract

The paper considers The Wire in the light of the critical discourse around The Sopranos and with reference to Deadwood, Mad Men, and Sons of Anarchy. The aim is to argue that, collectively, these works might be categorised as ‘postmasculinist television drama’, analogous to the grouping of shows such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City under the rubric of postfeminism. Like this latter category, postmasculinist dramas can be interpreted as displaying an ambiguous/ambivalent relation not just towards feminism but to other twentieth-century movements that were concerned with the de-centring of the normative, white masculine subject. Focusing primarily on issues of gender and medium, genre and form, the contention is that all these dramas create fictional worlds dominated by misogyny, homophobia, and racism whilst (apparently) establishing ‘ironic distance’ from these attitudes. Following up claims to the status of ‘tragedy’ made by, or for, all these works, this argument is developed by reading them in relation to early modern Revenge Tragedy. This suggests that, ultimately, they re-inscribe and reclaim for contemporary (white) masculinity the position of the (anti)-hero/subject as constructed by canonical tragedy, and defined in terms of the experience of existential ‘crisis’.