THE IMMORTAL COSMOPOLITAN

Abstract

The 1990s, internationally co-produced, television series Highlander was an early, successful example of everyday television produced under the pressures of negotiating the dictates of internationally conceived agreements concerning culture, representation, finance, and circulation. This essay parallels an institutional analysis of the series with a textual analysis of its fictive world and characters to examine the series’ attempts to elide the structural conditions and textual constraints underwriting its existence. To do so, the essay teases out the intricacies and implications of a new take on the colonial-era fantasy of cosmopolitan existence embraced by the series and embodied by the program's hero. It argues that this immortal cosmopolitanism offers a means for understanding the series as characteristic of transformations in the practice of transnational television production and circulation as a response to the globalization of neo-liberal economies. The machinations behind what gets displayed on screens around the world reveal a great deal about the substance of the global circulation of culture. At the same time, the text itself negotiated the pressures of attempting to appear constantly local and amenable as it traveled around the world. Highlander is significant for the specific ways in which it negotiated these pressures, revealing something of an allegorical take on its own existence as it imagined a hero that was relevant and interesting to globally-dispersed audiences in the 1990s: the immortal cosmopolitan.