Melodrama and Narrative Stagnation in Quality TV

This essay moves from Twin Peaks and The Wire to Queen Sugar and attributes their many moments of narrative stagnation to a shared interest in deindustrialization, on the one hand, and soap opera and melodrama, on the other. These dramas confront the historical erosion of separate sphere gender relations and the industrial family wage upon which those relations were based. At the same time, they confront the generic consequences of their own inability to distinguish home from work. As all work comes to seem a variant of housework, the ostensibly serial narratives that define these dramas become static, and expressions of the very melodrama from which they set out to distinguish themselves.