Cable watching: HBO, the sopranos, and discourses of distinction

Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 261-283

  Polan, Dana ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84860111027     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (24)

1. Peter Grant, " Comcast's Big Bet on Content," Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2004, B1.
2. To summarize the show briefly, it deals with the Soprano family and its patriarch, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), who is a mid-level Mafiosi. In therapy Cable Watching 281 after panic attacks, Tony is beset by the problems of his " line of work" as well as domestic issues (an up-and-down relationship with his wife Carmella [Edie Falco] and the growing pains of his two children).
3. Jennifer Baker, " The Unhappiness of Tony Soprano: An Ancient Analysis," in Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze, eds., The Sopranos and Philosophy: I Kill, Therefore I Am (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 28-29.
4. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989).
5. On the mutually rewarding interplay between 1950s critics and Golden Age teleplay production, see William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and Its Critics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
6. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956).
7. Paul de Man, " Semiology and Rhetoric," Diacritics 3, no. 3 (1973): 27-33.
8. Ted Johnson, " Great Expectations (Interview with Chris Albrecht)," Variety, August 25-31, 2003, A2.
9. Susan Sontag, " Against Interpretation" (1964) in Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Laurel Editions, 1969), 23.
10. David Simon, Tony Soprano's America: The Criminal Side of the American Dream (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), x.
11. David Bernstein, " Philosophy Hitches a Ride with 'The Sopranos': Small Publisher Finds Route to Big Numbers," New York Times, April 13, 2004, E3.
12. Meredith Armdur, " Has Success Spoiled HBO?" Variety, August 25-31, 2003, A14.
13. The standard account of HBO is George Mair's anecdotal volume, Inside HBO: The Billion Dollar War Between HBO, Hollywood, and The Home Video Revolution (New York: Dodd,Mead & Company, 1988).
14. For sex programming as an intermediate step in the elaboration of modern cable, see Karen Backstein, " Soft Love: The Romantic Vision of Sex on the Showtime Network," Television & New Media 2, no. 4 (November 2001): 303-17.
15. Much of the information in this paragraph comes from Denise Martin and John Dempsey, " Mobsters Mint Moolah: 'Sopranos' offnet pricetag like to hit record high," Variety (on-line), January 27, 2005, http: //www/variety.com/.
16. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
17. Allen Rucker, The Sopranos Family Cookbook as Compiled by Artie Bucco (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 2002). Factual information on the cookbook in this paragraph comes from e-mail communication from Rucker, to whom I express my appreciation.
18. Mark Wolff, " Site Seeing Internet Lets Fans Call up In-Depth Connection with TV Favorites," Rocky Mountain News, September 23, 2002, accessed on-line.
19. Michael Curtin, " Media Capitals: Cultural Geographies of Global TV," in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olssen, eds., Television After TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 281.
20. John Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
21. Jeffrey Sconce, " What If?: Charting Television's New Textual Boundaries," in Spigel and Olssen, eds., Television after TV, 98.
22. Caryn James, " 'Sopranos': Blood, Bullets, and Proust," New York Times, March 2, 2001, E1.
23. On " cultural citizenship's" re-writing of politics as lifestyle, see Toby Miller's Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007).
24. Brian Lowry, " Trading Places: Cablers Get Addicted to Reality Shows as Networks Steal Their Buzz Machine," Variety, January 31-February 6, 2005, 1, 70.