Programming the Future: Politics, Resistance, and Utopia in Contemporary Speculative TV

257 Pages·2022·5.776 MB·English

by  Sherryl Vint, Jonathan Alexander

PROGRAMMING THE FUTURE

PROGRAMMING
THE FUTURE
P O L I T IC S , R E SI STA N C E , and
U T O P IA in C O N T E M P O R A RY
SP E C U L AT I V E T V
SHERRYL VINT AND
JONATHAN ALEXANDER
WALLFLOWER
NEW YORK
Wallflower Press is an imprint of Columbia University Press
Columbia University Press
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Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Vint, Sherryl, 1969– author. | Alexander, Jonathan, 1967– author.
Title: Programming the future : Politics, Resistance, and Utopia in Contemporary
Speculative TV / Sherryl Vint and Jonathan Alexander.
Description: New York : Wallflower, [2022] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022009170 (print) | LCCN 2022009171 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231198301 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231198318 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9780231552578 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dystopian television programs— United States— History
and criticism. | Television— Social aspects— United States.
Classification: LCC PN1992.8.D97 V56 2022 (print) | LCC PN1992.8.D97 (ebook) |
DDC 791.45/75— dc23/eng/20220330
LC record available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2022009170
LC ebook record available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2022009171

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid- free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns
Cover image: Makkkro/Shutterstock.com
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION(cid:3)1
1. THE CHANGING SHAPE OF
SCIENCE FICTION TELEVISION(cid:3)28
2. INVENTING SCIENCE FICTION TELEVISION
AS POLITICAL NARRATIVE(cid:3)57
3. 9/11 AND ITS AFTERMATHS:
THREATS OF INVASION(cid:3)83
4. AMERICAN CIVIL WARS(cid:3)111
5. DESIRING A DIFFERENT FUTURE:
THE 100 AND THE EXPANSE(cid:3)140
6. REBOOTING DEMOCRACY AND MR. ROBOT(cid:3)169
CONCLUSION: DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS(cid:3)195
Notes 209
Bibliography 227
Filmography 233
Index 237

PROGRAMMING THE FUTURE

INTRODUCTION
I
n 2016 and 2017, SyFy aired the single season of Alex and David Pas-
tor’s series Incorporated. Set in a future in which climate change has
produced a world where people live either in “green zone” corporate
enclaves, protected from the worst economic and environmental disas-
ters, or “red zone” ghettos that began as FEMA camps, its grim vision is
simultaneously banal and familiar. Symptomatic of the speculative imag-
inary’s almost exclusive turn toward dystopian futures in the twenty- first
century, Incorporated remixes the familiar icons of cyberpunk futures in
which corporations have replaced governments, the impoverished must
commodify their identities and bodies for income, and a vast swath of the
population is simply irrelevant to the existing order. Moreover, much of
this imagery and especially the logic of economic austerity that grounds
it have become even more familiar to us as a vision of a coming future
that haunts the present. These projections of high-t ech, commodified,
urbanized futures have become something of a horizon of expectation not
only because we are immersed in a popular culture that circulates and
amplifies them but also because the neoliberal ideology to which cyber-
punk responded has migrated, since the 1980s, from the margins to the
center of Western democratic political rhetoric.
We begin with Incorporated because this series, despite its formulaic
qualities, aptly captures and articulates important shifts in contemporary
democracy that we seek to make visible in this book. Unlike most of its