Better Living through TV

Contemporary TV and Moral Identity Formation

Steven A. Benko

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2022
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781978754911
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Watching television need not be a passive activity or simply for entertainment purposes. Television can be the site of important identity work and moral reflection. Audiences can learn about themselves, what matters to them, and how to relate to others by thinking about the implicit and explicit moral messages in the shows they watch. Better Living through TV: Contemporary TV and Moral Identity Formation analyzes the possibility of identifying and adopting moral values from television shows that aired during the latest Golden Era of television and Peak TV. The diversity of shows and approaches to moral becoming demonstrate how television during these eras took advantage of new technologies to become more film-like in both production quality and content. The increased depth of characterization and explosion of content across streaming and broadcast channels gave viewers a diversity of worlds and moral values to explore. The possibility of finding a moral in the stories told on popular shows such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and The Good Place, as well as lesser known shows such as Letterkenny and The Unicorn, are explored in a way that centers television viewing as a site for moral identity formation.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Sleeping with Fishes and Talking with Horses: Animality, Identity, and Vegetarianism in The Sopranos
• The Bigger the Lie, the More They Believe: Morality and Ethics in The Wire
• The Two Walters: Walt Whitman’s Poetry and the Moral Vision of Breaking Bad
• Check Your Settings: Change to a Democratic Framework for Feminist Subtitles
• “The Lord of War and Thunder”: The Morality of Nemesis and Retributive Justice within Justified
• Law and Loyalty in Hellcats
• Justice Is Served: Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal and the Evolution of Cultural Morality
• What Made the Devil Do It?
• Letterkenny: Tolerance Meets Tradition
• Morality versus Mortality: The Meaning of (After)Life in The Good Place
• How Television Produces Invisible Communities in an Age of Loneliness: A Detailed Look at 13 Reasons Why
• Can Watching TV Make Me a Unicorn?: TV and the Ethics of Decency
• The Baby Yoda Effect: A Kantian Analysis of Mandalorian Ethics
• A Black Captain America: Race in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
• Subject Index
• Character Index
• Episode Index
• About the Contributors