Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America

The Fox-TV series 24 might have been in production long before its premier just two months after 9/11, but its story lineand that of many other television programshas since become inextricably embedded in the nations popular consciousness. This book marks the first comprehensive survey and analysis of War on Terror themes in post-9/11 American television, critiquing those shows thateither blindly or intentionallysupported the Bush administrations security policies.

Stacy Takacs focuses on the role of entertainment programming in building a national consensus favouring a War on Terror, taking a close look at programs that comment both directly and allegorically on the post-9/11 world. In show after show, she chillingly illustrates how popular television helped organise public feelings of loss, fear, empathy, and self-love into narratives supportive of a controversial and unprecedented war.

Takacs examines a spectrum of program genrestalk shows, reality programs, sitcoms, police procedurals, male melodramas, war narrativesto uncover the recurrent cultural themes that helped convince Americans to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and compromise their own civil liberties. Spanning the past decade of the ongoing conflict, she reviews not only key touchstones of post-9/11 popular culture such as 24, Rescue Me, and Sleeper Cell, but also less remarked-upon but relevant series like JAG, Off to War, Six Feet Under, and Jericho. She also considers voices of dissent that have emerged through satirical offerings like The Daily Show and science fiction series such as Lost and Battlestar Galactica.

Takacs dissects how the War on Terror has been broadcast into our living rooms in programs that routinely offer simplistic answers to important questionsWho exactly are we fighting? Why do they hate us?and she examines the climate of fear and paranoia theyve created. Unlike cultural analyses that view the governments courting of Hollywood as a conspiracy to manipulate the masses, her book considers how economic and industry considerations complicate state-media relations throughout the era.

Terrorism TV offers fresh insight into how American television directly and indirectly reinforced the Bush administrations security agenda and argues for the continued importance of the medium as a tool of collective identity formation. It is an essential guide to the tele visual landscape of American consciousness in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

This book is part of the CultureAmerica series.