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This chapter offers a surprising, even counterintuitive, paradigm for bringing all four major forms together. HBO's recent television series, The Wire (2002–2008), conceptualizes social life as both structured and rendered radically unpredictable by large numbers of colliding social forms, including bounded wholes, rhythms, hierarchies, and networks. Dependent on a narrative logic that traces the effects of each formal encounter on the next, it refuses to posit a deep, prior, metaphysical model of causality to explain its world. By tracking vast numbers of social patterns as they meet, reroute, and disrupt one another, The Wire examines the world that results from a plurality of forms at work. It is argued that this series could provide a new model for literary and cultural studies scholarship.

Carbon monoxide (CO) exposure has been described ever since humans developed products of combustion (e.g. fire, burning charcoal). The Romans realized that CO poisoning leads to death (Penney 2000). Coal fumes were used in ancient times for execution, and the deaths of two Byzantine emperors are attributed to CO poisoning (Lascaratos and Marketos 1998). Admiral Richard E. Byrd developed CO poisoning during the winter he spent alone in a weather station deep in the Antarctic interior (Byrd 1938). Further, CO poisoning took the life of tennis player Vitas Gerulaitis (“Died, Vitas Gerulaitis,” 1994; Lascaratos and Marketos 1998) and may have contributed to Princess Diana’s accidental death in 1997 (Sancton and Macleod 1998). Carbon monoxide is a colorless, tasteless, odorless gas by-product of the combustion of carbon-containing compounds such as natural gas, gasoline, kerosene, propane, and charcoal. The most common sources of CO poisoning are internal combustion engines and faulty gas appliances (Weaver 1999). Carbon monoxide poisoning can also occur from space heaters, methylene chloride in paint removers, and fire (Weaver 1999). The most frequent causes of pediatric CO poisoning are vehicle exhaust, dysfunctional gas appliances and heaters, and charcoal briquettes (Kind 2005; Mendoza and Hampson 2006). Less common sources of CO poisoning include riding in the back of pickup trucks, and while swimming and recreational boating (Hampson and Norkool 1992; Silvers and Hampson 1995). Among pediatric populations, minorities are disproportionately affected by CO poisoning compared to Caucasians, and Latinos and non-Latino blacks were more commonly poisoned by charcoal briquettes used for cooking or heating (Mendoza and Hampson 2006). Carbon monoxide is the leading cause of poisoning injury and death worldwide (Raub et al. 2000) and accidental and intentional poisoning in the United States. In the United States carbon monoxide poisoning results in approximately 40,000 emergency department visits (Hampson 1999) and 800 deaths per year (Piantadosi 2002). Children are particularly venerable to CO poisoning. The Center for Disease Control reports children younger than 4 years have the highest incidence of unintentional CO poisoning but the lowest death rates (2005).

Chapter 8 treats HBO Latin America’s first series to be made in Mexico. The chapter asks how the “HBO effect,” a paradigm of quality TV that is fully documented in the US, is transformed in a new territory and televisual ecology. The choice of a women’s prison drama thus not only connects the show with grittily realistic transnational titles from the network that addressed law and criminal justice; it also, in this new context, facilitates a connection with the melodramatic national genre of telenovela. The chapter further argues that authorship for the series should be assigned less to HBO than to the Mexican producer, Argos, which had been producing socially conscious and politically progressive dramas for some twenty years before.

Shilts makes the decision to publicly disclose for the first time that he is HIV positive. Shilts’s growing health struggles come quickly as he is then diagnosed as having AIDS. Shilts views as problematic the focus on his HIV status rather than the release of his new book, “Conduct Unbecoming.” Shilts has to limit his book tour to media interviews due to his declining health. The veracity with which Shilts answered earlier questions about his HIV status is explored; along with the ethics of what level of personal disclosure, gay men (or reporters) owe others. “Conduct Unbecoming” becomes a central part of the gay military ban discussion as movie rights to “And the Band Played On” are sold to HBO.

This chapter gives a close reading of HBO’s The Wire, arguing that the show powerfully engages with themes of absorption and theatricality (as these are understood in the work of art historian Michael Fried and philosopher Stanley Cavell), and thereby connects to issues in modernism (as they descend from painting, photography, and film). Such a preoccupation appears in the certain key scenes in The Wire, where the camera acknowledges the viewer and thereby meditates implicitly on the viewer’s absorption. Alongside this story, the chapter shows how these aesthetic themes are, in The Wire, bound up with its political aspirations, which are (1) to present a picture of the suffering that Baltimore—and by extension all US cities—undergo due to the effects of late capitalism, and (2) to meditate on what it means to acknowledge such suffering. In this way, the chapter also develops a notion of ‘tragic reconciliation’ and argues that The Wire employs this automatism throughout exactly through and because of its aesthetic ambitions. The chapter concludes by introducing—finally, now in detail—the notion of new television, arguing that The Wire participates in this genre.

In 2011 the United Kingdom’s leading pay TV provider launched a new channel, Sky Atlantic. Central to the channel’s promotional appeal was the sourcing of “quality” American drama, primarily via a £150 million deal with HBO that secured exclusive rights to its past and future productions. Building on ideas of importation as a process of assimilation with the national market, this chapter considers how, for Sky Atlantic, interaction between transnational and national industrial spheres has not simply served as a means of acquiring content, but has itself formed a key brand narrative. Through close reading of promotional texts surrounding the channel’s launch, as well as industrial data and press reception, the chapter demonstrates that recent commercial and technological developments in British television are leading not to a dissolution of national borders, but to the intense monetization of control over the flows that take place across them.

This chapter addresses a facet of “special relationships” in the production of transnational television drama series by exploring two examples of HBO-BBC coproduction: Rome (2005–2007) and Parade’s End (2012). It marks a quite brief historical moment when circumstances were propitious for two very different institutions to join forces in an era of coproduction. Indeed, the two series serve as examples, driven by perceived mutual benefit, to find a partnership and product “fit.” With the shared aim to produce innovative, high-end, transatlantic dramas with their ambition marked partly in their budgets, boundary collisions inevitably occurred in the negotiation of cultural proximity and difference. Though the coproduction project was broadly successful, the HBO-BBC moment was soon to be overtaken by the new circumstances of specialist production for network streaming.

This chapter explores how the acting in Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–present) both confirms and problematizes some common assumptions about British acting, and thus by extension notions of difference between British and American acting. The chapter anchors its analysis in the work by Conleth Hill (who plays Varys) and Liam Cunningham (Davos Seaworth). It considers the ways in which their performances challenge binary distinctions commonly found in discourses on British and American acting (e.g., technical strength versus organic “shooting from the hip,” suitability for stage-versus suitability for screen-based work). By highlighting the complexity and nuance in Hill’s and Cunningham’s acting, the chapter makes an intervention into discourses about British acting that is especially timely given the considerable success of British and Irish actors in contemporary US film and television. In doing so, it makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on performance and transatlantic television.