Examines how the U.S. television industry reflected and redefined the principles of the American Dream for audiences whose ideas about hope, fairness, work, and economic class were shaped by the Great Recession.

TV's American Dream examines how the U.S. television industry in the 2010s pursued audiences whose ideas about hope, fairness, work, and economic class were shaped by the Great Recession.

While Americans navigated the trauma of the economic meltdown, the television industry faced growing pressure stemming from new program distribution and viewing methods, increasingly fragmented audiences, shifts in methods of advertising, and regulatory changes. To cut through the clutter of television content to appeal to elusive viewers, television programming reimagined some of the traditional representations of the American Dream and continued to bolster others.

Exploring shows on different platforms from legacy networks to Netflix, Selznick takes a deep dive into representations of the American Dream on television. Each chapter of this book focuses on a particular strategy mobilized in the second decade of the new century to speak to audiences about their expectations for and concerns about the Dream. Bringing together research on industrial practices with an examination of sociocultural context, TV's American Dream demonstrates how interconnected forces give rise to the television programs that reinforce and redefine audiences’ ideas about the world in which they live.

"While Barbara Selznick adeptly interrogates the meanings of the dreams that Great Recession TV offered its viewers, she equally challenges us to ask how those dreams emerged from the economies in which TV is produced and distributed. TV’s American Dream reveals how industrial hopes and aspirations for profitable futures can determine what dreams become available to whom." - Derek Johnson, Professor and Chair of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and author of Transgenerational Media Industries: Adults, Children, and the Reproduction of Culture (2019)

"A wide-ranging, insightful, and accessible study of post-recession television, TV’s American Dream meticulously probes narrative, character, genre, audience, and industry to ascertain how the medium adapted to the fallout of an economy gone sour. Selznick maps the elusiveness of the American Dream onto the shifting terrains of television and demonstrates that while the dream can be contested, TV cannot tolerate its complete undoing." - Deborah Jaramillo, Associate Professor, Department of Film and Television, Boston University, USA