Delivered. As a result of the proliferation of serial products on the screens, and the need for the most passionate to navigate, the bibliography devoted to this former poor relation of popular culture continues to grow. As evidenced by the publication of The Fiction Machine. Ucritical history of American series, short, accessible and nevertheless very useful work, whose author, Bernard Genton, is professor emeritus of American civilization at the University of Strasbourg.
Conceived as a sort of long introduction – which does not prevent it from being scholarly – to the critical analysis of series, this book is based, as its name suggests, on an entirely American corpus, which has the interest of inscribing the “serial” object in a unique cultural, economic and political history.
Letters of nobility
In seven short and dense chapters, the author offers avenues for reflection around the birth of the genre in America in the 1950s, then its renewal in the 1980s until the advent of the “Quality television” which, for a quarter of a century, has given its letters of nobility to fiction on the small screen. The parallel, then crossed, developments of the cinema and television industries are thus studied and put into perspective; evolution which led, at the turn of the 1990s, to the multiplication of demanding series – this was the era ofEmergency room, of X-Files but also of Twin peaks – and the loyalty of an attentive public.
The author also explains how certain technical advances – deferred viewing (VCR, then VOD) and miniaturization of screens (computer, then smartphone and tablet) -, combined with the loosening of censorship and a certain decline in Hollywood in the 1980s , allowed what Bernard Genton calls the “Realistic contract” to impose. The credibility of the plots and the situations, the banality of the physical, the increasing importance given to transgression (violence, sex, ambiguous, amoral or even fundamentally bad characters): all of these elements have made the success of Hill Street Blues, Oz, The West Wing, The Wire…
This realistic bias is also what allows these large series to intertwine “The intimate and the political” and, in doing so, to give them an unprecedented resonance: ” This brings the serial genre closer to other more established and legitimate forms of representation such as literature, theater or cinema. (…) The advantage of the series (…) stems from their ability to concretely reflect both everyday and fundamental problems of viewers, and to some extent to make them if not understandable at least recognizable. “
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