Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America by Stacy Takacs (review)

When I wrote Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism, the topic of 9/11 and American film had been relatively unexplored.¹ Since the book’s publication in 2009, however, numerous insightful works have taken up the subject. In Firestorm, I was mainly concerned with theatrical film and covered television but briefly in a single chapter that did not aim to be as comprehensive as those that explored feature film.

Stacy Takacs’s Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America provides a wide-ranging and far more complete portrait of the influence of 9/11 and its aftermath on programming for television. She moves easily in her analysis from news to entertainment programming because she takes each category as containing elements of the other. She writes, “Rather than reimpose some false distinction between information and entertainment, nonfictional and fictional programming, my approach is to treat all program types as simultaneously entertaining and informative.”² News, documentary, and entertainment programming, then, are seen to perform many of the same strategic tasks in proposing, constructing, and conveying the various meanings of 9/11 to viewers.

The comprehensiveness of Terrorism TV is one of its virtues. The chapters examine news programming, shows that valorize counterterrorist agencies, entertainment programs with a military focus, and various examples of resistant or counterhegemonic programming. News coverage of the 9/11 attacks, Takacs writes, drew on the tropes of melodrama to mobilize the public to support a war of vengeance, and she demonstrates the ways this operated. The melodramatic framing functioned to make “militarism appear necessary and inevitable.”³ The ongoing efforts of counterterrorist agencies, depicted in heroic terms in shows like Threat Matrix (ABC, 2003–2004), The Grid (TNT, 2004), The Agency (CBS, 2001–2003), Sleeper Cell (Showtime, 2005), and 24 (Fox, 2001–2010), “helped normalize the state of emergency and promote the acceptance of policies of surveillance, detention and interrogation that were fundamentally antidemocratic.”⁴ “Militainment” formats—entertainment programs with strong military content—accompanied the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Takacs. Shows like JAG (CBS, 1995–2005), Over There (FX, 2005–2006), and Generation Kill (HBO, 2008) helped turn viewers into “armchair imperialists.”

While these categories of programming, according to Takacs, worked to manufacture popular consent for a new security regime and its affiliated policies, resistance to the new security order was voiced through shows like The Daily Show (Comedy Central, 1999–), Whoopi (NBC, 2003–2004), and Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi, 2004–2009). These “opened a space in the cultural terrain for dissent to be elaborated, explored and consolidated.”⁵

The final chapter, titled “The Body of War,” analyzes how the media sanitized the war by eliminating depictions of the scarred and maimed bodies of wounded survivor veterans and the corpses of those who did not survive. The topic has been written about by other scholars, but Takacs shows the myriad ways in which media worked to block honest depictions of war’s human cost. On the occasion that viewers did see such images, as in the James Gandolfini documentary Alive Day Memories (2007), the encounter might produce a provocative form of witnessing. Takacs writes, “This may not have been the type of witnessing that required ethical response in the form of action, but it did require individuals to confront the experience of violence and duress unique to war and to analyze their own relationship to militarism.”⁶

As this summary of the book’s content suggests, Takacs undertakes two interpretive moves. The first is an explication of how television programming was affected by the 9/11 attacks. She provides an analysis of programming content that is valuable because it encompasses many salient content categories. The second interpretive move extends beyond the themes and tropes of TV programming. Takacs proffers a series of descriptions about how viewers allegedly react to television shows, how their minds are influenced by what they see on the small screen, and...