Producing Precarity: The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places

Curtis Marez

ISBN 10: 1479836729 / ISBN 13: 9781479836727

Editore: New York University Press, 2025

Riguardo questo articolo

The hidden cost of TV production for communities of color Producing Precarity is a long-overdue examination of the television industry's practice of "offshoring" production to impoverished sites within the US. The author, Curtis Marez, focuses on state efforts to attract film and TV producers to poor places with tax incentives, discounted public lands, and subsidized infrastructures. He argues that these efforts result in the redistribution of wealth from poor people of color, Indigenous people, and other taxpayers to Los Angeles-based media makers, while also diverting money that could be used for education and health care to the wealthy. The popular series produced in these places, such as Breaking Bad, The Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, The Walking Dead, and Vida, are praised by critics and awards organizations and highlighted by streaming services for challenging genre, casting, and narrative conventions. However, many of these shows rely on racialized and gendered low-wage labor for production, and diversity, equity, and inclusion representations can sometimes perpetuate repression, such as depicting police as diversity champions. Producing Precarity examines how contemporary streaming shows from these areas promote racial inequality in ideology and content, as well as materially through their local production methods, and perceptually through streaming distribution modes that discourage viewers from understanding how TV is made. Marez also provides examples of local resistance, including movements against a police training center and a film studio in Atlanta, as well as anti-gentrification movements in Latinx neighborhoods of LA.

Codice articolo CIN1479836729VG

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Producing Precarity: The Costs of Making TV in Poor Places
• Editore: New York University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2025
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1479836729
• ISBN 13: 9781479836727
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: Very Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

The hidden cost of TV production for communities of color

Producing Precarity is a long-overdue examination of the television industry’s practice of “offshoring” production to impoverished sites within the US. The author, Curtis Marez, focuses on state efforts to attract film and TV producers to poor places with tax incentives, discounted public lands, and subsidized infrastructures. He argues that these efforts result in the redistribution of wealth from poor people of color, Indigenous people, and other taxpayers to Los Angeles-based media makers, while also diverting money that could be used for education and health care to the wealthy.

The popular series produced in these places, such as Breaking Bad, The Watchmen, Lovecraft County, The Walking Dead, and Vida, are praised by critics and awards organizations and highlighted by streaming services for challenging genre, casting, and narrative conventions. However, many of these shows rely on racialized and gendered low-wage labor for production, and diversity, equity, and inclusion representations can sometimes perpetuate repression, such as depicting police as diversity champions.

Producing Precarity examines how contemporary streaming shows from these areas promote racial inequality in ideology and content, as well as materially through their local production methods, and perceptually through streaming distribution modes that discourage viewers from understanding how TV is made. Marez also provides examples of local resistance, including movements against a police training center and a film studio in Atlanta, as well as anti-gentrification movements in Latinx neighborhoods of LA.

Informazioni sull'autore

Curtis Marez is Professor in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California. He is the former editor of American Quarterly, the official journal of the American Studies Association (ASA), and also past president of ASA. He is the author of Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics, Farm Worker Futurism: Speculative Technologies of Resistance, and University Babylon: Film and Race Politics on Campus.