Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure by Dennis Broe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure by Dennis Broe Suryansu Guha Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and the End of Leisure Dennis Broe Wayne State UP, 2019. 312 pages. $34.99 paperback. Dennis Broe's book is a new historicist reading of the ubiquitous cultural phenomenon of 'binge watching' or instantaneous consumption of television shows. Broe portrays this phenomenon as an inevitable result of the serialization of television shows. The rise of seriality in television series like Lost or Walking Dead, the book argues, is different from the kind of seriality that television shows used to have in the age of broadcast television. Although the book argues that the narrative archetypes of television shows remain the same, it claims that the shows themselves no longer are created for a fluctuating audience. As a result, episodes do not have to be as self-contained as they used to be. Thus, what Broe is doing in this book, by and large, is looking at how more macro political, economic and lifestyle changes in the world shape and influence what was being produced for screen. Drawing heavily from Bernard Stiegler's work, on the one hand, and Adorno's on the other, the book tries to understand how from the 80s onwards and with the rise of neoliberal economic policies certain processes were set in motion and how the "products of the culture industry bore the imprint of [those] process[es]" (28). By conducting a rigorous close textual analysis of a wide range of shows, the book reinterprets them (and sometimes movies like The Avengers) in light of neoliberal policies, growing wealth inequality, and the precarity of work conditions. The first part of the book shows how television consumerism has been very quick to adapt and appropriate the new platform to propagate its hyperindustrial modes of leisure. The first four chapters show how neoliberal ideologies are coded deep into the structures of these shows and how they are constantly trying to produce a neoliberal subject by producing in him "autism and addiction, the psychological conditions par excellence of hyperindustrial capital" (97). The second part of the book, consisting of the fifth and the sixth chapters, delves deeply into philosophical deliberations over seriality, offering a reconsideration of this term itself and what it entails as far as contemporary television is concerned. Chapter five starts with a Nietzschean understanding of the world and by extension television shows, as an eternal process of recurrence where time does not "evolve or advance but just circulates" (139). The counterpoint to this is posed via Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs who understand repetition through dialectics or returning with an understanding of "capitalist relations as a whole" (142). These two conceptions of time, the Hegelian and Marxist totality as opposed to the Nietzschian eternal return, are explored in the rest of the chapter through literature, comic books, radio, and, in the sixth chapter, film. The third and the final part of the book explores the emancipatory potential and possibilities of resistance that can come from within these hyperindustrial conventions and modes of consumption. Broe locates the site of this emancipation or resistance in the showrunner and the storyteller who can "carve out an autonomous space," "build engagement with social discourse," and "actualize the power of the medium" (211). The book locates fragments of subversive possibilities in a range of television shows like Dollhouse, Firefly, and Buffy. In sum, the book makes an Althusserian argument about how seriality and binge watching is a part of the hyperindustrialist, neoliberal mode of interpellation and subject formation, but also how the possibilities of counter-discursive formation that can upend the status quo are present within these modes. Though it at times threatens to subsume all of contemporary television narratives into the larger socio-political macro-narrative that Broe proposes, Broe's book offers a fascinating reading of how hyperindustriality informs not just the patterns of production of screen industries but also those of viewership. [End Page 48] While one can agree wholeheartedly with the overall argument of this book, it invites questions about a more concrete historical periodization and trajectory of seriality that might underpin the titular...