Action TV Reboots and Visibility Politics: Rebooting Middlebrow Culture
deals with the network TV reboots of
Hawaii Five-0
,
MacGyver
Magnum, P.I.
Lethal Weapon
and
The Equalizer
to explore the cultural politics at work in contemporary middlebrow culture. The book focusses specifically on the representational politics of contemporary middlebrow TV.
The book analyses action TV reboots via the framework of middlebrow television, and the political meanings of the category. It explores the category of middlebrow TV, the role of nostalgia of middlebrow reboots. This leads into a critique of the representational norms of middlebrow TV, which includes a variety of visual representations of ‘otherness’ but fails to narrativize marginalisation. Instead, visual ‘difference’ is reduced to visual signifier of an inclusive society. What emerges is the idea of visibility politics and its dominance in American network TV.