“Ethics and Politics of TV Series”: Demoseries in Open Philosophy

TV series have become a ubiquitous presence in our lives, even more so with the Covid-19 pandemic that confined the world’s populations to their homes for long periods of time. Yet the effects of TV series on human lives and on society still remain largely unacknowledged and understudied. This topical issue addresses this lacuna with seventeen essays by scholars from different countries that discuss TV series’ moral and political role and influence. Given their wide reach and omnipresence, TV series provide common reference points, which populate ordinary conversations and political debates. As noted by Sandra Laugier in the issue’s introduction “Taking TV Series Seriously”, TV series “become shared representations of moral reasoning and feelings. They arouse ethical reflection in their viewers – in the spirit of philosophy…The ambition of the present issue is to demonstrate the intellectual and philosophical ambition of TV series themselves, as works of art.”

The essays in the issue traverse a vast area of topics, including fictional realism, cross-cultural adaptation, ethics of representation, viewers’ experience and reception, etc. Reflecting different critical positions and methodologies, the contributors discuss a wide range of TV series to examine their moral and political influence. The section on “Moral Education and the Limits of Ethics” includes Ada S. Jaarsma’s analysis of Fleabag’s use of gimmickry as a pedagogical tool, while Riley Valentine discusses Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood through the lens of the communal ethics of care. In the same section, Selda Salman proposes a reading of The Walking Dead from a Kantian perspective by employing his interrelated ideas on history, ethics, and politics, while Ada Bronowski’s essay positions Game of Thrones within a tradition of pessimism, from Blaise Pascal to Vladimir Nabokov and the latter’s vision of birth as a separation between two voids.

The “Technological Imagination” section focuses on the way TV series address and define our relationship with technology: Alexandre Gefen draws attention to the political and ethical considerations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in serial fictions; Eamon Reid uses The Expanse to discuss how political matters and ethical agencies can be represented in science fiction; while Umut Eldem and Beşir Özgür Nayır examine the “technopolitical thinking” in Rick and Morty and the ways in which this animated series reflects on the impact of technology in contemporary societies.

 What makes TV series a distinct medium? And how does this specificity affect our perception of both fictional and real worlds represented in them? These are the questions that run through the articles in the “Ontology and Genres” section. Martin Shuster focuses on the practice of rewatching, considering what it can tell us about the medium of new television, about ourselves, and about our world and the possibilities of art in it. Jeroen Gerrits discusses the moral and political transfigurations of The Handmaid’s Tale across adaptations in different  media: the novel, the film, and the TV series. Sandra Laugier focuses on a specific genre of TV series, the “security series”, in order to argue for their status as works of art and powerful tools for educating and informing the public. Benita Acca Benjamin’s discussion centers on Delhi Crime in order to examine the new-found importance of ethically and morally grounded representations in the context of the digital turn and new screen cultures that facilitate transnational and cross-cultural viewerships.

The section “TV Series as Political Weapons” brings together articles that draw on critical theory and decoloniality to address the ways in which serial fictions both reflect and participate in paradigmatic societal changes. Thus, Philippe Corcuff discusses the ways in which series can play a role in reinventing critical theories; he focused on four series—American Crime, The Sinner, Sharp Objects, and Unorthodox—to address how these works formulate a critical decoding of current ideological contexts, in particular, the intersecting identitarian and ultra-conservative tendencies in France, Europe, the United States, and Brazil. Fernando David Márquez Duarte uses a qualitative methodology to analyze Black Earth Rising and Queen Sono and the ways these two shows address social and political issues such as neocolonialism, neoextractivism, internal colonialism, racism, inequality, justice, self-determination, corruption, violence, peace, memory, necropolitics, mental health, and decoloniality. Laura Schelenz and Marcel Vondermaßen focus on Dear White People, analyzing how the series treats “race” and racism and how the show’s approach relates to contemporary debates in the United States.

The “Security Series” section reflects on the growing importance of the security genre and its political and moral dimensions. In her essay, Pauline Blistène focuses on the concept of “realism” in serial fictions. Using the case study of The Bureau, she argues that spy TV series are “realistic” not because they correspond to reality but because of their impact on reality. Renée Pastel discusses the conflicting representational tropes of “veteran-as-hero” and “veteran-as-villain” to address the potential of TV series to affect the process of reintegration—and the parallel one of rehumanization—of veterans within the U.S. society.

“Ethics and Politics of TV Series” is available online on Open Access at https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/opphil/5/1/html. Check it out!