Books in the Spin Offs series

In this sophisticated examination of the HBO serial drama that aired from 2002 until 2008, Linda Williams, a leading film scholar and authority on the interplay between film, melodrama, and issues of race, suggests what exactly it is that makes The Wire so good. She argues that its narrative power derives from its genre, popular melodrama.

In It's Been Beautiful, Gayle Wald examines Soul!, the first African American black variety television show on public television, which between 1968 and 1973 was instrumental in expressing the diversity of black popular culture, thought and politics, as well as helping to create the notion of black community.

In this concise analysis of the television show The Sopranos, a leading film and TV scholar explains the importance of the series in both its cultural and media-industry contexts.

Dana Polan considers what made Julia Childs TV show, The French Chef, so popular during its original broadcast and such enduring influences on American cooking, American television, and American culture since then.

Charlotte Brunsdon traces television's representations of Paris, London, and Baltimore to show how they reflect the medium's history and evolution, thereby challenging the prevalent assumptions about television as quintessentially suburban and showing how television shapes our perception of urban spaces, both familiar and unknown.

Angelo Restivo uses the innovative show Breaking Bad as a point of departure for theorizing a new aesthetics of television in which the concept of the cinematic points to the ways in which television can change the ways viewers relate to and interact with the world.