The Late Oedipal Genre, Thantagonists, and Secondary Televisuality

Abstract

This article explores a dominant turn-of-the-millennium televisual genre, the late Oedipal narrative. Late Oedipal narratives such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad represent turbulent crises of sovereignty bound up with broader transitions in the spirit of the age. These crises are often connected to a change in the overriding media environment, which the late Oedipal genre tends to represent as a mortal challenge to atavistic, self-destructive “thantagonists” such as Jimmy McNulty, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen, and Walter White. As such, the late Oedipal genre constitutes a recursive form of television about television as the medium is vacuumed up and remediated by its successor, the Internet. I refer to such palpable rearticulations of televisuality through the universal medium of the Internet as “secondary televisuality.”